2004-10-29
Good Morning Dear Ones,
How very outstanding it is to know that each of us is so dear to our Creator. Even when we can’t understand why our lives are filled with so many challenges and so much suffering, we can know that our Lord’s love for us is constant and that His greatest desire is to bring us back to Him through faith in Christ. All the while, God is doing what has to be really hard work in gradually making changes in our sinful hearts to convert them to perfected ones. Let’s look at some of this hard work God is doing and how He needs our cooperation with it.
Long ago in EZK 36: 23-27, God promised His people a new heart. “When I demonstrate to the nations the holiness of My great name-the name you disgraced among them-then they will know that I am the Lord. I, the Sovereign Lord, have spoken. I will use you to show the nations that I am holy. I will take you from every nation and country and bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you and make you clean from all your idols and everything else that has defiled you. I will give you a new heart and a new mind. I will take away your stubborn heart of stone and give you an obedient heart. I will put my Spirit in you and will see to it that you follow My laws and keep all the commands I have given you.”
A full understanding of this marvelous passage can’t be had without looking at the context and time in which it was written. The Jews were in exile in Babylonia. Ezekiel was the spiritual leader of a group of Jews in the Chabar River settlement. The Chabar River was actually a canal off the Euphrates. The Jews were in exile, because of years of disobedience to God in the practice of idolatry. JER 25: 11 shows us that God had no plan to destroy His people, only to punish them for 70 years by a dyaspora, the loss of nationhood and dispersal amongst their enemies, in this case, the Babylonians. Since Ezekiel wrote between 593-560 BC, we can get a time frame for when God was speaking to him. This is long before Paul was inspired to give the same message in RO 2: 14, 28-29, “The Gentiles do not have the Law; but whenever they do by instinct what the Law commands, they are their own law, even through they do not have the Law…After all, who is a real Jew, truly circumcised? It is not the man who is a Jew on the outside, whose circumcision is a physical thing. Rather, the real Jew is a the person who is a Jew on the inside, that is, whose heart has been circumcised, and this is the work of God’s Spirit, not of the written Law.” For the sake of a time frame, Paul wrote the book of Romans in 56 AD. We must not forget that God keeps all His promises, which is why Israel regained her nationhood in 1948, why He sent His Son to die on the cross and be resurrected as the “first among many brothers” [RO 8: 29], and why there is a Body of Christ with true believers today. Those of you who are Gentile believers should not feel left out of this equation, because of RO 11: 16-24, the explanation of the “in-grafting” of wild olive tree branches [believing Gentiles] to the cultured olive tree [believing Jews] into the Body of Christ.
We can see the promise all this time ago in Ezekiel that the Holy Spirit will be given to obediently faithful believers. And, we must remember that Ezekiel had no idea Who Jesus Christ was or about the grace that God would eventually extend to those who repent and believe in Him. But, I have mentioned a number of times the pattern that I see in the word of God of the Lord allowing those whom He esteems being given a view of the future. This is what happened with people like Abraham [GN 12: 1-3; GN 15: 13-21], Joseph [GN 40: 13, 19; 50: 25], Daniel [DN 9: 24-27], and John [the book of Revelation], for example. We can’t help but recognize that the promise of the Holy Spirit was voiced in Ezekiel’s time and came to pass after the Atonement of Christ. John, which was likely written between 85-95 AD, gives us JN 14: 16-17, 26 [Christ speaking] “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Counselor, Who will stay with you forever. He is the Spirit, Who reveals the truth about God. The world cannot receive Him, because it cannot see Him or know Him…The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, Whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you everything and make you remember all that I have told you.”
It is obvious that the message that was given to Ezekiel, Christ, Paul, and others to write in the Scriptures has no time frame. It applied in their times, just as it applies now and will for eternity. I want to stand up when God describes true believers through the prophets of the OT and the writers of the NT and shout, “that’s us! We are so blessed!” If we examine our still imperfect lives and get a view of how God is hard at work chipping away our hearts of stone and replacing them with obedient hearts, we can only be awed by His constant love, compassion, and tremendous power. I feel that He’s had a terrible job to do on me, and to think, He’s still willing to keep with it! How about you?
PRAYER: O Lord, as we study Your word and pray for Your help, we stumble upon the realization of how impoverished our spirits are when they are not fully united with Your Spirit [RO 8: 16]. Replacing a stubborn heart of stone doesn’t happen easily or overnight, but with our cooperation it does happen. That’s Your promise to us, a promise that we can be sure You will keep. RO 8: 14-15 tells us You don’t make us Your slaves or give us cause to be afraid in this process; instead, You make us Your children. Through Christ, in His Sermon on the Mount, You tell us in MT 5: 3, that those of us who realize our great need for You are the ones who will inherit Your Kingdom. Dearest Abba, we can confidently come before Your throne and open ourselves to You in confession of our sins, in rehearsing our sorrows, in sharing our victories, in expression of our adoration, and in thanks and praise of You. Many verses like 1 CH 5: 20, “He answers their prayers, because they trusted in Him,” tell us that You listen to our prayers and are glad we are praying to You. MT 11: 28-30 and other passages tell us that we can place our burdens on Your shoulders and You will help us deal with them. When we pray to You, You often help us make decisions; as shown in PS 32: 8, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with Mine eye.” You care about every detail of our lives, something we learn from passages like PS 37: 23-24, “The steps of the godly are directed by the Lord. He delights in every detail of their lives. Though they stumble, they will not fall, for the Lord holds them by the hand.” You refresh our lives and renew them, as seen in PS 36: 9, “For with You is the fountain of life; in Your light we see light.” You surround us with constant love, which is why we can have hope in You alone [PS 33: 22]. Dearest Lord, we bow before You to offer You our thanks and praise, that which You richly deserve. We pledge to Your our desire to open our spirits wider and wider to Your Spirit, and thus, become Your servants and friends with faithful and obedient hearts to please You. In Christ, we pray. Amen.
In next week’s message, I will follow the direction the Holy Spirit gives me and write more about how God is changing our stubborn hearts of stone into faithful, obedient ones. After looking at RO 8: 2 and EPH 1: 13, which deal with the issues of freedom from the law of sin and death and God’s claim of ownership of true believers, I hope to look at some of these heart changes in the context of MT 5: 17-20 (a portion of the Sermon on the Mount). Learning to love the Lord Jesus Christ didn’t come easily to me. Because I came from a traditionally Jewish home, the name, Jesus Christ, was a sore topic indeed. Now that I look back on this as a “completed Jew” (one who has had to veil lifted from her eyes [2 COR 3: 13-17] and who recognizes that Christ is indeed the true and only Messiah –Redeemer), it’s hard for me to see how so many of my Jewish family and friends can’t see this. Yet, this is the reality of my life. Christ told us in MT 10: 34-38 that families will be rent over the issue of believing in Him or not, and this is true. LK 9: 23-24 is plain talk from our Lord, “And He said to them all, ‘If anyone wants to come with Me, he must forget himself, take up his cross every day, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his own life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.’” That the Lord is working this hard on changing my heart of stone into a faithful, obedient one and that He is refusing to give up, tells me just how much love He has for me. Imagine how he loves those who don’t give Him such a hard time, like you! God is eager to have each of us learn to love, honor, obey, and work with Him. His reason is that His greatest pleasure is in being able to bless each of us.
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn