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
Reading the words of today's extract, It is very easy to assume that the people referred to here were the best of people. They must have done something right to deserve the amazing work God was promising to do in their lives. It will be nice to read up one key verse just before today's extract: This is what the Sovereign Lord says: It is not for your sake, people of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone - vs. 22.
The first lesson here for me is this: there is nothing I can bring before God as my good works that deserve mercy. All that God does is about His name and His Word. Every time I speak, act or interact with people, I am either showing God off, or promoting self. And let it be known that God always seeks to take glory in and through me, so I must be careful to ensure that I am living in line with this divine arrangement.
Another lesson for me is this: God can do anything, even go against nature, to prove that He is God and deserves my total devotion. He created the heart, yet can also give a new heart. No man/woman is so far gone that s/he is beyond God's grace. And nobody draws near to God unless the Son draws such a person to Himself. A new heart means that the old one wasn't doing what it was built to do. That is the power of sin.
Sin destroyed the initial template. Sin made it impossible for God to use the polluted heart. The only way God would be able to impact the human heart was to take away the old heart and give a new one. How does this work: you get a new heart by total surrender to the Lordship of Jesus. You acknowledge you cannot help yourself, and you allow Him do the work of salvation and redemption through His blood. His blood has cleansing power, and can make the foulest clean.
When the heart is clean, then God can make use of it for his glory. When the heart is under His control, there is no limit to what He can achieve through that life. Maybe the reason why we are not experiencing the full demonstration of God's power is because we want to hold on to the controls. We are afraid to let go, thinking we can't control the outcome. With God, you can never really be in charge. You have got to let Him do what He alone can do: change a life from within, so that the world out there will certainly know that this is a life touched by God.
Have I truly surrendered all to God or am I still struggling to let go? Can God count on my total surrender or does He have to struggle for time with me, along with other 'important' things? The choice of control is always mine; the consequences of that choice is always eternal. His time of favour is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment