“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

The picture of the new heart, incorporating lessons from the stony heart and the heart of flesh, is so important in Ezekiel that we could call it his keynote address. Taking the two passages together (Ezekiel 11 & 36) we obtain a clear insight into the need for and the challenges that the promise of the new heart presents us with.

This promise of revival also bears certain similarities to the one which Jeremiah wrote concerning, which Paul applied forcibly to the New Testament age when writing to the Hebrews:

But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Jeremiah 31:33

This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them;

Hebrews 10:16

The need for a new heart is often emphasised to the unbeliever in Gospel preaching. However, all of these promises were directed to God’s backslidden people. They point to recovery, reformation and restoration. This is what revival is; the Church recovers lost blessings, is reformed by the dynamic of the Spirit and is restored to her first love. This will occur only when we are granted the new heart. Revival is work which God does in the hearts of His people. This is the burden of this study.

The Stony Heart Removed

“I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh”

With the coming of the new heart, the old heart, the stony heart would be displaced.

The stony heart is hard, unfeeling and indifferent. A Church with a stony heart, is proud, indifferent to the glory of God, unresponsive to the Word, insensitive to her sins and uncaring about the souls of perishing men and women. In truth – there are few without a few stones in their spirits, stones that must be broken if God is to work.

Israel were insensitive to the departure of God’s glory from their midst. In Ezekiel 11, where the promise of the new heart is also given, the prophet is given a solemn vision for the captives in Babylon. The glory of God moved from the sanctuary (10:4) to the threshold of the temple (10:18) until He departed completely (11:22-23). Yet the people would continue in their sin, not aware of the departing presence of God.

Our sins grieve the Spirit and can quench His activity altogether. Christ, when speaking to the Ephesian congregation, warned of removing the candlestick from His presence. He also charged Laodecia with a sin which caused Him to spew them out His mouth. In Laodecia’s case the sin was lukewarmness whereas the Ephesians did not love the Lord as once they did. These are sins of the heart.

Who can claim that God is with His Church today working mightily and effectually?

Souls are dying, people around us know little of Christ; where is our passion and zeal?

Where is the spirit of inspection and examination?

May God save us from hardness!

The New Heart Implanted

“A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you”

This new heart is promised by God and is a gift of His grace. The key theme in all these revival pictures is the work that God does among His people. He promises a new heart, He gives a new heart, He does a new thing among His people. This work is undeserved. Like Israel we are sinful and careless. At times we must be chastened and corrected. But still – God comes again in favour working in our lives, reviving His Spirit in our hearts.

This Spirit is neither worked up nor is it organised. God comes down among His people. Yet we should pray – utterly dependent upon Him – asking for a visitation from on high. This is our need today.

The significance of the heart should not be lost on us. Outward reform changes nothing except externals. But only God can change the heart and it is only when the heart is changed that we are changed.

The New Heart Described

“an heart of flesh”

This new heart is described as a heart of flesh. This is a soft spirit, responsive and tender to the will of God.

That, instead of a heart of stone, insensible and inflexible, unapt to receive any divine impressions and to return any devout affections, God would give a heart of flesh, a soft and tender heart, that has spiritual senses exercised, conscious to itself of spiritual pains and pleasures, and complying in every thing with the will of God. Note, Renewing grace works as great a change in the soul as the turning of a dead stone into living flesh.

Matthew Henry

Ezekiel sees this heart as one which obeys readily the voice of God because the Lord has planted new desires deep within the soul:

And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

Ezekiel 36:27

This is also a spirit which takes ownership of personal sin and repents of past failure:

Then shall ye remember your own evil ways, and your doings that were not good, and shall lothe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities and for your abominations.

Ezekiel 36:31

With this heart of flesh comes promises:

God said that He would resettle His people once again:

And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.

Ezekiel 36:28

He pledges Himself to forgive them:

Thus saith the Lord GOD; In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your iniquities I will also cause you to dwell in the cities, and the wastes shall be builded.

Ezekiel 36:33

He gives them a vision of ruined cities, made waste by the enemy being rebuilt. The enemy of the Church steals our hearts, hinders our growth, transforms our perspective, restricts us to time and material things, seizes our children. BUT God is able to give us back everything that the devil and the world has taken.

Then the heathen that are left round about you shall know that I the LORD build the ruined places, and plant that that was desolate: I the LORD have spoken it, and I will do it.

Ezekiel 36:36

Using a beautiful phrase the prophet of the flock increasing, of population growth. The significance of this should not be lost on us:

Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will yet for this be enquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them; I will increase them with men like a flock. As the holy flock, as the flock of Jerusalem in her solemn feasts; so shall the waste cities be filled with flocks of men: and they shall know that I am the LORD.

Ezekiel 36:37-38

Yet God is commanding us to pray for this very thing, for multitudes of souls, for prayer meetings bulging at the seams, for the blessings that will flow from the new heart experience.

One who saw God work when preaching from this text was Scottish preacher John Livingstone.

In 1630, at the Kirk of Shotts in Lanarkshire, near Glasgow, a remarkable outpouring of the Holy Spirit occurred when John Livingstone, who had been ministering in Ulster, preached. Robert Bruce of Kinnaird was invited to preach at a special communion service in June 1630. The preaching and fellowship were so blessed that the people decided to stay over and have further fellowship on the Monday. John Livingstone, not particularly well known, and only 27, preached the sermon, having been called at late notice. The story is best heard in Mr Livingstone’s own words:

“The day in all my life wherein I found most of the presence of God in preaching, was on a Monday after the communion, in the churchyard of Shotts, June 21, 1630. The night before, I had been in company with some Christians, who spent the night in prayer and conference. When I was alone in the fields in the morning, before the time of sermon, there came such a misgiving of spirit upon me, considering my own unworthiness and weakness, and the multitude and expectation of the people, that I was consulting with myself to have stolen away and declined preaching; but I thought I durst not so distrust God, and so went to sermon, and got good assistance about one hour and a half upon the points which I had meditated on. And in the end, offering to close with some words of exhortation, I was led on about an hour’s time in a strain of exhortation and warning, with such liberty and melting of heart, as I never had the like in public all my lifetime. Some little of that stamp remained on the Thursday after, when I preached at Kilmarnock; but the very Monday following, preaching at Irvine, I was so deserted, that the points I had meditated and written, and which I had fully in my memory, I was not able to get pronounced — so it pleased the Lord to counterbalance his dealings, and to hide pride from man.”

Livingstone further described how a shower of rain in the midst of his sermon so affected him and in so doing moved his listeners:

“If a few drops of rain so discompose you, how discomposed would you be — how full of horror and despair, if God should deal with you as you deserve? and thus he will deal with all the finally impenitent. God might justly rain fire and brimstone upon you, as he did upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and the other cities of the plain. But, for ever blessed be his name! the door of mercy still stands open for such as you are. The Lord Jesus Christ, by tabernacling in our nature, and obeying that law which we have wickedly and wilfully broken, and suffering that punishment we have so richly deserved, has now become a refuge from the storm, and a covert from the tempest of divine wrath, due to us for sin. His merits and mediation are the alone defence from that storm, and none but those who come to Christ just as they are, empty of everything, and take the offered mercy at his hand, will have the benefit of this shelter.”

A contemporary, Rev Fleming verified Livingstone’s account

“I can speak on sure grounds, that about five hundred had at that time a discernible change wrought in them, of whom most proved lively Christians. It was the sowing of a seed through Clydesdale, so as many of the most eminent Christians in that country could date either their conversion, or some remarkable confirmation from it: and this was the more remarkable, that one, after much reluctance, by a special and unexpected providence, was called upon to preach that sermon on the Monday, which was not usually practised. And the night before being spent in prayer, the Monday’s work might be discerned as a convincing return of prayer.”

Let us today be encouraged to hold onto God, praying for a visitation, that the Spirit would visit our hard hearts doing the new thing of which He has promised:

“Behold, I will do a new thing;
now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?
I will even make a way in the wilderness,
and rivers in the desert.”

Isaiah 43:19