If you feel heaviness, pressure, aching, and/or burning in your chest, you’d better get to the doctor, because you could have coronary artery disease, which can be deadly. If the disease is advanced, bypass surgery could be required. That surgery will unblock clogged arteries, allowing blood to flow freely again.

Perhaps you don’t need a physical heart bypass, but a spiritual heart bypass instead. This procedure requires that you bring your aching, burning, heavy heart full of troubles to God, the Great Healer, who can easily perform your spiritual heart bypass.

You might falsely assume you need not go to God with your troubles, that you can handle the burdens yourself. That’s a dangerous assumption. Untreated emotional trauma can reduce productivity, shorten life, and even directly cause death.

There is a reason God says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” and “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” He can take on life’s burdens that overwhelm us and bring us to despair.

Allow God to be your physician and to reach into your heart to remove any harmful thing that may have hurt you or created a distance between you and Him.

We are grateful to physicians who perform open-heart surgeries. We can be even more grateful that the Great Physician performs spiritual heart surgeries. It may take several hours on your knees, but if you open your heart and allow Him to operate, you will have a new heart and experience the joy of freedom from those weighty burdens.