I. Introduction

A. Illustration – The story is told about a woman who asked her coworker, "What is it like to be a Christian?" The coworker replied, "It is like being a pumpkin. God picks you from the patch, brings you in, and washes all the dirt off of you. Then he cuts off the top and scoops out all the yucky stuff. He removes the seeds of doubt, hate, and greed, and then he carves you a new smiling face and puts his light inside of you to shine for all the world to see" (as cited on PreachingToday.com).

B. Context – That in a nutshell, or in a pumpkin shell as the case may be, is what our Scripture passage is all about. So let’s read Ezekiel 36:25-27, and I’m reading from The Message.

II. Scripture Passage

A. Ezekiel 36:25-27 (from The Message) – (NEW SLIDE) I’ll pour water over you and scrub you clean. I’ll give you a new heart, put a new spirit in you. (NEW SLIDE) I’ll remove the stone heart from your body and replace it with a heart that’s God-willed, not self-willed. I’ll put my Spirit in you and make it possible for you to do what I tell you and live by my commands.

III. New Heart Equals New Life

A. Christians tend to believe that, if God’s gift at Christmas could be expressed in an equation, it would look something like (NEW SLIDE) “Baby + Bethlehem = Salvation.” Or at Easter time we’d express it something like “Jesus + Jerusalem = Salvation.” But God has a different formula in mind for us. That’s what this promise in Ezekiel is trying to tell us. The new formula is something like this: (NEW SLIDE) “Baby + Bethlehem = New Heart.” Without a new heart, we can’t follow and obey this Baby Jesus like we’re called to.

B. All this talk about a new heart can be confusing. We all know the advances that medical science has made that allow heart transplants in those fortunate few that donor hearts are found for. We can’t live without a heart, and that’s why donors are so hard to come by. But when those recipients receive a heart transplant, their dying hearts are replaced by ones that do exactly what they were designed to do. The same thing is true spiritually. (NEW SLIDE) God designed us with hearts that could love Him fully and obey Him completely and share His love with the whole world. Sin came into the world through Adam and caused all of us to be born with diseased spiritual hearts that, without intervention, will kill us off spiritually. All of us have got to have a spiritual heart transplant if we’re going to thrive in our relationship with Jesus Christ, this Baby who came to give us new hearts.

C. You see, what the Baby came to do is not just to forgive us for our sin, but to cleanse us from our sin and enable us to walk in obedience to Him. Do you understand the difference? When we are forgiven from our sin, it’s like the doctor telling us that we can live a while longer if we do what he take the medicine he prescribes. The immediate problem of being spiritually dead is taken care of and we begin a new life of taking care of our spiritual hearts, but our hearts are still disease-damaged and unable to function the way God created them to. (NEW SLIDE) Our Lord and Saviour came to earth as a Baby to die so that our sins can be forgiven AND so that we can be filled with His Spirit and given a new heart so that we can really live.

D. Look at what our passage says: I’ll give you a new heart, put a new spirit in you. Not a prescription so that we can live with the symptoms from our old diseased heart. But a new heart. And not the old defeated, sin-tainted spirit we’ve lived with for so long, but a new spirit. I’ll remove the stone heart from your body and replace it with a heart that’s God-willed, not self-willed. (NEW SLIDE) The problem with our old heart is that it is self-willed – it wants to do only what serves itself. Oh, there will be the occasional good deed or word, but even that will be for the heart to show itself how good it is. The gift the Baby came to give us is a new heart, God’s own heart recreated within us. I’ll put my Spirit in you and make it possible for you to do what I tell you and live by my commands. (NEW SLIDE) What God has promised us is a new spiritual heart that is inhabited completely by the Holy Spirit. Only the complete and constant filling of the Holy Spirit will enable us to obey God with everything we are. In the terms John Wesley used we would call it entire sanctification, but it really doesn’t matter what you call it as long as you experience it. As long as you allow God to do His work within you and give you a new heart.

E. Illustration - Dale Hays tells of a Haitian pastor who ttold his congregation this gruesome parable: A certain man wanted to sell his house for $2,000. Another man wanted very badly to buy it, but because he was poor, he couldn’t afford the full price. After much bargaining, the owner agreed to sell the house for half the original price with just one stipulation: he would retain ownership of one small nail protruding from just over the door. After several years, the original owner wanted the house back, but the new owner was unwilling to sell. So first the owner went out found the carcass of a dead animal, and hung it from the nail he still owned. Soon the house became unlivable and the family was forced to sell the house to the owner of the nail. (NEW SLIDE) The Haitian pastor’s conclusion: "If we leave the Devil with even one small peg in our life, he will return to hang his rotting garbage on it, making it unfit for Christ’s habitation" (as cited on SermonCentral.com). That’s why God wants to give us a new heart so badly. Because anything short of it leaves our enemy that one peg to hang his rotten stuff on it and it will kill us spiritually. It’s for our own good that we receive this precious gift that Jesus came as a Baby to make available to us.

F. Illustration – James W. Kennedy wrote, (NEW SLIDE) What really matters is what happens in us, not to us (as cited on PreachingToday.com). A new heart is what God wants to place inside of all of us. But how do we receive this gift? The answer is simple, but it’s not easy. You see, the Israelites Ezekiel was speaking to had been exiled. They had been driven from their land because of their sin. They had be exiled to a place that was totally polluted by idols and sins that made theirs seem like child’s play. They saw the effects of gross sin on those people, and they began to realize that sin had done the same thing to them. When they started to realize the truth, and how badly their sin had offended God, then they saw how much they needed to change. So God said he would do this work in response to their need. Wrong! He said, I’m not doing it for you, Israel. I’m doing it for me, to save my character, my holy name, which you’ve blackened in every country where you’ve gone. I’m going to put my great and holy name on display, the name that has been ruined in so many countries, the name that you blackened wherever you went. Then the nations will realize who I really am, that I am God, when I show my holiness through you so that they can see it with their own eyes. These verses immediately precede the passage we’re looking at today. (NEW SLIDE) God wants to give us new hearts so that His holiness shines through us, is seen in our lives, is reflected in our character.

G. Illustration - Pastor and author Tony Evans says this aabbout God: “Holiness is the centerpiece of God’s attributes. Of all the things God is, at the center of His being, God is holy. Never in the Bible is God called, ‘love, love, love,’ or ‘eternal, eternal, eternal,’ or ‘truth, truth, truth.’ On this aspect of His character, God has laid the most stress” (as cited on SermonCentral.com). That’s exactly what Ezekiel is talking about. (NEW SLIDE) This gift that the Baby came to give us at Christmas is the gift of allowing God to be glorified through everything we are and say and do. The simple part is that God works this heart transplant in us by the power of His Spirit. The hard part is that in order to receive this gift, we’ve got to surrender everything we have and are to God. (NEW SLIDE) It’s a process of surrender, where little by little we give up our rights to different areas of our lives, until we reach the point where our obedient surrender leads to the cleansing and filling of His Spirit. How long does it take? It varies from person to person, with God knowing us well enough to know how much surrender is enough for each of us. He knows when He has us, and then He moves us to desire that His holiness more than anything else, and then we will do whatever is necessary to get that transplant. That’s probably a more ambiguous answer than you wanted, but in reality it is truth. (NEW SLIDE) Pray for a new heart, keep praying for a new heart, surrender to Him to receive that new heart when the time comes, and then keep praying and obeying to keep that new heart.

H. I have to tell you from experience that it’s a daily battle to keep that infilling of the Spirit fresh. That’s because my relationship with the Giver of the gift has to be kept fresh every day. When a person gets a physical heart transplant, they then have to take anti-rejection drugs to keep their body from rejecting that transplanted heart. (NEW SLIDE) In the same way, daily time with God in prayer, Bible reading, meditation, and other spiritual disciplines keeps our sinful nature from coming back to life and rejecting the work that God has done within us. It’s a battle because as long as any of us has a new spiritual heart, we’re a threat to the enemy of our souls. It’s a battle because we were born with a propensity to sin. When we focus on fighting the sin, we take our eyes off of Jesus and lose the battle. When we allow His infilling Spirit to guide us in dealing with sin, then we will always win. (NEW SLIDE) Our world is looking for people who have a fresh and powerful experience of the true and living God in their daily lives, and that’s exactly what we will live if we allow God to give us a new heart and a new spirit.

I. Illustration - Dr. Ronald Meeks, a Biblical Studies teaaccher at Blue Mountain Community College in Blue Mountain, MS, writes: I have not had the opportunity to travel much, but several years ago my dad won a trip to Italy through his business and he asked me to go along. A highlight of the trip was visiting Florence, the great city of the Renaissance. One afternoon out of curiosity I went to a museum where the some works of Michelangelo were displayed. As we viewed the half-finished sculpture of St. Matthew the tour guide explained that this unfinished work was a prime example of Michelangelo’s philosophy of art. He believed that in a stone there was a figure or statue waiting to be released. The work of the artist was to free the statue from the stone. The statute was so lifelike that I thought any minute St. Matthew might just step out of that huge stone. As I looked at the half-finished statute, I could see that the artist had begun to free the statue but had not been able to complete it. The tour guide went on to explain that Michelangelo had numerous works he never finished. As I thought about God’s work in us, I realized that God has begun a work in us to conform us to the image of Christ. However, unlike Michelangelo, God does not stop working in our lives until he finishes what he intends to accomplish. According to Philippians 1:6, God will finish what He has started; ultimately, God has no unfinished works of grace (as cited on SermonCentral.com). God has begun His work to free us when we have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Will we allow Him to finish it by giving us a new heart and a new spirit? After all, that’s the greatest gift God could ever give us – it’s our Christmas present.

I. Conclusion

A. Please bow your heads and close your eyes out of respect for each other’s privacy. Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? If you don’t, and you’d like to start one right now, please pray along with me and repeat what I say, either out loud or in your heart: “Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner and need Your forgiveness. I believe that You died for my sins. I want to turn from my sins. I now invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as Lord and Savior. In Jesus’ name. Amen.” If you prayed that prayer this morning, welcome into God’s family. Tell someone before you leave today. Begin reading the Bible every day, and pick up a Daily Bread brochure out in the foyer to help you with that.

B. With heads still bowed and eyes still closed, if you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, would you like to receive God’s gift of a new heart? If you’d like to receive a new heart, please come forward to the altars and be prayed for. Surrender yourself to God in prayer, and ask Him to give you a new heart and fill you completely with His Spirit. And don’t give up surrendering and asking until it happens. With some folks here today it might happen right now, so if you’d like to receive God’s gift of a new heart, come forward now.