To begin our new life in recovery we need to permit God to remove from us our old “ways of insanity”. The bad news is, the insane desires and thoughts entwined in our old heart cannot be fixed. This new life requires something more. It requires a brand new heart.
The good news is that God has a wonderful plan that can give us this new heart we so desperately need. However, in order to get started, in the same way a patient signs a release form before a surgeon will operate on them, so we need to give God permission to take out our old heart and put in a new one.
“I’ll pour pure water over you and scrub you clean. I’ll give you a new heart, put a new spirit in you. I’ll remove the stone heart from your body and replace it with a heart that’s God-willed, not self-willed. I’ll put my Spirit in you and make it possible for you to do what I tell you and live by my commands.” (Ezekiel 36:25-27 MSG)
Without God, our heart truly is as hard as stone, filled with revenge, with hateful anger, with resentment, with bitterness and self-righteous judging. It’s been scarred for too long by broken tapes of hatred and condemnation. There’s no “fixing” that stuff. We actually have to hand over that dead and dried up heart and get a new one transplanted that is living and soft and real. We need the new heart God is giving that is guided and controlled by God’s Spirit of love and peace and gentleness. Will it sometimes feel like He’s “killing us” during the transplanting process? It will because He is. The change is dramatic but the results are wonderful.
God says, “…I will give them singleness of heart and put a new spirit within them. I will take away their stony, stubborn heart and give them a tender, responsive heart, so they will obey my decrees and regulations. Then they will truly be my people, and I will be their God.” (Ezekiel 11:19-20 NLT)
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