A Heart of Flesh for a Heart of Stone 1976

I'd like to read a couple of verses today from Ezekiel chapter 36, starting at verse 22. Therefore say to the house of Israel, thus says the Lord God, it is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations in which you have profaned among them.

And the nations will know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. For I will take you from the nations, and will gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. And I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and to be careful to observe my ordinances. And you shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.

In this beautiful prophecy, which God gives to his people Israel and Ezekiel, we see God taking a people who have gone astray, and for no other reason than his sheer goodness bringing them back home. Now if we don't happen to be among those people, especially, we have a tendency to say, why should he bother? Haven't they gone wrong again and again and again? Haven't they proclaimed his name among the nations? Why doesn't he let them go to hell and start with somebody decent? But God, praise his name, is not like we are. And at a particular moment in time, this prophecy, which I just read, begins to unfold.

In fact, this has already begun. And for reasons that they themselves cannot understand, these people who are scattered all over the world, and have gone astray, and have profaned his name, these people who have rebelled and stiffened their necks against him time and time and time again, begin to hear a call in their hearts to come home. They've had enough of wandering around, enough of riches and prosperity, enough of prison and death, enough of tragedy, and home they go.

See, but even when they're on the land, they still don't understand what's going on. Somebody says, God brought you back. And they say, don't be ridiculous.

We brought ourselves back. We did this. We chose to come, and we sweat, and strove, and worked, and ran risks, and suffered in order to get here.

It was our doing. You know, and again, we're inclined to say, well, then why doesn't God just strike them down right there, and show them who's boss? Nothing happens. And then another moment comes when the next phase begins to unfold, and this has not happened yet, but I believe it will soon, when the spirit of the living God then begins to sweep over the land of Israel.

And by the tens of thousands, these people fall on their faces in repentance for their hardness of heart. And they begin to call upon the name of God, and upon the name of his Messiah. And they are washed clean.

Then this is followed by even a more wonderful miracle, when the living God begins to give to these people a new heart. And he takes out of their flesh this heart of stone, and puts inside them for the first time in their lives, and for the time in one sense, in their life as a people, four thousand years, a heart that is truly tender toward God, and truly merciful toward their fellow man. Now, the proof that this promise in Ezekiel is valid, and that God is going to fulfill this for sure, is that this promise is already being fulfilled.

Now, in the life of a people who have been ordained by God to carry the redemptive light through this long season of Israel's slumber, a people made up of Jew, Arab, Black, White, every tongue, every nation, every kindred on earth, the church, the body of Christ, where the wall of partition has truly come down. This people has no geographically defined land, and their Jerusalem can be found in any city or village on earth. And now, at the hour in which you and I live, they are being brought home, and they are already being washed clean, and they are already being given a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone.

This is happening now. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh. A new heart and a new spirit.

Now, let's understand that you can't put the Spirit of God in a heart of stone, and the order has to be the new heart first, and when the new heart is there, then the new spirit will come. And if we concentrate on trying to put the Spirit in hearts of stone, we end up with all kinds of monstrosities. First comes the new heart.

Now, people say, but didn't this happen at the moment when we were reborn? And the answer, of course, has to be that it began then for sure. Surely that was the beginning of the Lord giving us a new heart and a new spirit, but what are you going to do about the person who has been reborn? And yet, in spite of the fact that he or she is constantly feeding on the Word, apparently, and constantly praying for all we can see, nevertheless, this person manifests in so many ways a heart of stone, and this person could well be ourselves. So then, we have a heart that is hard against the constant merciful influences of God's Spirit, and a heart that is continuously indifferent to nine out of ten people who come our way.

Now, when we have a hard heart, we're obviously not aware of it. Scrooge didn't think he had a hard heart when he refused to let Cratchit put some more wood on the fire, or give him five minutes off for Christmas, or whatever it was. He just thought he was a sensible man.

You know, and likewise, we don't think of ourselves as having hard hearts. Say, God gives us a promise, a beautiful promise, but we refuse to hold on to it. We somehow don't cling to that promise.

We don't consider that a hard heart. We say, well, Lord, that's my weak faith. But God says, your weak faith, my friend, is your hard heart.

See, and when we're scanning horizons with a continuously, relentlessly critical eye, all the time, seeing everything that's wrong with everybody and everything, we don't think of ourselves as critical. Oh, no. We're simply being wise, and perceptive, and discerning.

But God says, uh-uh, hard heart. Now, to the extent that we still have that rock down in here instead of a real heart, to that extent, we block ourselves from receiving the full benefits of God's mercy. And this begins to show itself in a number of ways.

For instance, a hard heart will always distort my judgment, so that I may think that I size up a situation with great perception, but the truth of the matter is that I have it all warped and twisted. You know, and I look upon friends and enemies. And people come to me and ask innocent questions, and I immediately hear them as threats, because my heart is hard, and I'm not listening carefully.

I can't. A hard heart will also blind my vision. So all the wonderful things that God is doing all around me, the Lord is healing the sick, and opening the eyes of the blind, and delivering people from their bondage, and giving them a new start.

And I look around and all I see is trouble. Everything wrong. Then Satan comes up to me, and he offers me, in a lovely package, with all the Christian wrappings on it, a half-truth.

And I grab it with thanksgiving as if it's a revelation from heaven. And I start trying to write it down. Everybody else is broke, too.

A hard heart always dulls my ears, so that I can't hear. Remember the time as Jesus was approaching his crucifixion, in John 12, he said, the hour has come, you know, for the Son of Man to be glorified. What shall I say? Father saved me from this hour, but for this cause came I to this hour.

Father, glorify thy name! And a voice came back from God the Father, I have glorified it, and I will glorify it. And people standing around said, oh, it thundered. And some others said, an angel spoke.

And you could almost see the condition of the heart by what they heard. If it was thunder, then it's harder. If it's an angel, it's not quite so hard.

See, but we hear the voice of God so many times, and we say, it thundered. Or that was static on the radio, or that's the voice of an idiot, because our hearts are hard. Another example or symptom of the hard heart is that we just don't seem to have any communication with God or man.

It's all just twisted around and distorted. Heaven is this brass, no flow going back and forth between myself and heaven, nor is there any flow going between myself and my fellow man. And I wonder, how is it that people all the time misunderstand what I say? And how come I don't seem to be understanding what they're saying? And the reason is, because of my hard heart, I'm not listening.

A hard heart never listens. It only hears what it wants to hear. And it picks out of things that people say just what it wants and leaves all the rest.

So what is a hard heart? Very simply, a hard heart is a will that has stiffened itself against the mercy of God. God speaks to me with such grace, and such goodness, and such love, and such kindness, and I just harden myself against it, and I shut the door. And we do this repeatedly, and we keep doing it, and we keep doing it, until finally the heart has petrified, becomes stone.

And the only cure is it has to be replaced with a heart of flesh. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh. Obviously the heart of flesh, and the removal of the heart of stone, this happens to us at Calvary.

As the blood of the land begins to dissolve this heart of stone, and gives me a new heart. That's for sure. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed, and that healing basically is a new heart.

It extends into our very body, and mind, and spirit. That's for sure, but it begins with that new heart. But to the extent that I still have inside myself a heart of stone, then I must conclude that the work of Calvary, which was done and finished two thousand years ago outside Jerusalem, is still not finished in me.

And the same God who sent his son to die out of sheer mercy, and the same God who caused us to come under the hearing of that gracious gospel, and to open our eyes to the reality of Calvary, is now bringing this thing to fulfillment in us. And he's doing it out of love, he's doing it out of sheer mercy, right now all over the earth, wherever people are in any way opening their hearts and receiving what God has to give, he is completing the work of exchanging the heart of stone for a heart of flesh in us. This is happening everywhere.

Do we understand what is going on right now? Are we fully aware of what God is doing in the body of Christ across the earth? And do we understand that what he is doing is his doing and not ours? What he's taking us out of, what he's bringing us into, do we grab that, do we understand that? Everything that's going on here, does any good. And everything that's going on in our personal lives, which are most of them going through all kinds of boiling torment or turmoil. There are very few, if it were known, who aren't going through rough circumstances of one kind or another, or inward confusion.

But the purpose of it all is to bring us to the place where we allow God, through his son, to get what's left of that heart of stone out of us and give us a heart of flesh. Now the heart of stone, we understand. Do we understand what it is to have a heart of flesh? Two simple things.

A heart of flesh is a heart that is tender toward God. And secondly, it is a heart that is merciful toward its fellow man. God has given to us as a gift, not something we earn, and it's the most wonderful gift we'll ever have, a heart that is tender toward him.

Now we're not born with a heart that's tender toward God, and you can't get a heart tender toward God by going through some spiritual Vic Paney program. It has to come from him, and he's doing it among us and among believers all over the earth right now, by the score, by the hundreds, by the thousands, wherever people yield in the slightest way, wherever they are willing to open the door and not stiffen themselves, God is doing that. And the result of it is that we begin to have a thirst for God we never experienced before, a yearning for him, a longing for him, a desire for him, a love of him.

When thou said unto me, seek ye my face, my heart, my heart, my new heart said unto thee, thy face, Lord, will I seek. George Fox, who was the one who was the beginning of the Quaker movement, used by God in mighty ways, when he would come back from a trip around England or wherever he was, he would describe the response of people in terms of whether or not they showed tender hearts toward God. Their hearts were very tender, he would say, but they were very tender toward the word, and by this he meant he could see the operation of God's merciful spirit moving upon them.

And when your heart or my heart becomes tender toward God, we begin to find ourselves desiring his word as we never did before, and opening up in prayer as we never could before, and we just we just become God conscious and it becomes satisfying, you know, no longer drudgery or a duty, a longing, a thirsting that we never seem to get enough of, and it's a delight. It's almost as if there's an epidemic of healing going on, really, in which God is giving his people who are low, hearts that are tender toward himself. May all of us be included, may we all catch that one.

Secondly, God is giving to us, as a gift, not something we earn, but as a gift, a heart that is merciful toward our fellow man, brothers and sisters, also people outside the merciful. Now, we know all too well that the nature of our heart of stone was the opposite. It could not be merciful, but the heart of flesh can.

It is desired, you know, and suddenly we begin to see that that grudge that I've been holding all these years belongs to the heart of stone. It has no place in me anymore. I get rid of it, and I begin then to take the words that Jesus said repeatedly, over and over again, to myself.

Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. Judge not, and you will not be judged. Condemn not, and you will not be condemned.

Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given you. Press down.

Good measure, shaken together, running over, will men put into your lap. For the measure you give is the measure you will get. Now, the heart of stone cannot receive that word from the Lord into its heart.

You know, we can get it in our heads, and we can talk to others about it. We can ram it down their throats. We can teach it.

We can write books about it, but we cannot live it. The heart of flesh can. In fact, the word, every word that Jesus speaks concerning mercy begins to become like the one thing I need.

It becomes like the rain on the spring earth that refreshes us and renews us. We desire it. We long for it.

We can't get enough of it, and then we begin to find ourselves as the nature of the new partage that God gave us, responding to people who do us evil. Instead of cursing them under our breath or threatening them out loud, we begin to pray God's richest blessings on them, and instead of coming back to destroy or hurt them, we begin to do them good, and it becomes our nature to do that, and our one desire is to conform to the mercy of God which has come to us. We begin to edify and to build, and instead of criticizing everything we see, we begin to speak and act along such lines as build up and strengthen and encourage, and even at those times when they do come, when we have to say no to people or when we have to come down with hard words, behind it all still remains a heart of mercy, and if you don't do it out of a heart of mercy, you know, it's not going to do anything but harm.

It's not going to bring anything but death. Somebody asked that, are you saying that all of this is the work of God and that we have nothing to do with it at all? And I believe that while there is coming a time very soon where we will be doing things that we've never done before, doing much out of that heart of mercy that God gives us, the exchange of the heart of mercy for the heart of stone is a thing which only God can do, and the only thing we can do is get out of his way, cooperate with him, yield to him, conform to him, and just let him reach down with his merciful hand and pull out the rock and give us the heart of flesh and fill it with his spirit, and everybody in this gathering right now who desires this may receive it now, you know, or if you had it once and lost it, it can be renewed for you if this is what your desire is. God is speaking to each of us now according to our desire, a new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, you.

Lord God, you know our needs, you know how desperately we need to be brought back to life and how we have allowed ourselves to dwell in large areas of our lives in utter debt, and we're asking, Lord God, that today this promise that you have given to Israel and to your church will be fulfilled in our very lives in a new way, especially do we pray that any among us who have been so conscious of an inner debt and have felt so condemned and so afraid even to draw near, that they may be given such strong encouragement from your Holy Spirit that they will find themselves once again in your loving arms and surrounded and filled with your grace before they leave this place today. We ask it in Jesus name, amen.