How to Keep Healthy
At our Hospitals, we strongly advocate the maxim that prevention as being equally important as cure.
According to the American Heart Association, these are the seven things that you should do to keep your physical heart healthy.
- Avoid smoking and using tobacco products
- Be physically active every day
- Eat a heart-healthy diet
- Maintain a healthy weight
- Manage your blood pressure
- Control your total cholesterol
- Keep your blood sugar healthy
The human heart weighs less than 450 gms. It beats 100,000 times a day and over 2.5 billion times in the average lifetime. Your system of blood vessels – arteries, veins, and capillaries – is over 60,000 miles long – enough to go around the world more than twice.
This is not just an amazing spectacle; it is the ‘heart’ of human life. Without your heart, your body would quickly cease to work. Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the Western world.
Jesus Christ spoke a great deal about the heart. The heart is a metaphor for the inner life. The word Jesus used means the seat of the physical, spiritual and mental life. The heart is the centre and the source of the whole inner life – thinking, feeling, and willing.
God is concerned, primarily, about your heart. He wants you to have a healthy heart. He said to Samuel, ‘The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart’ (1 Samuel 16:7).
Even more important than a healthy physical heart is the condition of your spiritual heart. In the passages for today, we see five key ways to keep your spiritual heart healthy.
Proverbs 6:20-29
1. Guard your heart
2. Love the living God who gave you life, with your whole heart
3. Focus on your heart
4. Give from your heart
5. Keep your heart holy
At the time of Jesus 2000 years ago, many of the teachers were putting the emphasis in the wrong place. They thought and taught that holiness could be attained simply by obeying a whole lot of rules that concerned outward behaviour and actions, rather than heartfelt obedience towards God.
Jesus pointed out that there is something far more important than all of this. As we see in today’s New Testament passage, ‘To love [God] with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices (Mark 12:33). Holiness is not a matter of outward appearance. It is a matter of the heart.
Lord, help me to guard my heart from spiritual heart disease. May we be a community of love – loving you and loving one another. Please fill my heart today with your Holy Spirit and keep my heart holy and healthy.
