This week we continued our series form Ezekiel focusing on the transformation of God’s people that Ezekiel prophecies in Ezekiel 36. A link to the powerpoint lesson is available at the bottom of the page and on our sermon series page.
Ezekiel 36:26-27 (NIV) 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. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
This is the spiritual transformation promised in the new covenant. Instead of the law working from the outside in, God promised a new heart to work from the inside out. The 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon had this to say about the heart: “True religion begins, then, with the heart, and the heart is the ruling power of manhood. You may enlighten a man’s understanding and you have done much, but as long as his heart is wrong, the enlightenment of the understanding only enables him to sin with a greater weight of responsibility resting upon him.”
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you…. Jesus referred to this great work of spiritual transformation through the new covenant when He spoke of being born again in John 3. Paul spoke of it when he wrote of believers being new creations in Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17).
I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. God promised a new nature in the new covenant. In that covenant those who come to Christ are made new, with a new nature patterned after the nature of Jesus Himself (Ephesians 4:21-24).
A heart of stone is stubborn, senseless, and unteachable. It cannot accept the things of God because it has been hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. But a heart of flesh is receptive to the truth. It is teachable, it is repentant. According the late British theologian Adam Clarke (1762-1832) the heart of flesh can feel and enjoy love toward God and to all men, and be a proper habitation for the living God.
God says I will put My Spirit within you: Another aspect of the new covenant is the promise of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Under the new covenant, the Spirit dwells in every believer (Romans 8:9). We see fulfillment in Acts 2:38. Charles Spurgeon had this to say concerning Ezekiel 36:27.
“An incarnate God is a mystery, – the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; but, here is another mystery, God dwells in every son of God. God dwelleth in us, and we in him. The Holy Spirit cannot dwell in the old heart; it is a filthy place, devoid of all good, and full of enmity to God. His very first operation upon our nature is to pull down the old house and build himself a new one, that he may be able to inhabit us consistently with his holy spiritual nature.”
Ezekiel 36:27 (NIV) And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. The spiritual transformation and indwelling Holy Spirit causes us to want to follow God’s ways. It changes our desires to be in line with God’s will, not our own.