WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 12/11/05

Ezekiel 36:22-28 “Renewed Hearts”

Having a bad heart can be a real problem! I was forced to think seriously about this recently when my physician sent me to a cardiologist for a stress test (which, by the way, came out fine!). Given the abuse that many of us inflict on our hearts over the years, it’s no wonder some of them act up. But none of us wants to struggle through the rest of our lives with hearts that are weak or diseased.

The idea that our hearts are the center of our lives is, of course, what gives such power and resonance to the metaphorical use of “heart.” English literature, at least since the medieval period, is full of lovers with hearts entwined – the image of the heart as the center of our emotions. The Bible too is full of “heart” metaphors, but here it is the seat of our spiritual life, the core of who we are before God. “The Lord looks at the heart” (1 Sam 16:7); “you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart” (Deut 6:5). In the Hebrew idiom, the heart is the seat of the will, not the emotions (they are usually associated with the bowels).

1) The Bad Heart

Our problem, as you well know, is that according to the Bible, we all have bad hearts. Abraham Heschel, one of the greatest Jewish theologians of our time and an expert on the prophets, put it this way: “Man is unable to redeem himself, to cure the sickness of the heart. What hurts the soul, the soul adores.” (The Prophets, vol. 1). Is that not an extraordinary thing? The very things that harm us most, we love! The foods we know are worst for us, we crave. The forbidden fruit that can poison us, we must have, no matter what the cost. The cigarettes, the liquor - no matter how bad they are for us, we believe we need them to get us through the day.

You see people throw themselves into destructive behavior, or through small decisions over the years, slide slowly into pits that it seems impossible to rescue them from. Why do we do such things? The Apostle Paul was a theologian and also a man of great honesty. He said of himself: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do... what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing.” (Rom 7:15, 19). If we are honest with ourselves, this is where we all live at times.

Ezekiel, like all the later prophets, knew that Israel’s collective bad heart had brought disaster upon the nation. “The house of Israel is obstinate and hardened,” he said; they have “hearts of stone.” The problem of the hardened heart is its stubborn refusal to change, which eventually reaches so deep that change becomes, humanly speaking, impossible. There are people I meet in counseling situations who know what they need to do to change their bad situations, who will agree that it is necessary, but are incapable of following through and doing it! That can be disastrous.

2) A New Heart

Thank God he does not give up easily on his people. Despite the discipline he has to inflict on us, as any parent does, his love for his children never wavers. And because he is both gracious and sovereign, he can do what we consider, humanly speaking, to be impossible.

God, and only God, can give us “a new heart.” Ezekiel had the privilege of proclaiming to his fellow exiles in Babylon that God was going to change his people. Under the “new covenant,” that Jeremiah had proclaimed, God would take the initiative to do what nobody else could do. “I will take you out of the nations... I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land... I will sprinkle clean water on you... I will cleanse you... I will give you a new heart... I will remove your heart of stone... I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees.”

This is a sovereign and gracious God taking the initiative to do what humanly speaking is impossible; to create a new inner motivation, a new heart and mind and spirit. He makes it possible for hard-hearted people to turn away from their errant and destructive ways, and find their way home.

God does what needs to be done; what we have to do is to accept and embrace it. That’s what Advent and Christmas are about: God’s gift of his Son to be our Savior: Jesus, whose very name means “The Lord is Salvation.” We cannot, as Paul grasped so well, even understand our own behavior and inclinations - they are, in a word, perverse. And what we cannot understand, we certainly cannot change. But God can change us by the work of his Spirit within us. “The Spirit of life set me free from the ‘law of sin’,” exclaims Paul. If you read Ezekiel, Paul, or the words of Jesus; wherever you look you will find the same claim: that God’s Spirit can make the difference within us. He can give us “new hearts.”

Well, what is a “renewed heart” like? Remember the Hebrew metaphor: the will is changed - the emotions may follow, but only at a distance. New hearts are no longer hard, no longer obstinate, no longer stubborn. They no longer refuse to admit that there is anything wrong with them. They stop being indifferent to other people’s needs and feelings. They stop being defensive, stop being argumentative, stop being critical. They admit that they maybe do not know everything, and that some things they “know” may just turn out to be wrong. (There is an apocryphal story about what happens on the first day of Medical School. New students are told by the Dean: “Half of what we teach you in the next 4 years will be wrong – the trouble is, we don’t know which half!” People entering Bible studies, churches and seminaries should, I suspect, be told the same thing!).

Renewed hearts are not proud of “what they believe” or “who they are,” and are not afraid to change. Renewed hearts are “hearts of flesh,” which are alive, growing, sensitive to what is going on around them, listening to what other people say, caring about the effects they have on other people. Renewed hearts are “clean” - the stains of all the sins of all the years are washed away. They are “undivided;” steady in their purpose, not forever lurching from obedience to disobedience and back again. They are hearts that are “warmed” towards God, that care about what he cares about, that are eager to do what he wants done, that weep over the things that make him weep, that rejoice over the things that make him rejoice.

3) A New Spirit

When the Spirit of God creates renewed hearts, a new kind of life begins. In Jesus’ words, we “enter the kingdom of God” by being “born of the Spirit.” How does this happen? “Whoever believes in me... streams of living water will flow from within him,” Jesus said of the Spirit. A new heart and a new Spirit come when we truly believe that Jesus has done all that needs to be done for us; that what Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Isaiah all foresaw was the “new covenant” in Jesus’ blood; which, he said, was “poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Believing, embracing, thanking him that “he died for me” is at the heart of Christian faith, and is the door through which the Spirit enters our lives.

Truly embracing Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord - submitting our hearts, minds, souls, bodies to him - changes our lives for the better. For some people, the effects are immediate; they are suddenly motivated and empowered to throw off the demon drink, or whatever has had them in chains. For most people, bringing this new life to maturity is a slower process, more like Jesus’ metaphors of the small seed that grows into a great tree, or the yeast that eventually permeates all the dough.

Whatever your favorite metaphor for spiritual life, make sure you know its reality. Don’t let someone else’s language for it put you off, or make you hide from God behind a fog of language, or the excuse that you don’t like how someone else expresses their faith! That makes as much sense as being put off by other people’s tastes in poetry, art or music. God wants to do something in you and me that needs to be done – by whatever name we call it - and it is something that nobody else can do for us, and that we cannot do for ourselves. “I will give you a new heart... I will put my Spirit in you,” he says.

The prophets heard this promise, long, long ago. From the peaks of the OT, they saw the dawn coming. Now we live in the daylight of the promise fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus the Messiah. Don't let Advent go by, or Christmas rush past you, without taking in why the birth of this child matters. It can, it should, affect your heart – and your whole life.

Let us pray...