A change of Heart

Proverbs 4:22- Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.

Your life is like a river and everything that flows down the river of your life comes down-stream from your heart. So, just as if there’s pollution flowing down a river, you need to go upstream to find its source in order to clean it up, so it is with sin in our lives; we need to go upstream to our hearts and deal with it there.

Jesus taught this explicitly.

Matthew 23:25-26- Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

Mark 7:20-23- "…What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean. For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.'"

Jesus taught that we sin because our hearts are sinful and upstream from every area of our lives; sin comes out of the overflow of our heart and manifests itself in various ways. We sin because our hearts are sinful and because our hearts are sinful we love and desire sin.

John 3:19-20- This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.

So, the verdict is in- and it's not the one that we wanted. Our inclination; our nature, the orientation of our heart in sin, is that we are darkness-loving and light hating. And if we are to come ‘out of the darkness and into the light’; if we are to ‘hate what is evil and cling to what is good’; we need a change of heart.

That’s why this work of regeneration is so wonderful and so important.Because aside from the work of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit in us to give us a new heart and a new mind with reformed desires, we will not come into the light- we love the darkness too much.

Jesus plainly teaches this in John 3, and then he goes on to say in verse. 21- ‘But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done (i.e. living by the truth, coming into the light) has been done through God.’

So we come out of the darkness and into the light because God begins and will complete a work in us to draw us to Himself.

That this work in us has begun is assumed in Romans 12, where Paul says;

Romans 12:2- Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world (loving what is evil, living in darkness), but be transformed (how?) by the renewing of your mind. (that is the work of the Holy Spirit on the believer). Then you will be able to test approve what God's will is- His good, pleasing and perfect will.

That renewal doesn’t happen instantaneously. It’s not that God wriggles his nose and all of a sudden we, as lovers of darkness and haters of light, become haters of darkness and lovers of light. Renewal is a life-long process.

But hopefully, if you are born again, you can recognize evidences of this process taking place in your life- dissatisfaction with sin and darkness and a longing for Jesus and the light- a change of heart and a change of mind.

Paul calls for our heart and it’s feelings and our mind and it’s attitudes to come into conformity with God’s word and will in such a way that can only be achieved by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 12 calls us to live and think and act and feel in a way that goes far beyond superficial deeds and towards the radical outworking of a transformed heart- and only God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, can truly and totally change our hearts in this way.