New MRI Scanner for King’s Mill Hospital

image courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net

Over £440,000 has been raised through the local newspaper appeal to raise money for a new MRI scanner for King’s Mill Hospital. Even a generous estimate of the population of the area would indicate that this is more than £2 per person, including children. In those terms it is an enormous amount of money. CHAD, the local newspaper concerned, said, ‘The new scanner features a range of hi-tech software allowing doctors to carry out more in-depth scans as well as facilities to care for cardiac and breast scans’. What a tremendous achievement! What a significant development this will be for local medical provision.

I suppose this is an indication of what technology enables us to do in medicine in 2013. The facilities that we have, and the expertise that we have, contribute to an improved quality of life for all of us. But this story made my mind turn to a verse in the Bible. God says, ‘I the Lord search the heart’. Another Bible verse describes God as ‘a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart’. However good an MRI scanner may be, it cannot discern our thoughts and intents. Even the greatest technological minds could not devise and build a device to accomplish that level of scan! I am not seeking to detract from the tremendous achievement of fund-raising but to put the devices of men’s creation into perspective.

The more demanding question would be, ‘when God scans our thoughts and intents, what does He see?’ The real benefit of the high-power scanners is that they might enable a doctor to see something that would be otherwise hidden – they reveal what the human eye can’t detect, what remains a mystery to standard forms of medical diagnosis. What might God see when He scans our minds and motives? The Bible tells us that He sees us as sinners – those who have, and will continue to, fail to live up to His standards. No one likes to see a dark mass that could be a cancer on the results of an X-ray or scan. It could be something life threatening. In a spiritual sense, sin is every bit as life threatening. It can deprive us of spiritual life – a hope of heaven and fellowship with God. It could consign us to a lost eternity. There is no medical solution to sin. There is no ‘quick fix’. Our only hope as sinners is Jesus Christ. He died to save us from the consequences of sin, to offer us new life in Him. What will you do with Jesus Christ? Now you have the results of God’s scan, how will you respond? Will you believe?

Not another scandal!



Pictures taken from the BBC News web site

It has been an interesting few weeks. The news seems to have been full of one sort of revelation or another. There were the horrific revelations about the late Jimmy Savile’s activities. There was the “confession” of Lance Armstrong that he was a cheat who had won so many cycling awards by using performance enhancing drugs. There was the confession of Chris Huhne, a senior Liberal Democrat politician, that he had “perverted the course of justice”, and, then, as we’ve noted before, the horsemeat scandal. It has been a period of one scandal after another.

One thing that struck me in this seemingly never-ending saga of corruption was the scope of it all. I picked up the local paper recently to see the headline detailing the suspension of a local head teacher whilst investigations took place into his interests in pornography. Scandals seemed to have affected nearly every branch of life. Whether it is education, politics, business, sport, or entertainment, no area seemed exempt from the defilement. I wonder what our thoughts are upon such matters. Do we merely shrug our shoulders and say, “well, that’s life”? Whilst we may be shocked and saddened, do we merely think that this is all about somebody else and something else that has no bearing upon us?

 

God says through the Bible, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked”. Recent events, as detailed above, have proved just how right God is. But wait a minute. Do we really understand that this verse is speaking to me? It is always easy to point at certain situations, and the people caught up in criminal activities, and single them out as sinners. It is far more challenging to realize that the Bible is speaking to me! My heart is not really different from theirs. While I haven’t committed some of the crimes that others have, my heart is every bit as capable! It is for this reason that King David wrote, “Create in me a clean heart, O God”. Only God can do that. We can’t transform ourselves. Only God can remove the sin and guilt from our heart and life. He can do that and will do that if we are prepared to confess our sin before God and accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our Saviour. What about you?