The Heart I Cannot Manufacture

You cannot soften stone. I want to begin there, because everything else follows from it.

There is a yard I know where they cut stone, and I have spent whole afternoons watching, which is the sort of thing I do. And a mason will tell you, if you ask, that there are exactly two things you can do with a hard stone. You can shape it, which is slow and takes the right tool and a great deal of patience. Or you can break it, which is fast.

What you cannot do, by any method, with any tool, at any temperature available in a yard, is make it soft. Softness is a property of a different material. It is not something a stone can be persuaded into.

Now here is a man who has been trying for two years.

Not with stone. With himself. He has a matter he intends to bring to God, and he has decided, without ever being taught it in a sentence, that it must be brought with a soft heart. And he does not have one. He has the hard sort, and he knows it, and he is not proud of it and he does not defend it.

So before he brings the matter he tries to produce the softness.

He does this by reading things that ought to move him, and noting that they do not. He does it by sitting quietly at length and waiting for something to give. He does it by rehearsing what he did until the account is as vivid as he can make it, on the theory that vividness will do what argument has not.

And after two years he is a man who has become extremely well informed about his own hardness and has not moved a millimetre.

That is you in the yard.

You've been trying to manufacture a property you do not have, out of material that does not have it, using tools that were never designed for the job. And you have taken the failure as a verdict on your seriousness, when it is a verdict on your equipment.

Ezekiel puts the whole transaction on God's side

Read this and count the verbs, and notice who the subject of every one of them is.

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

Four verbs. I will give. I will put. I will take away. I will give. Every one of them has the same subject and it is not you.

This is the passage people reach for when they talk about a changed heart, and almost always they read it as a description of what a changed person is like. Read it as a job description instead. It tells you who does the work. And the answer, four times over in one verse, is God.

You have been attempting a piece of work that Scripture assigns to God in four consecutive clauses, and I am not making this convenient: Ezekiel 36:26 puts every verb in the first person divine, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can persuade a determined man to put a chisel down.

Now let me be exact about the two materials, because the passage is exact. The stony heart out of your flesh. Stone, in that image, is not wickedness. It is unresponsiveness: the property of not being affected by what should affect you. That is precisely what you have been diagnosing in yourself for two years, and you have been right about the diagnosis and wrong about the remedy.

And the replacement is not a softened stone. It is an heart of flesh, which is a different material entirely. God does not propose to improve the properties of what is there. He proposes an exchange.

You are not being asked to soften anything, and the verse offers a replacement rather than a treatment, which is written into the two nouns rather than into my sympathy for a hard man, with the Spirit of God able to do in an evening what two years of effort could not begin.

Here is the part that took me longest to understand, and I say it as somebody who likes to work things out. The very fact that you have spent two years wanting a softer heart is itself a datum. Stone does not want to be flesh. A genuinely unresponsive man does not spend two years grieved by his own unresponsiveness. The wanting is not the achievement, and it is not nothing either: it is the first sign of a work already begun by Somebody with the right tools.

This exchange has already been started in you, and the wanting you have been treating as evidence of failure is the earliest evidence of it, because Ezekiel 36:26 makes the giving God's work, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a yard at the end of a day.