A friend has been meditating over the space of a few years about the new heart that God has given us. He wishes to comprehend the victory that Jesus has given us over sin and death, and to apply the new creation heart to live victoriously and become an overcomer. This is a noble, but frustrating, pursuit. Believing that we have been given a free and victorious heart, we have to reconcile the victory that has been won with the simple fact that we are far from perfect, and we “lose” battles every day.
In fact, to have the fallen flesh is to operate in brokenness, and to interpret God and the world around us through a grimy lens. Even in my best moments of, what seems to me, complete surrender to Him, there is some degree of self-preservation or exaltation that is unseen, at work beyond the edges of my consciousness. God knows that we are unable to present a heart to Him that is completely devoid of the concerns of the flesh. And so God operates in continual grace to a constantly broken and needy people.
It is a JOY to the Lord to fill His people with Himself, and to do things through a people who acknowledge that they need Him desperately and are looking toward Him like helpless children. This kind of heart is soft and receptive to the Spirit, and desires what God desires. But no heart started out this way. We know from Jeremiah that the heart is desperately wicked, and we know from Paul that there is no one who seeks after God on his own. God Himself draws us and opens our eyes to Who He is:
Hosea 11:4. I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them.
John 6:44. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.
Romans 2:4. …God’s kindness leads you toward repentance…
So God Himself opens our eyes to be able to see Him, and He gives us a new heart. Ezekiel 36:26. “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.”
We are tempted to think that this new heart is one that is able to gain victory over sin, and that it has the capacity to throw off the domination of sin. After all, we are a new creation! We begin to adopt the idea that we have the final victory over sin already, and that all we need to do to resist sin is to believe hard enough that the victory is already ours. Subtly, our eyes can be diverted from an ongoing dependency on Jesus to a pursuit of perfection of our own righteousness.
If our primary goal is to be victorious over sin and to be an “overcomer,” we will be constantly frustrated. We supposed that we just hadn’t believed strongly enough… that we are more than conquerors. If God has already given the victory, and we are still experiencing defeat, we rationally conclude that our faith is lacking, and assume that we just need to work up the strength of our faith.
But what is the goal of the Christian life? Are we supposed to reach some state of sinless perfection, or perfect obedience? God knows that we can’t do this, and yet we often make this our chief pursuit, taking on an impossible behavior management project which, we suppose, will please Him. A behavior-centric focus to the Christian life is a path to burnout and disillusionment, and shifts the burden of perfection from the shoulders of Christ onto our own. Our faith and sanctification must be Christo-centric, because Christ is our very life!
Hebrews 12:1-2. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
This kind of persistent pursuit is a testimony of His grace rather than our obedience—of His righteousness rather than our own. HE is the perfecter of our faith, and not we ourselves. He is the Author and the One Who has made us holy, and it is HE who sanctifies us as we still inhabit the body. I can’t will myself to stop committing sin, but I am able to humble myself as one who recognizes the bankruptcy of his own righteousness, and ask that God do in me what I can’t possibly do.
Col. 3:1-4. “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
When I eagerly submit to the reign of Jesus in me, and Christ lives and breathes and speaks and thinks through me, then I have nothing to boast about for myself, and I will find myself in awe of His presence and power, and in the difference He makes in my life. I won’t worry about my progress in becoming an overcomer; I will be enamored with the One Overcomer, who overcame for us, and christens us overcomers despite our incomplete obedience.
So, what is the “heart of flesh” that God gives us, spoken about in Ezekiel 36:26? I think the answer is grasped when we consider what the “heart of flesh” is contrasted with—the “heart of stone”–that God removes. The description of our former heart, the unbelieving one, focuses on its hardness and coldness. This hardness is primarily toward God Himself, and to His truth, but is evidenced in our lives by a strong self-will to pursue our own ends or to secure our own security. This might even look like a life of selflessness in some people, as they try to win acceptance from others and from God through being a people-pleaser. Self-salvation is the goal for this hard-hearted condition.
God opens eyes in our stony hearts so that we can see Him, and agree with the truth that we can’t save ourselves, and, at that moment of belief, God removes the heart of stone, the hard one, and gives us a heart of flesh, that is soft toward Him—yielding and responsive. Before receiving Christ, truth could be poured out all over our stony hearts, but none of the Living Water could be absorbed nor find purchase. Since we now have a heart of flesh, purchased by the blood of Jesus, God makes it soft and absorbent, like a sponge, so that our hearts can be made full of Christ and grow in Him.
Even so, our new fleshy hearts can get dehydrated through our neglect of God and His truth. We can still harden our hearts toward Him, and when we deny the Living Water passage through our hearts, our hearts begin to dry out, shrink, and become hard to the touch again. A sponge left on a stone outside, to dry in the desert sun, will become hard and brittle in pretty short order.
But this new heart, dry and hard as it can become again, has many holes in it that are made for receiving and holding the water, so that it can be made soft quickly, the moment we call for Him, and God’s refilling occurs—a re-hydration of the Spirit.
The heart that we have been given cries out for the Living Water, and will not find rest nor peace outside of fellowship with the Lord. This new heart is holy, and has been given a True North direction by which to orient itself. The new heart is more sensitive to changes in direction, and has new desires to return to the north heading when straying east or west, (or south!), in order to be at home with the Lord.
This new heart is responsive to the Holy Spirit, and can be roused to condemn our direction when we stray, and hears the Lord calling, when we wander from Him and rebel against truth.
1 John 3:19-24. “This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.”
So this new heart is not the exact same deceitful heart that we once had, but we still have “sin in our members” that tempts our hearts to follow the lies, the old patterns, and the dead trails that our old stony hearts could not help but trace in the past.
Romans 7:23-24. “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.”
If our new hearts are drawn away by sin in our members, we will experience the wounds of the spiritual battle, and can even be taken captive in some ways by the enemy. Our hearts are often willing accomplices to the “sin at work,” and we allow ourselves to surrender our bodies temporarily to the enemy.
Galatians 5:16-18. “So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.”
Here is the answer, again, in how to live. Live, being led by the Spirit, not as one who is trying to keep the law perfectly, but as one who knows that he can’t. If we think, act, and speak in Christ, submitted to Him consciously, and rely on His power and presence, we will truly live, and He will give an eternal weight of glory to our moments that is an additional blessing to the grace that sustains us and makes up the continual difference between our impotent obedience and Christ’s perfect obedience.
If we keep in step with the Spirit (Galatians 5:25), then 2 Corinthians 4:17, “our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”