I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezek. 36:26)
Expanded Passage: Ezekiel 36:25–27
On December 3, 1967, the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, made its grand entry into the history books. That was when renowned surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant on fifty-three-year-old Louis Washkansky, a South African grocer who was dying from chronic heart disease. The donor was Denise Darvall, a twenty-five-year-old woman, who had been fatally injured in a car accident. Unfortunately, Washkansky died eighteen days later from double pneumonia.
However, heart transplants were already a reality long before that revolutionary day in 1967. The ultimate Heart Surgeon covenanted with his people to surgically remove their heart, which had become hardened by persistent unfaithfulness, and replace it with a new pliable heart of flesh. Concomitant with that heart transplant, God would administer a generous dose of “anesthesia,” sprinkling them with clean water to cleanse them from all their impurities. And to prevent any post-surgical fatality, he would breathe into them his own life-giving Spirit who would prompt them to lifelong obedience.
With surgical precision, God can perform a successful spiritual transplant of your hardened or diseased heart for a brand-new heart. It matters not how calloused it may have become by disobedience, pride, or anger. Ask God to give you a new heart and to put his own Spirit in you. He would like nothing better.
Submit your heart to the ultimate Heart Surgeon.
Theodore Griffin is a Wesleyan pastor and a doctor of ministry student. He and his wife, Randy, have two adult children and are the proud grandparents of a ten-month-old grandson.
© 2023 Wesleyan Publishing House. Reprinted from Light from the Word. Used by permission. Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®.
