Going to the dentist sends shivers down my spine: cold, sterilized chairs; tall, lifeless walls; maniacal drilling noises; little kids crying so loud that I can’t hear myself think; year-old teen magazines featuring Twilight interviews; dentists who lie and say that “it will only hurt for a second” when it actually hurts for the next day or two. Needless to say going in for a check-up can become quite an ordeal.
But although I hate to admit it, going to the dentist is actually good for me. Even though it might mean a small amount of pain for a day or two every six months, check-ups help keep my teeth in line and cavity-free, and if a cavity pops up, it’s dealt with quickly and efficiently so that it won’t do any more damage.
Our hearts are a lot like that.
When we first come to Christ, we desperately need a heart check-up. Receiving salvation means receiving an entirely new lifestyle that comes as a result of God’s grace working in our lives—a lifestyle that is completely opposite from how we acted, thought, and lived before we ever knew Jesus and experienced His love. Colossians 3:9-10 says “You have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge and the image of the Creator.” The more we learn about Jesus and about His amazing grace, the more we are going to live like He lived, but before we can move forward we need a heart check-up to remove the “cavities” in our hearts.
King David prayed, “Search me, God, and know my heart” (Psalms 139:23 NIV). The Message translation of this verse goes even further reading, “Investigate my life, O God, and find out everything about me.” David had such a deep understanding for what it was like to live a God-filled life that he personally asked God to investigate his heart, to search out the bad, and to replace that bad with God’s goodness and love so that he could live a pleasing and free life. In short, David gave himself a heart check-up.
What makes us a Christian is a change in the heart. We need to be changed like Jesus – from the inside out. And the first step in being changed from the inside out is giving ourselves a heart check-up, not just once when we first accept Christ, but periodically. We need to pray the same prayer David prayed and ask God to reveal the sins in our hearts, because many times its hard for us to see our own faults until they blow up in our faces.
And, along with the heart check-up we do when we first come to Christ, we need to continuously ask God to check our hearts. Just like we go to the dentist periodically to maintain our dental health, we need to continuously humble ourselves and go to God asking him to search our hearts.
Recently, I experienced an unexpected heart check-up first hand. About two weeks ago I was feeling good; I felt confident that I had everything under control in my life and in my heart. In my eyes, I was golden and I thought that nothing could touch me because there was nothing wrong with me. Covering my basics as a Christian, I prayed that God would search me and show me anything hidden in my heart, even though I didn’t expect Him to find anything.
The next day I presented three posters I had made the night before to my classmates. The teacher that assigned the project walked by as I was revealing the posters, and before I even showed the third poster, she cut in saying, “Are those the posters? Looks like you took two seconds to make those.” I quickly responded “No, ma’am. This took me two hours to make.” I immediately felt embarrassed and overwhelmingly angry with my teacher. I told myself that I couldn’t have a face-to-face conversation with her or else I would explode. I walked around for four days resenting my teacher and her rude remarks about the project that worked hard on.
Then, God reminded me of the prayer I had made only a few days before. God had used the entire situation with my teacher to reveal the underlying heart issues I had with my pride and maintaining my good reputation. I prayed that God deal with this heart issue and thanked Him for His faithfulness. I wasn’t as golden as I thought I was.
If you think that you don’t need to go to God and that you can live right all by yourself, you should take a look at Colossians 3 and look at your own life. Colossians 3 has an entire list detailing how we should live in the Spirit and how we shouldn’t live by the flesh. However, it’s important that we approach these verses knowing that we can never achieve holiness or live right on our own power. Nothing we can do could ever make us right, which is why God’s grace is so amazing. He gave us His holiness through grace so that we could live right through Jesus, and all we need to do is receive this gracious gift by faith. Once we do that, then the things listed in Colossians 3 will become fruits in our lives.
So whether you’re a new believer or you’ve grown in Christ throughout the years, whether you feel close to God or further from God than ever, you need to ask God for a heart check-up. The longer you take to go to God and surrender your heart to Him, the more damage you might cause to yourself. Thankfully, we have God who loves us so much that He invites us in to get checked out because God doesn’t care about what we’ve done, He cares about who we are and for how much better we will be once we embrace His grace.
