Our God Replaces Stony Hearts
Our God replaces stony hearts. “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.” (Ezekiel 36:26, NIV) He will keep this promise, but he won’t be doing it for our sake. It’s another promise he makes and keeps for the sake of his reputation.
On Saturday, I watched several hours of coverage from the National Mall in Washington D.C., where a group of Christians and Messianic Jews had gathered for public repentance and intercessory prayer. Earnestly and appropriately, they confessed our national sins of infidelity, promiscuity, pornography, human trafficking, abortion, greed, and many other unrighteous things.
These offenses to God and man are the result of stone-hard hearts. Left to ourselves we can not expect conditions to improve. But…
Our God replaces stony hearts.
It’s a very good thing that he promises this, because none of the prayers I heard in that broadcast on Saturday was a specific plea for a changed heart. We need to be shaken up to admit our sins, much less repent from them. We’re also prone to ask God for things we want, believe we deserve, or make pleas about things that make us fearful.
None of that is wrong. God wants us to ask about those circumstances, but they do distract us from realizing the one thing we desperately need: for our God to replace stony hearts with responsive, living ones.
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Ruth DeMaat
Heidi Kortman