6. Jesus Performs Whole Heart Operation:

No matter how much of the heart is blocked, Jesus performs whole heart operation. Consider the children of Israel who did not understand this. After the Israelite’s 430 years of bondage in Egypt, “God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them” (Exod. 2:24-25).

God sent Moses to deliver them. Moses, like all the children of Israel, was a descendant of Jacob (whose name was changed to Israel). Moses was delivered from the wrath of the Pharaoh of Egypt who hoped to retard the growth in the number of Israelites (Hebrews), by sentencing all newborn baby boys to be executed. To avoid that fate, Moses’ parents put him in a floating basket and hid him in the Nile River. He was discovered by the Pharaoh’s own daughter who raised him as her son.

When Moses was an adult and discovered who he really was, he tried in his own strength to deliver his people from their slavery by killing an Egyptian who was mistreating a Hebrew slave. Accused of murder, he fled to the desert to save his own life. While tending sheep, Moses saw a burning bush. After turning aside to look, God called to him, saying, “. . . I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. . . .” (Exod. 3:8).

Through his servant Moses, God worked miraculous signs and wonders, with ten plagues, to snatch the Israelites from Pharaoh’s grasp. After leaving Egypt and crossing the Red Sea on dry land, the Israelites witnessed first-hand miracles from God Almighty. They could have entered the Promised Land within eleven days; however, when Moses sent out twelve spies into the land, ten came back with a fear-filled report that the people were stronger and taller than the Israelites.

Only Joshua and Caleb Allowed Jesus to Perform Whole Heart Operation

Only Joshua and Caleb trusted in the goodness, wisdom, and power of the Lord, in His promise that they could take the land as He commanded them. For that lack of faith, the Lord told the people, “Not a man of this evil generation will see the good land I swore to give your forefathers, except Caleb son of Jephunneth. He will see it, and I will give him and his descendants the land he set his feet on, because he followed the Lord wholeheartedly” (Deut. 1:34-36 emphasis added).

God sent all the people back to wander in the wilderness for forty years until that generation died. Only the little children who the people said “would be taken captive”19 would see the Promised Land. Joshua would be their leader because, like Caleb, he believed God and followed Him with his whole heart.

Try to imagine what it would look like for a patient to refuse to allow the surgeon to operate on her whole heart? After experiencing the initial life-giving royal blood flowing through her veins and being translated into heavenly places, she wakes up from the operating table and says, “Just take half; give me back the rest.”

In doing so, the upper chamber pumping the blue, lifeless blood would only partially gravitate to the machine. Only a part would ever be energized and rerouted to the body. Left long enough in this state, the result is “congestive heart failure,” where fluid backs up, causing congestion in the tissues due to reduced pressure of the blood flow.

You may say, “But no one in their right mind would do such a thing.”
Spiritually speaking, it happens all the time. Look at what the children of Israel did. After they received the command of the Lord to go up and take possession of the land, the people fell into a half-hearted commitment. Moses writes,

“You grumbled in your tents and said, ‘The Lord hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us. Where can we go? Our brothers have made us lose heart'” (Deut. 1:27-28 ).

The Lord had just told them where to go and how He would get them there; but, they listened to the wrong people–the ten spies. With their non-believing words, they took back part of their hearts from trusting the Lord to live His life through them in His power and in His strength.

This brings up an important question, “If the children of Israel lost heart, did they lose their salvation?” They were out of Egypt, weren’t they? So are the patients who have asked the Great Physician to replace their heart. It is just as impossible to take back a replaced heart as it is blood that is already shed.

Scripture backs this up: “No one can deliver out of my hand. When I act, who can reverse it?” (Isa. 43:13). The apostle John records the words of Jesus, chapter 10 verse 28, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.” If that were not enough, Jesus takes it to the highest authority, “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”

Salvation cannot be annulled; it is the legal contract between Jesus and His Father.

If only the children of Israel could have, in faith, let go and believed this promise:

Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. The Lord your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, and in the desert. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place. -Deuteronomy 1:29-31

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With Marie, nothing good came to her life until she was ready and willing to commit her whole life, her whole heart, to Jesus Christ, in complete obedience to His will and His way. Our analogy stops here, for Jesus not only transforms our heart, He replaces it. He says, “I’ll remove the stone heart from your body, and replace it with a heart that’s God willed, not selfwilled” (Ezek.36:26 The Message.). The marvelous thing is, He gives us His heart, uncorrupted, pure and clean.

7. Jesus Performs Whole Heart Operation with a Deep Inner Meaning:

“The Lord confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them” (Ps. 25:14). The Amplified version reads that He will “reveal to them its [deep, inner] meaning.”

E. W. Kenyon (1867 – 1948), discovered this deeper meaning. He was a pastor and evangelist who found the Lord in a Methodist prayer meeting when he was seventeen years old. His ministry lives on through his writings. In one of his booklets, Blood Covenant, he says he knew there had to be more to the New Covenant than he realized, and that it resided in the Lord’s Supper table. “The silence of the disciples when Jesus introduced it, saying, ‘This is my blood of the New Covenant, which is poured out for many unto the remission of sins’; and then told them to eat the bread which was His body and to drink the wine which He declared was His blood–I say, the very silence of the disciples indicates they understood what he meant. I did not and it confused me”20

Through more research, Kenyon found evidence that in Africa, India, China, Borneo, and the Islands of the Seas, men practiced a blood covenant very similar to the Lord’s Table. Their reasons for evoking a covenant, as it were for Abraham and others in the Old Testament of the Bible, were to bring peace between parties, or for love’s sake. When one party had a demand put upon it, the other obligated himself to meet that demand. It was a sacred rite that if broken, one’s own mother or wife, or his nearest relative would seek his death. “No man can live in Africa who breaks the covenant . . . he curses the very ground he walks on.”21 It is so sacred that the children to the third and fourth generations revere it and keep it. It is perpetual and cannot be annulled.

Kenyon tells a profound story that illustrates the New Covenant Jesus was trying to communicate to His disciples and to us:

Journalist Sir Henry Stanley was commissioned to go to Africa to find David Livingstone. When he found the Scottish missionary on November 10, 1871, his now famous words were, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” In his seeking, Stanley came in contact with a powerful war-like equatorial tribe. His interpreter explained what a blood covenant was and asked Stanley, “Why don’t you make a strong covenant with them?” “What will the results be from such a covenant?” Stanley asked.

“Everything the chieftain has will be yours if you need it.”

Stanley revolted from drinking someone else’s blood, but when conditions worsened, he agreed. The first step was negotiation as to motives and the commitment and ability to keep the covenant. Next, the chieftain and Stanley exchanged gifts. The old chieftain wanted Stanley’s goat, but giving away the goat meant life or death for Stanley. He was in poor health and had to have goat’s milk to live. It took everything within him to give it. The chieftain gave Stanley his seven-foot, copper-wound spear. Stanley thought he was defeated.

To Stanley’s surprise, the ritual continued with each man bringing in a substitute to perform the actual cutting. Blood dripped from the substitutes’ wrists, falling into one cup of wine. The bloods were mixed, and then the cup was given back to the two substitutes to drink in equal parts. They were now blood brothers, and Stanley and the chieftain and his men were bound together. Gun powder was rubbed into the wounds of the substitutes, which when healed, was the sign of the covenant.

After sealing the wounds, a priest pronounced awful curses upon the wives, children and tribal members if the covenant was broken. Then a tree was planted–one known for its long life–as a remembrance for the time to come.

Afterwards, Stanley’s men did not have to stand guard over their bales of cotton cloth and trinkets, but now they could sell them and buy from the tribe as well; to steal meant death. To Stanley’s amazement, everywhere he went with the chieftain’s spear, everybody bowed to him as though he were the chief himself.

In comprehending Stanley’s story, heart surgery and how it relates to us and the New Covenant, consider these things:

• The difference between the Old Covenant and the new is that the third person of the Trinity cuts into the heart. (He is the only third on earth today.) The Holy Spirit does the work of Jehovah Tsidkenu. [For simplicity’s sake, Jehovah Tsidkenu is used here, although Jehovah Mekoddishkem is God’s name meaning to sanctify, or purify. The Holy Spirit is the sanctifier.22] When we trust Him to do so, He cleanses our heart of waste matter with His royal blood; for “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). He then daily and perpetually gives a spirit-filled life to those who believe whole-heartedly.
• An open-heart surgery cannot take place unless 100 percent of the blood supply is diverted to the artificial heart-lung machine. Until we mentally and spiritually assent to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, giving Him 100% commitment–as Stanley did with his goat–and make Him our number one priority, we cannot find life.
• These seven dimensions of heart operation performed by the Holy Spirit can only be discerned through the Holy Spirit, for “the man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). As we spiritually discern this New Covenant, we begin to see that when God looks at us, He sees Jesus. He sees the royal red blood Jesus shed for us, and the legal contract signed in His blood.
• In exchange for our gift of self to God, He gives us five words, “In the name of Jesus” (see John 14:13). After Jesus ascended to His Father and sent His Holy Spirit to earth, His disciples used these words in time of need, for themselves and others. By so doing, Jesus replicated himself 100-fold, just as a dying seed brings forth life multiplied (see Matt. 12:42). Using the “name of Jesus” (which represents all that He is) puts a demand upon the New Covenant. This was revealed to Stanley when tribesmen bowed to him because of the spear. It represented the chief himself, “Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9-11).

ENDNOTES
19. See Deuteronomy 1:39.
20. E. W. Kenyon, The Blood Covenant, (Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, Lynnwood, WA, 1969), p. 5.
21. Ibid, p. 10.
22. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, p. 1100.