Journal Entry ~ 01/21/18

26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. - Ezekiel 36:26-27

We cannot know our own hearts because they are full of deceit, but God does. We are told in scripture that He searches our hearts and knows it. He searched all thoughts and intents of the heart, from the quick and fleeting thoughts to the lingering thoughts we dwell on. He sees the thoughts we try to disguise from others and those we don’t even recognize ourselves. He knows it all. He looks at and judges everything that passes through our minds. But more than judging and knowing, His desire is to grow us to be more like Christ - this is why He gives us a new heart. 

Giving us a new heart is a process, not a moment. While I truly wish it happened in a single moment, I have come to realize receiving a new heart and a new spirit takes some time. His Spirit does come to dwell in me in a single moment, and my heart began its change in that moments, it’s taken decades to clean out this things I hide from others and myself from my heart.

God wants our hearts to be more like Christ.  He wants them to be clean and new. In order to do that, He must reveal to us what lies in our hearts. He must expose the blindness to our sin. So, God will allow challenging people or situations in our lives to expose the darkness that still exists in our hearts. These situations are meant to test our hearts, to bubble up to the surface those dark places that remain hidden from us. He wants us to see our heart as He sees it, and to root out those places where we hide our sin. This is the reason He allows us to walk through difficult trials - all
So that He can give us a new heart and a new spirit. 

It doesn’t happen over night - as much as I wish it did, God just doesn’t give us that new heart over night. But what does happen in the moment do salvation is the indwelling of the Spirit, and His Spirit begins its work on our hearts, revealing and testing and bubbling to the surface all the dark and ugly places in our hearts so that we can have clean and new hearts that desire to glorify Him


Press on ~ you are loved 💗

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