Welcome to the Welling: for your spiritual well-being and your ministry overflowing. When you hear the word pump, what do you hear? I want to explore that metaphor over the next couple of times, enjoining it to the most unbelievable verse which speaks about the essence or the heart of the spiritual life.
I’m going to relate it to a heart pump. We’ve been visiting with this verse which has four I’s, personal pronouns in it. The first couple referred to the egotistical I, the prideful I. The next two talk about the psychological I, the personal I.
The prideful I has been crucified with Christ. The apostle Paul says, I lived in the law but the law was external to me. But now I am in a new zone, a new administration, a new jurisdiction. That’s not only external, but internal. A new spirit has come in to me, a heart has been given to me, which is going to permeate my entire being.
To pump something into means that there are resources that are given, where there is a provision as well as a putting in of something that is needed for the functioning. That is what has happened in the new I. So the apostle Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who lives, but Christ lives in me. And now, he says, the life I live in the flesh, now how do I live in this body, that faces sinning possibilities, that faces weakening in the realities, that faces dying in its very members? For the rest of my life how do I now live the life I now live?
When the law was my sphere, I lived in it, but now my heart has something in it. I want to tell you what it is. It’s almost like a heart transplant. There’s fantastic technology that is being used all over the world and each time, the data says, it has great amount of success.
You may have heard of the doctor who offered a heart attack patient the reality of dying without a heart transplant, but he had an option. Not many people get options, so he said, would you like one of two hearts that are available? One belonged to a politician, the other to a pastor. Immediately the heart patient said, I want the politician’s heart. Why?, the doctor says, and the patient says, You know a pastor, the pastors all have bleeding hearts, they’ve been used quite a lot. But a politician has probably never used his, let me have his heart.
The physical heart is an amazing organ, just a little fist-sized thing which keeps pumping blood, beats about 100,000 times a day with 2,000 gallons of blood that moves around the system, the circulatory system. Remember your early physiology classes. This blood goes through your vessels, the arteries, or capillaries, or veins, about 60,000 miles, more than twice the circumference of the earth. And this heart gets a beating even while it is beating. And so it eventually runs into some challenges. A heart transplant happens and doctors are very careful as to how they will administer a variety of immunosuppressive drugs, and the regimens that they must follow. They orient the surgery to the person, to the very individual, specifically for you, and with skill and finesse transplant your heart.
That is what has happened. Your heart has gone through a transplant. You have been given a new heart and this heart is going to pump spiritual life throughout your being because Christ now lives in your spiritual heart. It’s a new heart, not a dead heart, it’s a live heart.
A humorous story with some profanity in it has a Sunday school teacher asking his class where can we find Jesus today? And many in the class say in our hearts. Some say in heaven. And then there was George, who said, Jesus Christ is in our bathroom. And why do you say that, George? Because my father every morning knocks on the door and says, Jesus Christ, are you ever going to come out?
Now that’s profanity and curse phrasing, we don’t want to approve of that; we cannot take the name of the Lord Jesus in vain. But the point is good: Jesus, as the first group said, is in our hearts. And He will never come out of your hearts. The law left us depleted, drained, but Christ pumps in energy, power, enthusiasm, confidence, for it’s not only a new jurisdiction externally, a new administration over you. But a new spirit inside you, where Jesus lives inside us by His spirit.
While we are not against rules and laws, we cannot live under the old Mosaic Law. Today we have the law of Christ as it says in Galatians 6. And that law is the law of love, love of neighbor. Galatians 5, we don’t do evil to one another. It is the law by which we do not engage in the works of the flesh, but by His power we are able to walk in step with the Spirit and thereby exhibit the fruit of the Spirit.
If we live in this new reality, with a new heart, with Christ indwelling us, He’s not going to come out of your heart. He lives in your heart. And you can fulfill His expectations of you. Because the secret of your welling is Christ indwelling in you for the rest of your life, till the very end of your life, regardless of sin and Satan and the world and the flesh and every temptation that you might meet. He is in residence, He is in influence, He is in presence with you, in you, and on you.