December 31, 2025
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within
you. I will remove your heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of
flesh.”
God has promised to remove from us our hearts of stone. At
the new birth, we are born again and suddenly we feel like God has given us the
heart of love. The Holy Spirit pours itself into us and we overflow with a
supernatural love for all mankind. It’s a baptism of the Holy Spirit and it
seems our hearts have been truly transformed by the power of God, by the power
of the Holy Spirit of love.
But as time goes by, so the feelings of those first moments
are lost or overwhelmed in our daily shortcomings and sins which so easily
beset us. The transformed heart seems to lose its softness. The heart of flesh
slowly reverts back to a heart of stone. Until one day another breaking by the
hand of God or man finds us on our knees begging Him for His help, His
intervention, His hand of salvation and rescue.
Over and over again we go through the breakings, the
retooling, the remaking, the reshaping of our hearts of stone in the hands of
our Maker until the Holy Spirit finally takes full possession. But it is a long
and winding road down the path of humility, the path of brokenness, the path of
submission, the path of service to others, the path of yieldedness, the path of
surrender.
A life transformed is a life that has submitted itself to
the process of self-annihilation, or to the death of self. A transformed life
is a selfless life that has been broken and remade in the Master Potter’s
hands. In the transformed life we see what God can do to a vessel totally
yielded to His will.
But we have got to do the yielding. We have got to get down on our hands and knees and call out to God to save us and remake us, to transform us, and to continue to remove the hardness from within our hearts, that we might be able to love as He would call us to love.
It's the story of
the “Happy Prince and the Swallow,” by Oscar Wilde. Only by responding to the plight
of the poor and needy is the stony heart of the prince transformed into a heart
of flesh. His heart turns to love as he sheds his golden covering and shares
its wealth with those in need. Both he and the swallow find eternal happiness
in death to self and in laying down their lies for the needs of others.
And so is the life of a follower of Christ. The Christian
life is full of breakings, and remaking, of suffering and forsaking, of yielding
and forgiving, of starting over from scratch once again. If any man or woman be
in Christ, they are a new creature, a new creation. Old things must pass away,
old ways, the old sins and habits must be forgotten and abandoned. Behold, all
must be made new – or be born again into a new creation of God by the
transforming power of the Holy Spirit.
That transforming power enables us to be kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sakes has forgiven each one of us. And yet we so easily fall from His grace and let sin and bitterness enter, and the hardness is present once again.
But we must
fight the good fight of faith and resist the devil. We must put on the whole armour
of God and be steadfast warriors taking the shield of faith, the breastplate of
His righteousness, the belt of truth and the sword of the Spirit which is the
word of God. We must cut the devil to the heart and overcome the adversary by
the word of our testimony through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He
is the victory that overcomes the world. Let Him transform us and make us new
once again. He says, "Behold, I make all things new."
Following is a cartoon rendition of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince.
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