Who is God? – Day 18

How well do you know yourself? Do you recognise yourself in today’s verse? When last did you take a good long, hard look at your heart and your spirit?

I hear you saying: “Aren’t we supposed to be looking at who God is?” Well, the fact that God is vitally interested in you, and wants to reach you, does tell you an enormous amount about God and how important you are to Him! He sees you in your fallen state, but does not turn His back on you and walk away. Instead He does everything within the parameters that He has set — that is respecting your free will — to reach out to you, to speak into your life and to bless you with the love, joy and peace that will make your spirit live, something that only He can give.

There are many different expressions that contain the word “stone”. Look for a common thread in this list: stone broke, stone dead, stone cold, stone cold sober, stone blind, stone deaf, carved in stone and, what we read in today’s verse, heart of stone. Would you like to have any of them associated with you?

I don’t think that many would, as each one has the negative association of hardness, coldness and unyielding impenetrability that spoils some aspect of life, with no possibility for give: complete blindness, complete deafness, completely poor; even stone cold sober doesn’t have the positive connotation expected when compared with being drunk, but gives the impression of being so sober that the person has no life.

When God speaks of removing our heart of stone, we realise that He sees how our hard, cold, unyielding, impenetrable hearts are spoiling the plan of abundant life that He has for His children. He sees that we are drained, driven, struggling to make sense, struggling to make ends meet, struggling to keep up, struggling to see where we fit in to the extent that we have hardened ourselves. Can you identify with any of this?

He wants to free us so that we will be able to lead lives that are warm and vibrant and lived in technicolour, because, as pretty as some stones are that we find, they are dull by comparison!