The Heart

Have you ever listened to your heart beating? It is like a little clock inside you, isn't it? Really, it is like a little machine, a little pump made by God to keep you alive. Day and night, summer and winter, from the minute you are born to the minute you die, that little machine will be hard at work with never a moment "off duty".

We know some very interesting things about the heart. It beats 70 times every minute. That is about 36 million times every year. It spends its time pumping blood throughout your body, just a little, every time it beats. It beats regularly and often, and if it was pumping new blood into you all the time, in one year it would amount to 650 gallons! Your very life depends on your heart.

In the Holy Bible we can read a lot about the heart, and what _it_ says is even _more_ surprising than _this_. But it is not talking about this little machine that pumps our blood, it is talking about the place which is inside of us, where all our thoughts and desires come from. God intended our hearts to be full of goodness and love, but are they always nice like that? No, they are not. You know it yourself, don't you? Sometimes we tell things that are not exactly true; sometimes we are selfish; sometimes we take things that are not ours, sometimes we are angry. God says that we should love other people even when they are not nice to us, but we don't always do this. There are many things we do that are wrong. All these wrong things, God says are sins even if they look small to us. And they all start from the thoughts in our own hearts. All the sins, big and little, that anyone does, begin in our hearts. The Holy Bible says that God sees right into our hearts and knows everything we think. He knows when we _do_ bad things, but He also knows when we start to _think_ about them, before we even do them. He says that everyone in the world has something bad in his heart which makes him do bad things. This must be removed if we want to go to heaven, and surely _everybody_ wants to go _there_.

You see, heaven is such a good place that if anything bad came into it, it would spoil it completely. Nobody is selfish there, and nobody gets angry. There is no sadness, no sickness, no night, no fear. Nobody dies. Nobody goes hungry. It is where Jesus Himself lives. He has made it so beautiful and good that everybody is happy all the time. He hates everything that is bad, and that is why He won't let any wrong things come into heaven. We cannot go to heaven just as we are. God says a price must be paid for our sins, but nothing _we_ have is good enough. Even if we try to do good things all our lives, this cannot make up for the sins that we do.

But listen! I have good news for you! There is a way for your heart to be made clean, and your sins taken away. _Jesus_ loved us _so much_ that He came to this world and died for us. By shedding His blood on the cross, He paid the _whole price_ for our sins. In This way He opened the door from earth to heaven. If you ask Jesus to forgive your sins and to make your heart clean, He will do it, because the Holy Scriptures say, "The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin." His Holy Spirit will come to live in your clean heart, and He will help you to do what is good. Then when you die, Jesus will take you immediately to heaven to live with Him forever.