A Heart of Stone

My whole relationship with Jesus is pretty much based off these Scriptures; Ezekiel 36:25-27 25 Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. 26 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

It is in fact, the whole purpose of the Gospel in each of our lives. It is the heart of the whole matter. The Bible tells us of the Cross of Calvary. It tells of the history of mankind, our evil hearts, our sin and wickedness. Even those who consider themselves to be “a good person”, is guilty of sin.

The Old Testament says in Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” The New Testament tells us in Romans 3:23 “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;”

In order to get right with God, with His heart, we, who live in this broken, sin-filled world, must go through a transformation. It starts with the heart. In the Bible, the heart is referred to as our mind. Our thinking. Ephesians 4:22-24 22 “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; 23 And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; 24 And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”

My parents are a classic example of someone with a heart of stone. After years of abuse in their childhood, their heart had become cold and hard. Like mine. And many, many others. It doesn’t have to be caused by abuse in your childhood. Life causes us to become hardened. Disappointment, frustration, betrayal…there are many reasons. And instead of dealing with the pain and hurt, we think it is easier to just shove it down inside, pretend it isn’t there, and go on with life.

But when we build up walls, even though we think it makes it easier to endure and to get through life, our hearts become hardened, the less compassionate we become and sometimes we find yourself doing to others what was done to us. Hurting people hurt others. We may not think that is true. We may believe we are only protecting ourselves from being hurt again. It doesn’t stop what others do to us. We may think we are keeping others out, but it is also keeping ourselves from being able to love. And over time, our hearts become like stone without us even noticing it.

I was like that and didn’t even know it. I had lived that way for so long, that it blinded me to the truth. I believed the lies the enemy was telling me, that I was only protecting myself. But I wasn’t. It kept me selfish and self-centered. It kept me with a victim mentality that the problem was everybody else and never me.

We should be extremely grateful that God doesn’t feel that way. When man fell into sin, whether willingly or by being deceived of the devil, God could have wiped out His creation and said forget it. Man became so evil and hard-hearted that God did wipe out most of mankind with a flood. His Word also says there will come a judgment day for every single person who ever lived. We will stand before a Holy God and be judged for our hard hearts.

Even if somebody else hurt us, we will still be judged according to our heart. I struggled greatly with that for years. I didn’t ask for the abuse that was heaped on me as a child. Life doesn’t seem to be fair. It has taken me a lot of years of being in God’s presence to get where I am today. God was gracious to me, and merciful, just like He is to every single one of us, even those who have hurt us. He worked with me and in me to make me able to understand this.

The purpose of this website is to record my walk with God, with what He has done in my life and how He has changed me, and to testify that it is possible for others, even you, to be transformed by a loving God. He gave me Ezekiel 36:25-27 because of my hardened heart. It was as a stone. I built up walls because of the hurt and abuse I endured. But, in the midst of that hardness, I was crying out to be loved. The only way that could happen was I had to allow Jesus to break down those walls.

To become vulnerable, after being abused for years, has been hard to do. God has been giving me what I need to be able to bury this heart of stone and let Him replace it with His heart. He gave it all. He didn’t hold back, even though He knew what I was like. My heart is changing. I understand that even though it isn’t “fair” that those who have been abused on this earth, may spend eternity in hell, when we look at it from the perspective of the Cross, we need to understand, God gave it all. God gave us everything when He sent His Son to die on that Cross and pay the penalty for our sins. He opened up His heart and became vulnerable to the same mankind that turned their backs on Him.

For those who are still struggling through your own maze of pain and hurt, understand the first step you need to take is to confess Jesus as Lord. Read His Word. Know that it is the truth, no matter what You have been told or even what You really believe.

Jesus is the reason why I can now feel the pain my parents must have gone through, and it has helped me to forgive them. God softened my heart. He has chipped away at that hard shell around my heart and is removing from me my heart of stone and giving me a heart of flesh.

2 Corinthians 3:3 “Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.”

Let Jesus work in you, letting His Spirit give you a heart of flesh that you may become a testimony for Him, that you may feel His love and know the reason He gave it all for you.