Lord, your Word says that Israel's heart was stone. Surely, Lord, that means hard and dead, recalcitrant, dull, obstinate. It was a stone. And God, that speaks over all of humanity. We do pray that through your Son, Jesus, and by His Spirit, that our hearts now would be softened and open so they can receive from you. It is in your son Jesus's name that we pray. Amen.
I carried about me a cut and bleeding soul that could not bear to be carried by me. And where could I put it? I could not discover. Not in pleasant groves, not in games and singing, nor in the fragrant corners of a garden. Not in the company of a dinner table, not in the delights of the bed.
Not even in my books and poetry. It floundered in a void and fell back upon me. I remained a haunted spot, which gave me no rest from which I could escape. From where could my heart flee from my heart?
That's the African churchman, Saint Augustine in his most personal work, The Confessions. And as he does throughout that autobiography, he turns from gazing at the world around him, to trying to understand the world within him. This means looking at his own heart. But the Augustine or Augustine, however you want to say it, is not interested in mere introspection. He's interested in healing. Thus, Confessions is a story about the healing of a man's heart and this all unfolds because his heart is brought into union the heart of another. Augustine's wounded and wayward heart is healed by the heart of God. And he will go on to refer to his Lord with the most affectionate title, God of my heart.
In the weeks ahead, I want us to undergo something similar to St. Augustine. I want us to take stock of our own hearts. To ask how they're doing. And this is mainly because I think the last year has been really hard on our hearts. I am learning in pastoral work that one of the most important questions to ask people is simply, how is your heart doing? Beneath all the stress of the past 10 months, how is that sensitive passion-filled, at times capricious, at times recalcitrant part of your soul that we call the heart doing? Is it lonely? Is it tired? Is it anxious? Is it angry? Is it hopeless?
Perhaps it's grown hard and stiff. Maybe it's a little bit cold. We take our hearts everywhere we go and they affect everything we do. This is why Augustine ends that beautiful passage with, where could my heart flee from my own heart? We can be the smartest and sharpest people with the best grasp of the facts. But if the heart we carry into interactions with others is hard and cold, we could do more harm than good? Likewise, we could be so kind and agreeable and accommodating with everyone. But if it's because our hearts are too fearful or timid or weary to speak their mind, well, that's not ideal either.
The past year has been hard on our hearts. At least this is what I see when I talk to many of you and when I think about myself. And so I want us to take some time as we close the season Epiphany in the next two or three weeks and as we moved through the season of lent, I want us to take some time to work on our hearts. The main way we will approach this is by putting our hearts before God's heart. We're going to put our small heart before his great heart. Our tired heart before his tireless heart. Our cold heart before his warm heart and simply cry out for healing. And so we launched today A sermon series titled "thy very heart.
My heart healed by his." And as I've thought about this, an image keeps coming to mind and I just want to share this image with you as an image that you can hang over the entire sermon series that you can think about when you wake up and you can think about in every interaction you have, and you can let this be the last thought when you go to bed. And it's the image of God reaching over to you as though his arm were a stethoscope and placing his hand on your chest and asking, how's your heart doing? And at the same time, taking your hand and pulling it over and placing it on his chest and saying, because this is how my heart feels. It is our heart coming into contact with the heart of God that brings us into the affective center of what the Gospel is.
Christianity and the Gospel is not merely a set of ideas and doctrines, although it is never less than that. It is a personal encounter with the living God that goes to the very depths of you had. And in those depths, it touches and encounters the very depths of God. And by the end of this sermon series, I want to show you how that unfolds. We will spend the majority of this series looking at that great heart. Looking at the heart of God. Mainly as it's manifested through his Son, Jesus. But today what we'll do is we'll take an assessment of what the Bible says about the heart more generally, and especially what it says about our heart more specifically.
Because as we see, if we think back to St. Augustine and many others, we have to first have an honest account of our own heart before we can begin to understand fully the importance of putting it before God's heart. What we'll do today is we'll move through one of the more important heart passages in the Bible. It's this passage in Ezekiel where we read God's own diagnosis of the human heart. It's a stone. It needs to be removed. It's quite a diagnosis. And in seeing this, as we walk through this passage in a moment, we're just going to make three observations about what the Bible says about the human heart. We'll see the heart’s centrality. We'll see its condition and then we'll see how it's healed.
Let's move into our passage. We're going to be in Ezekiel 36. You can turn there in your Bibles, or you can just listen to Ezekiel in the Old Testament and the events of chapter 36 take us back to the years, following the tragic moment of 586 BC. The Babylonians have invaded Israel. They've sacked the city and they are taking in stages the Israelites into captivity. Taking them the 500-mile trek all the way back into Babylon to be assimilated into their culture. This is happening because of Israel's sin. So God speaks through Ezekiel, who's a prophet and he says just a few chapters before the one we'll look at, he says to Israel, "You rely on the sword. You commit abominations and each of you defiles his neighbor's wife. Shall you then possess the land?"
What God is saying is I've given you this land and now you're upset that you're going into exile. But look at the way you've lived while you were there. They've presumed upon the Lord's goodness. They've indulged in sin and God has therefore taken away his hand of protection and let his hand off the leash of Babylon and that great beast has come down. And as one of the refugees arriving from Jerusalem says to Ezekiel in chapter 33 verse 21, the city has been struck down. So the Israelites are 500 miles away from home. They've seen their city pillaged, women raped, people killed, and now they find out that the city and the temple have been burned to the ground.
So when you read Ezekiel and what's happened to Israel, you're not quite sure whether to have pity or to point the finger. It's awful what's happening to these people. You feel bad for them and their families. And at the same time, so much of Ezekiel is pointing the finger at them and saying, this is what happens. This is what happens when you break your covenant with God when you turn to idols when you reject the Lord in his ways. When we arrive at our passage in Ezekiel 36, while we're wondering should we pity them or point the finger, what I want you to see is that actually, the most important question becomes, what is God going to do?
How is God's heart feeling as he looks out upon this situation? And that's actually the most important question for you to ask in every single moment of every instant of your life. How does God's heart feel about this? And as we'll see, God looks down and he sees that they're sinful, yes. But he also sees that they're sick. And beneath the pointing of the finger Wells up pity and mercy. Let me unpack some of this passage and we'll draw out some insights about the heart because what I want you to see is this passage becomes a story about how salvation has to pass directly through the human heart. So from verses 22 through 26, we begin to see a prophecy coming through Ezekiel, this is God speaking about how God will act in mercy, despite Israel's sin, and save them.
In verses 22 through 24, the salvation focuses on all the external problems. We read that God will vindicate his Holy name to all the nations that have oppressed Israel. Verse 23, "I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations." And then he promises Israel in verse 24, "I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land." So notice what's happening as it all unfolds. If you're an Israelite you're thinking, this is exactly what we need. He's going to deal with these oppressive nations and he's going to bring us back to the promised land. That solves our problems.
These wicked strong oppressors who push us down because we're weak, God's going to stop them. And this godless culture that's unfolding around us, the culture of the Babylonians that seeks to seep into our souls and wreck our lives, God's going to remove us from that. And this homesickness, all these circumstances that wreck our lives, he's going to take them away and put us back in the perfect neighborhood, on the perfect block, with the perfect Temple so we have full access to the Word of God. We can worship freely. We don't have to deal with the Philistines or the Babylonians. And this is going to fix things, right?
Even a cursory reading of Israel's history makes plain that while there are external problems they have to deal with that are real, this never fixes everything because Israel's sickness is inside of them. It goes all the way down to their heart. This is why as our passage moves on after God removes these external obstacles, he then has to go inside of them. After he says I'll bring you back to the land, when we think that will fix everything, the passage goes on. Verse 25. "I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness. And from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart. I will remove the heart of stone." This takes us to our first point, which is the centrality of the heart. Many of us assess the problems of the world by looking around us. And there are serious problems in the world around us. We have intermural skirmishes with people about the best way to fix these problems. These are important skirmishes.
However, what the Bible sets before us is a scenario where it's not necessarily only the external world, but it's your internal world that is at the root of everything that's going wrong. Your heart is included. It's quite a diagnosis. And so the passage moves from without to within. I don't know if you've ever been told that something's wrong inside of you or you've ever talked to a person who just was told that something's wrong inside of them. You have cancer. You have ALS. You have schizophrenia. I don't know if you've ever talked to a person like that, but you could put the whole world to rights around that person and they would still be sitting there saying, but I am so sick. I need help and I need somebody to get on the inside of me. That's our spiritual condition according to this passage. The world has gone all wrong around us and it needs to be put right. But beneath and underneath all that, we need to have work done on our hearts.
So let me just step back and try to put a little bit more flesh on this, on how central the heart is in the Bible. It's central to the movement of redemption. Redemption will either involve the depths of human beings, or it will be no redemption at all. Because you can bring Israel back to the land, take away all her oppressors. Just read first and second Kings. Read Judges. Read the life of David. Read the life of Saul. Just watch. The human heart spawns evil and wickedness. The heart is central. It's central to what God is doing in redemption. But notice all the things that happen in this center, in the heart in the Bible. Just want you to hear this.
It is in the heart that we treasure God's law. It is from the heart that we have faith. Paul says, "for with the heart one believes." It is with your heart that you doubt God. The Psalmist says, "the fool says in his heart, there is no God." It is with the heart that we love God. Love the Lord your God, with all your heart. It is into the heart that the Spirit comes to dwell. Paul prays, "may Christ dwell in your hearts." And then finally, as though to sum all things up, Solomon simply says, "keep your heart with all vigilance because from it flow the springs of life." A more literal translation would be to keep your heart with all vigilance for from it are the issues of life. The heart is absolutely central to everything God is doing in redemption and to you.
The heart isn't simply a temperament you have, or a like you have. The heart is who you are. Now, I want to also pause here and take a moment to try to define how the Bible might define heart. I think today, we often reduce the heart merely to emotions and feelings. And then sometimes we kind of prize feelings over thoughts, or maybe vice versa. We prize reason over feelings and kind of divide the person up. But that's not quite how the Bible understands the heart. When the Bible is thinking of the heart, it's not just thinking about where we feel. In the Bible, thinking, feeling, and willing, all eschew from this complex center of the person called the heart.
The heart is the control center of human life. The heart is the place where the facts that you take in are turned into convictions or opinions. Are molded into the ways you will act. The heart is the place where our feelings and our thoughts bear upon our will and press us towards the type of actions we will take. The heart is the center of our thinking, feeling, and doing. I have a few passages here I want to read and I'm always worried I'm reading too much scripture as though that could be a problem. But I just want you to see this. I want you to see from the Bible that you think with your heart and you feel with your heart and you will with your heart. We're not like a filing cabinet where the top drawer is thinking, the middle drawer is feeling, the bottom drawer is willing. We're like soup and everything's mixed together and everything flavors the other parts.
Let me just give you some examples. Thoughts, thinking eschews from the heart. "For out of the heart come evil thoughts. Murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. That's Jesus. Out of the heart come thoughts. Now, actions eschew from the heart. "The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good." Producing good is the action and result of your life. Jesus is saying these actions ultimately come out of your heart. Then desires eschew from the heart. Jesus says again, "but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart." The heart is the center of desiring. It's the center out of which comes doing and it's a place where facts are turned into understanding and conviction.
The heart is the deepest part of the person ut of which arises our deepest desires, wants, and longings. The heart is central. It's central. Now let's move to a second observation because not only does this passage point out that salvation has to pass through your heart, but it also begins to diagnose the current condition of our heart. So verse 26 God says, and this is not a compliment, your heart is stone. He says, "I will remove from you the heart of stone." What does that mean? Well, of course, it speaks to hardness, stubbornness, even a deadness. Then the Bible paints a picture where all humanity, all of our hearts are like this. You guys know this, or maybe you don't know this, but Israel, whenever you read about Israel, Israel is an image for humanity at large. What read about Israel, it's true about all of humanity. So when it says Israel has a heart that's stone, it's saying that's everybody. Now I want to take some time with this, the condition of our heart.
The Bible uses a lot of words to describe the condition of our hearts. Impure or pure, hard or soft, defiled or clean, alive or dead, stone or flesh. But a lot of people summarize our heart's condition with the phrase, brokenness. That word is used a lot. Brokenness. And what I want to do is I want to show you that the brokenness of the human heart kind of has two hues. It's important that we feel. They're interrelated, but there are two hues. The first hue is a brokenness that is mainly you could say a manifestation of sinfulness. And the other is a brokenness that is mainly a result of frailty. There are important nuances here that I want to draw out. The stony heart is a heart that suffers brokenness due to sinfulness. We see this in our passage. In our passage in verse 25, when it talks about Israel, it talks about God will cleanse Israel from all her uncleanness. And he will cleanse her from her idols. This is saying that the heart is defiled and divided. Uncleanness of the heart, it speaks to defilement.
It's like pollutants that have come into our hearts. It's like pouring acid into a baptismal font or chemicals into a clean river. These things, images, words, experiences come into our hearts as pollutants and you know this, they don't just wash out. They lurk and they don't just stay in a corner. They pollute everything. This passage is saying the heart needs to be purged. It needs to be cleansed from defilement, but it also talks about in our passage that God will clean them from their idols. If uncleanness on the one hand is pollutants coming into the heart. Idolatry is what the heart reaches out to that's outside of itself. Idols are the things your heart really wants. What Idolatry says across the Bible is simply that the heart is always divided at best. Meaning it's divided between what it loves. It goes to church on Sunday and lifts its hands up to heaven and somewhere in the heart it's also worshiping man, or money, or sex. Or something that the heart is saying, but I need this to be okay.
The brokenness of the heart is manifested through how the hardest polluted and through the way the heart reaches out to false idols. This is its sinfulness. And you could add a lot of other biblical words. The heart's darkened. It's dead. It's blind. All those things. But what I want to shift a little bit to this other hue because the Bible also presents a heart that's not just sinful, but frail. Now, these things are interrelated, but I want you to hear this.
Throughout the Bible. We hear of a heart that suffers frailty, meaning weakness and vulnerability. The Psalmist says, "my flesh and my heart may fail." Meaning they're weak. David says, "a broken and contrite heart, Oh Lord, you will not despise." King David when he's surrounded by his enemies and he's just a young leader, he cries out. It says David was sore afraid of Achish, the king of Gath. Our hearts can be sore afraid. I love that phrase. Sometimes I look out at big, complex, hard things and I say, Lord, I am sorely afraid. I am really afraid, God. Our hearts can be troubled. Jesus says to his disciples, preparing them for his departure, do not let your hearts be troubled.
So along with this kind of overt wickedness, there's this pitiable weakness. Our hearts can melt. They can fail. They can fear. They can get broken and battered and bruised. What I want you to see as we walk into this sermon series is that when God deals with the human heart, it's not just that he's coming in and saying, you need to clean your act up and I just want you to obey me. He's saying, I also want to put my hands underneath you and I want to comfort you because I know you're tired. You're sinful and you're sick and so what you need is the hands of a compassionate physician. And those are the hands that are doing this heart transplant in Ezekiel. And so now I want to move to our final point. You see that the heart is central. I hope you see that.
I hope you in your own life can feel some of this condition of the heart. Sinful and also frail. How does this passage maybe point us in a direction for how the healing of the heart comes about? Well, there's a very fast motion. In an instant in verses 36 and 37, where God simply says, "I will remove from you your heart of stone. And I will give to you a heart of flesh." Then God also says in verse 27, "I will put my Spirit within you." There is a lot going on here that God conveys to us in a very, very tight assortment of words. But caught in this passage is the healing of the heart. I want to suggest a few ways that I think this unfolds keeping in mind also the larger picture of the Bible.
This image of God's Spirit coming into you and the old heart being removed and the new heart being given, it anticipates what Christians call conversion. It's what Jesus is talking about in John 3, when he says to Nicodemus, you need to be born again of the Spirit. This is what he's talking about. In other words, your heart's dead. Now let me just draw out one implication to this. The heart work that the Bible sets before us is available to those who will put their faith in God through Jesus Christ. That's the beginning of the healed heart. You must come to Jesus. And as we say, as Jesus says, be born again. Now when you're born again, and God is putting this new heart in you and working, can we start to say a little bit more maybe specifically of what's going on to then work on the fact that in this world, these new hearts are still pulled towards all types of sin. There are lingering things in them. They can get hard. They're still weak right now. What's going on for the continued healing of the heart.
And this is where I want to draw you back into a few things in this passage for the healing of the heart. The first thing to notice, and this is important in a world of self-help, is that God takes the initiative. Notice who's acting all throughout this passage. God says, “I will take you. I will sprinkle. I will give you a new heart. I will put within you a new heart. I will remove your heart of stone and I will put my Spirit within you and I will deliver you from all your uncleanness. I will, I will, I will.” Let that lay over your life. It's at the heart of the gospel. God will act on behalf of his people. Take a deep breath. That's good news. Now, how exactly does he go about doing this? You've probably noticed in this passage, along with the new heart, there's a lot of language about Spirit.
God says in verse 26, "I will give you a new heart and a new Spirit." Now you're wondering, does that mean just my Spirit's new? What does that mean exactly? And then he explains it in verse 27. Which Spirit? Read verse 27. I will put my Spirit within you. This is very important. God will put his Spirit in you. Why not just give you a new Spirit? Why does it have to be my Spirit? Well, this is because God's Spirit, the third part of the Trinity, God's Spirit irrevocably attaches us to him. This is a relational idea. God is basically saying I will come inside of you. And there's a little nuance in the prepositions in the Hebrew. He says, "I will give you a new heart." He says, "I will put in you my Spirit." The Spirit’s dropping in deeper than anything else. Now this of course points to what Christians understand is the giving of the Holy Spirit.
I want you to see, and I'm getting close to wrapping up. This is a bit complicated. Stick with me. We need to learn this stuff. Here's where I want you to see how the image of God putting his hand on your heart and taking your hand and putting on his heart and basically connecting the great heart with the small heart, the strong heart with the fearful heart. This is how it happens. It happens through what it means to have God's Spirit within you. In the new Testament, Paul tells us that the Spirit of God searches everything even the depths of God. That means the Holy Spirit is that part of the Godhead that dwells way down in the depths of God and understands the secret heart of God. Then Paul tells us in Romans, the Spirit of God dwells in you. Then Paul tells us elsewhere, keep with me here, That God's spirit, here's how he puts it.
God's love has been poured into our hearts. You hear the heart language. God's love has been poured. Where does God's love come from? His heart. God's love has been poured into our hearts. How? How has it been poured into our hearts? Romans 5:5, "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which has been given to us." Okay, now we need to put this together. The Spirit of God is that part of the Trinity that dwells in the very depths of God and knows His heart. The Spirit of God has been put into us and Paul says that the Spirit of God is the agent by which the love of God is poured into our hearts.
So what do you think Ezekiel 36 verse 27 means when God says, "I will put my spirit within you." What else could it possibly mean except God's saying, you need the movements of my heart to be thrust into the depth of your heart? And until that happens, you will not be made new. Isn't that an amazing, amazing view of salvation? It's way more than doctrine, not less. But it's God's saying I'm going to revive your heart by putting my heart against it and letting you feel how my heart beats. And it will soften. It will awaken. It will shape. This is conducted according to scripture, by the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the member of the Trinity. That makes real to our hearts, the heart of God.
Now we need to conclude. How can you practically apply this? I'm going to end with just a few practical things. Number one, take serious stock of your heart this week. Take a little time to journal. Maybe your small group could ask this question. How's your heart doing in January, the end of January, beginning of February of 2021. How is your heart doing? Maybe jot down some thoughts. And then begin to say, Lord, as we go through this sermon series, please give me a couple passages from the Bible that reveal your heart and let the Holy Spirit fill my heart with belief and satisfaction In those truths. The spirit works most often through the word of God. And so what I'm going to try to do the rest of this sermon series is simply put before this pouring out of the Spirit into your heart, words from God about his heart and pray that he will transform you by it.
So the application, in this case, is simply if you happen to be cold and you walk outside and it's sunny and warm, how do you apply that to your cold self? You just stand there. You stand in the warm rays and that's what we're going to do over the next several weeks. Let me pray for us.
Lord, we set before you our hearts, which are wayward, Lord. And as the hymn says, prone to wander. God, I just pray in your great mercy. This prophecy from Ezekiel will be lived into in all its experiential reality in our community. It is in your son Jesus's name we pray, who exists as our mediator to intercede for us. Amen.
