A New Heart
“I became free hearted,” said a foster kid to other teens at church after surrendering to Jesus as king of his life. A week earlier he had almost hit another kid over the head with a chair, who had treated him poorly at church. He said basically God washed him of all the shame of the sins he committed, and he was able to forgive all those who hurt him. The week after he shares about his transformation, he tells the group it’s his last week at church because he was adopted!
It says in Ezekiel 36:25-27 that God can give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. His Holy Spirit will then move you to follow God and power to do what God wants.
Once, you have this new heart, you still live in a very broken world. People will sin against you, and you will sin against others. We have an initial purifying experience of a new heart by the power of the Holy Spirit, but the heart starts collecting dust, dirt and grime.
I used to have a salt water aquarium, and it needed to be cleaned every month, or it became covered in algae. In the movie Finding Nemo, one scene shows fish intentionally clogging the filter so they can escape to the ocean. The tank gets all green and yucky, and the fish can barely swim. When I cleaned my tank, the water was so clean, the fish swam fast like they just drank a case of Red Bull.
If you want to keep your heart free, you have to find a way to keep it clean. God gives us only two tools to keep our hearts pure: repentance and forgiveness.
Sin can be internal and external. Externally, we talk behind people’s back, or we treat people poorly. Internally, we have wonky heart attitudes. It says in 1 John 1, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Or my translation: admit you’re a jerk, and watch God work — repentance. With God we are never stuck in the yuck. He wants to free us from it.
Not forgiving people will also block you from experiencing a free heart. It says in Matthew 6:15, “But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” If you have been repenting but don’t feel free, you may need to forgive someone.
A survivor of childhood and marital abuse after learning how through the power of the Holy Spirit to release sins they committed and sins committed against them in forgiveness and repentance wrote us. “I learned more and received more (emotional) healing in a half hour, than I have in the last several years. I feel an emotional release through the Holy Spirit that I can’t describe. I understand now that I need to give these memories, emotions to the Holy Spirit and ask him to then cleanse me. I’ve done this several times today as He has brought things to mind. I’ve kept them bound in my memory and emotions/soul that need to be released to him.”
She experienced her free heart at a deeper level. We need to clean our hearts in order to have life to the full that Jesus promises.