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. (Ezekiel 36:26-27)
Reading this passage I am struck by the phrase “heart of stone.” A hardened heart. The thing that shuts our ears off from God, the thing that blinds us to sin, the thing that draws us into idolatry is a heart of stone.
I think the pull of sin is constantly moving us to harden our hearts. As we go through life, we tend to become cynical, stubborn, set in our ways. The longer we are on a certain path, the harder it is to get off it. We become stiff-necked. God tries to pull the reins and move us in a different direction but we fight, resist, and dig in our heels.
That is why God calls us to have the heart of a child. A child is still pliable, teachable, dependent. At some point, however (adolescence?), the heart starts to exert its independence. “Who are my parents to tell me what to do? What do they know? And while I think about it…who is God to tell me what to do? Who is He? Does He even exist? What right does He have over me? He should answer to me not vice-versa.” Not too many people probably think this way consciously but deep down this is the attitude of a heart of stone. It is immovable, impenetrable, built up with walls, objections, rationalizations, bitterness, self-sufficiency, pride.
Jeremiah 5:3–a parallel passage–says this: O LORD, do not Your eyes look for truth? You struck them, but they felt no pain; You crushed them, but they refused correction. They made their faces harder than stone and refused to repent.
Wow, what a picture of the human condition. As someone once said, “We would often rather die than repent.”
It really takes a miracle for the Spirit of God to break through to such a heart. God’s relentless grace keeps pursuing, keeps knocking, until through some miracle of regeneration, a person opens up their heart to Him. The hardest territory to take in the entire universe is truly the human heart.
But when God’s Spirit gets in, He does something amazing…He gives us a “heart of flesh.” He doesn’t make us super-spiritual…He makes us truly human. We become what we were supposed to be. We become able to think, able to feel, able to follow Him. The heart becomes soft, teachable, humble, less self-confident and more dependent on God. We learn to cry again. Learn to submit. Learn to serve. Learn to care. Learn to love. And, amazingly, learn to be human, made in the image of God, reflecting the glory of our Creator.
O LORD, make me less like a stone and more like a human today!