A
New Heart
“I will give you a new heart and put a
new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a
heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit
in you and move you to follow My decrees and be careful to keep My laws.” Ezk. 36:26-27
The Lord promises in Ezekiel 36 to
bring His chosen people back from the places they have been scattered to as a
result of captivity. The Lord indicates
that He will cleanse Israel from all impurities and idolatry. Beloved, these truths apply to us as
well. For those who are held captive by
fear, worry, doubt, or oppression, the Lord wants to encourage us that He will
gather us and return us to where we belong.
He will cleanse us and we will be clean.
He continues in the verses above: after
gathering and returning and cleansing us, He then will do some major spiritual
surgery in our lives –part of being a new creation in Christ
Jesus. He will give us new hearts. They are hearts of flesh, hearts capable of
love, compassion, mercy, and grace. They
are hearts capable of empathy and bearing one another’s burdens. As the Lord removes our old hearts of stone
and through His precise surgical procedure gives us our new heart, we become
more fully human. We begin to walk in
our new identity with this great gift of a heart that functions the way it was
ordained to function from before the foundation of the earth.
He adds to that putting a new Spirit
within us. This again is part of His
spiritual surgery as we say Yes to Jesus as our Lord and Savior. That Spirit is His Holy Spirit – which God
puts in us as the seal of the New Covenant and representation of Christ in us,
the hope of glory. This Holy Spirit will
communicate with us in such a way that we will understand a whole new way of
life. A life more fully human; the life
we were created to live from the beginning.
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