He Is the One Who Changes Hearts

There are nine of them on the shelf above the desk, and she can tell you the order she bought them in.

The first one was a gift. Someone meant well. It had a subtitle about recovering the fire, and there was a chapter at the end with lines on the page for you to fill in, and she filled them in with a good pen because she wanted it to work.

The second one she bought herself, in a service station on the way back from a funeral. The third one had a thirty-day plan. The fifth one told her the problem was probably unconfessed sin, and she spent five weeks going through her life like a woman looking for a lost earring, and found things, and dealt with them, and felt precisely nothing. The seventh one told her to be still. The eighth told her to be zealous. The ninth is still in the packaging on the corner of the desk and she has not opened it, and she looks at it most days.

Here is what she has never said out loud. It is not that the books did not work.

It is that after each one, she was colder than before. Because each one handed her a method, and each method failed, and each failure went into a file she has been building for eleven years, and the file is titled: there is something wrong with me specifically.

Read the verbs and count whose they are

I want to put a sentence in front of you and I want you to do one small mechanical thing with it. Count the verbs and see whose they are.

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.Ezekiel 36:26

Give. Put. Take away. Give. Four verbs, and every single one of them is His.

There is nothing in that sentence for the person to do. Not one instruction. Not a step, not a plan, not a posture, not a thirty-day anything. God is describing an operation He performs, and the person on the table is not handed a scalpel.

You have been trying to do a work God has never once delegated, and the failure of your methods is not a failure of yours. That is not me letting you off; it is the plain grammar of Ezekiel 36:26, where God says what He does about hearts, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old promise about stone and flesh and lays it over a shelf of nine books above a desk.

Where the file came from

Now let me get at the file, because the file is the real injury here and the books were only the occasion.

Eleven years of methods that did not work have taught you something false. They have taught you that you are the variable. Nine books, nine approaches, one constant, and the constant is you, so the fault must sit in you. That is how a person reasons and it is completely reasonable and it is wrong, and it is wrong at the first step, because the method was never the mechanism.

Consider what the fifth book did to you. It told you the coldness meant unconfessed sin, and you went hunting through your own life for five weeks. I want to say something hard about that book. Dry feeling is not sin. It is not evidence of sin, it is not a symptom of sin, and sending a cold-hearted believer on a five-week search of her own conscience is how you take a tired woman and make her afraid of herself.

You were never the defective case, and there has never been a file with your name on it anywhere but in your own hand. The written word says there is no condemnation for a person who is in Christ, with no clause about temperature or about how many methods they have tried, and the Holy Spirit is not the author of the accusation you have been living under.

And notice the direction God is working in that verse. He is not softening a heart that is already flesh. He is dealing with stone. The condition He describes is the worst-case condition, and He does not treat it as a disqualification; He treats it as the starting material.

You are being handled by a God who specializes in the exact condition you are afraid of, and He named it before you did. Ezekiel 36:26 puts stone in God's hands as ordinary work rather than as a hard case, and His Spirit is the one performing it rather than any method you could learn.