Diet, Exercise & Family History | Discovery In Recovery

Seeking Spiritual Healing

You can look fine on the outside and still be walking around with heart disease. Spiritually speaking, the same is true. Sometimes we don’t realize we’re in danger until we’re lying flat on our backs, forced to stop and examine what’s really going on inside.

That’s what happened to Pastor Courtney during a recent health scare that led to open heart surgery—and in that vulnerable space, God began to speak. Not just about physical healing, but about spiritual health. The kind of heart disease we all carry, often unnoticed.

Psalm 19:12 asks:

“How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart? Cleanse me from these hidden faults.”

Let’s take a look at three causes of spiritual heart disease: diet, exercise, and family history.

1. Your Spiritual Diet

Just like your physical body responds to what you eat, your soul is shaped by what you feed it. The question isn’t whether you’re consuming—it’s what you’re consuming.

What fills your ears and eyes during the week? Is it truth, grace, worship, and wisdom? Or is it gossip, fear, distraction, and comparison?

If Sunday is your only spiritual meal, your soul is starving. And just like a crash diet can’t undo months of junk food, an occasional sermon can’t repair a week’s worth of toxic input.

“If you only eat healthy one day a week… you don’t eat healthy.”

2. Your Spiritual Exercise

Knowing what’s right and doing it are two very different things.

“For him to know to do right, and not do it, to him it is sin.” (James 4:17)

Spiritual growth happens when you act on truth. Forgiving someone. Letting go of a habit. Apologizing. Serving when it’s uncomfortable. Speaking up in love.

It’s in the obedience that your heart becomes strong. But when we avoid spiritual movement, we allow blockages to build up. Things like…

• Bitterness
• Control
• Passive disobedience
• Comparison
• Pride masked as “independence”

We excuse these things because they don’t feel like sin. But they’re blockages—slowly cutting off the flow of grace and love through your life.

3. Your Spiritual Family History

The third risk factor is one you didn’t choose: your family history.

Physically, you can inherit a predisposition for heart disease.

Spiritually, we’re born with it.

We enter this world with sin in our DNA. As the sermon said, “We come here with blockages.” And while a healthy lifestyle helps, there comes a point where no amount of behavior change will fix what’s broken.

You don’t need bypass. You need a transplant.

“I’ll take what’s wrong with you and give you all that’s right about me.”

That’s what Jesus offers.

You can live a long time with symptoms and never realize you’re in danger. You can adjust to what’s broken until it feels normal.

But if your spiritual heart has grown numb, blocked, or tired, don’t ignore it.

Come to the table.

Ask the Great Physician to examine you.

Let Him reveal the hidden faults.

And trust Him to do what only He can—restore your heart.