Heart Transplants

By Rowland Ward

[Page 62]

     The word "heart" is used in Scripture for the seat of life or strength; hence it means mind, spirit, or one's entire emotional nature and understanding. It is also used as the center or inner part of a thing. (Cruden's Complete Concordance).

     Our hearts have been moved by recent developments in Cape Town, South Africa. It is wonderful that such feats of skill and knowledge have brought hope to mankind throughout the world. Dr. Barnard and his colleagues have successfully performed two heart transplants, and although the first patient died, it remains that the operation was successful.

     I have followed the news of this surgery with keen interest, and while it is current, it seems proper to remind our readers of the Great Physician and the untold number of successful heart transplants he has been doing for two thousand years.

     Our study of both physical and spiritual transplants indicates the many similar steps required for success. In the spiritual realm one must realize that an operation is necessary and that there is a Physician ready to perform it. When the prodigal son came to himself he was ready to confess his sins and return to his father and the home of his youth. So we also must come to our heavenly Father, believing that He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Without faith it is impossible to please him.

     When we then repent or turn away from a life of sin, acknowledge Christ as the Son of God, and are buried with him in baptism, we rise to walk in newness of life. The old life has been put off, we have put on a new life. We have placed ourselves in the hands of the Great Physician and he has given us a new heart. The old heart diseased with sin has been removed. A new heart capable of pumping the blood of Jesus Christ through our bodies is given us, and that blood takes away the sins of the world when properly applied.

     We are weak as babes in Christ and only able to take a liquid diet, the sincere milk of the Word. But later we will be able to eat solid food, the meat of the Word. We will mature in the body of Christ. Now obedience to the gospel of Christ makes the patient a Christian, and nothing but a Christian, without any labels devised by man. Once King Agrippa said to Paul, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." What he wanted to be indicates what he thought Paul was. But we have no record that Agrippa ever underwent the operation to become a child of God.

     In the physical realm the body wants to refuse or rebel against the transplanted heart, and in the spiritual realm the carnal mind will often rebel and seek to reject the mind of Christ when it is planted in a good and honest heart. We urge our readers who have never been immersed into Jesus Christ to do so upon faith. If you will become just a Christian, nothing more or less, and hunger and thirst after righteousness, you will find the new heart will overcome all rejections and rebellion within.

     God has provided for us the Great Physician, His only begotten Son, who is willing to operate on our entire being. He wants us to have life and have it more abundantly. After our stay here is completed we may depart with a hope of eternal life in the world to come. When this fleshly dwelling is dissolved we will have a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

     (Editor's Note: Rowland Ward lives on Route 1, Highway 130, Hobart, Indiana.)