Jesus and all His miracles…there are so many. So very many. Here’s something that is so fascinating to me. If you’re a regular reader of these short messages, you know how much the Jewish leaders hated Jesus. But, did you know that they never denied Jesus worked all these miracles? Despite their hatred of Him, they knew He really did all these miracles. The leaders never accused Jesus of lying about working any miracles—not even once. They knew His miracles were true—He really did them. They even watched Him do them! In John 5, Jesus healed a man whose hand was withered, right in front of the leaders, inside the temple! In that instance, they were literally trapped by the truth: Jesus worked miracles. They could NOT deny it. And yet it still didn’t stop them from wanting to destroy Jesus and to kill Him. This too, is fascinating. No matter how many wonderful and compassionate things they witnessed Jesus doing, they refused to accept who He was: the Son of God. They were absolutely committed to making sure that Jesus was destroyed. How could they see all these miracles and still want Jesus dead? How could they reject Him as the Son of God? The same way people do today: hard hearts.
Here’s what a hard heart might say or think. A hard heart might say, “I believe in God.” That’s it, no more. There’s no faith or belief in Jesus. A hard heart might say, “Yeah, I think Jesus existed. Seems like He was a nice guy, did a lot of nice things.” A hard heart might say, “I don’t have time for Bible stuff right now. I’ll get around to that sometime, but not right now.” A hard heart might accept some parts of the Bible, but not all of it, thinking it’s outdated and doesn’t apply to the real world anymore. A hard heart says, “That religious stuff is phony baloney.” For myself, for a long time, my own hard heart said, “I’ll go to church most of the time, because it feels like that the right thing to do.” We are born this way. We all suffer from hard hearts—from the second we are born. And there’s not one thing a person can do about that. You can’t change your hard heart. I couldn’t change my own hard heart. So now what?
Here’s the only solution: the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s the only One who can do anything about hard hearts. Here’s what the Bible says. The Lord changes hearts…but it’s even better than just a change of heart. The Lord doesn’t just clean our hearts up or dust off those old hearts. It’s so much better than that! The Lord gives believers a new heart. “I will give you a new heart…I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26-27). A heart of flesh is a soft heart, a heart that has responded to the Lord, a heart that loves the Lord, and a heart that obeys the Lord. And here’s the truth: we can’t do any of this ourselves. We can do nothing to change or get a new heart. We are completely dependent on the Lord for this miracle—which means we need Jesus MORE than we can possibly comprehend! So, seeing that we can do nothing about our hard hearts, what can you and I do? We can pray. You can pray that the Lord might grant you forgiveness of your sins and create in you a new heart. You can pray that the Lord works a miracle in your heart. If you’d like me to pray for you, let me know.
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