Okay, Exactly HOW is the Heart Changed?

Last night’s effort showed that the heart is the miracle behind behaviour change. Without the heart being convinced of its need to change, change—true and lasting change I mean—simply cannot occur.

My task is now to dig deeper, to plunge down to the icy depths of a human being’s regenerative transformation, and to attempt to come to grips with exactly how a heart is changed at the ocean floor.

First of all, the heart must know in a very personal way that change is required.

A person of their own opinion still,
will not have a change of will.

They cannot change, because they see no need of change, and there isn’t even any insight to bring awareness of the change required. Yet, there are many who know that change is required, but still struggle in the department of the will. They want to change, but they are not willing to pay the price of sacrifice.

Sadly, we have all been there!

But this is what this article is about: God actually changes our heart. That’s right, only through the impartation of God’s holy revelation—that stirs our soul awake—that leaves us breathless in contrition—that takes the old to death in order that the new can come to life—does change occur in our heart.

If we should crave it, and of course we should, because there is nothing in the world like the power of true heart change, we know we can go after it.

We only need to recognise change without lasting heart transformation is futile and then we get serious with God. We stop wasting our time.

We need to be sick and tired of being sick and tired, when the sickness and tiredness is borne of our self-dependence and other-than-God-dependence.

We genuinely need to recognise that the power to change comes only as a grace through God. At this point we are absolutely humble. We recognise that without God we’re not masters of our destiny.

We are, instead, a shambles. We trust, fear and love the wrong things.

But as soon as we begin to trust and fear and love the things of God, our Lord begins to bless us with right sight for the things of the heavenly Kingdom. What comes as a result—what is already apparent—is the fruit of repentance.

We’ve chosen to change our minds. We have decided to stop trusting our own judgement. We have decided that abiding by the truth is worth more than our pride. And a sense we have not chosen to change our minds; our minds have been changed for us. Of course, this is a mystery.

Everyone who seeks God but does not yet have God is open to the witness of the testimony of God in another person’s heart, as that person is witnessed as transformed. A transformed person is a walking miracle. And just about everybody who witnesses such a walking, living miracle gesticulates, as was said in When Harry Met Sally, “I want what they’ve got.”

The heart is changed by God, but it’s not out of the realms of possibility for humans to want such a heart. And with enough desperation on anyone’s part, especially given the circumstances of brokenness, just about anyone can be ‘met’ by God to this degree.

Heart change is necessary for regeneration. Nobody can be born again until they’ve been born from above, which is to be reborn from within by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The evidence of heart change is obvious; there is a constant and flourishing turning from the ways of this world back to God; there is behaviour change where one takes astute responsibility for one’s own actions and is cut to the heart whenever another person is hurt by their person’s actions.

There is no doubting the evidence of this heart change. And this is the heart change we ought to want to see in each of ourselves, more and more; never satisfied that we know enough when we aren’t repenting enough, never content that we live any kind of lie as opposed to seeing only the lies in others’ lives, never happy when we aren’t blessing others because in fact we can, and supremely happy when we know that God sees us.

The interesting thing at this concluding juncture is that, having read these words, and having edited these words—indeed having written these words, no less—it’s impressed upon me how little I bear this note of transformation within myself, even though I’ve been transformed much.

Indeed, this little article serves as a golden reminder that I haven’t arrived; that I am still so far from the destination, even if despite my sin, which is, in this case, a coveting of a salvation that bears little fruit, I am saved by the grace of God.

This leaves you and I
in the land of perennial opportunity.

How exactly are our hearts to be changed? We must desire them to be reborn every day. We must hunger that God would change us, that our hearts and minds would ever be open in ways that those who are yet to believe would find godly attraction in experiencing us.

We must stop arguing as we are tempted to argue. We discern astutely. We must stop judging, because ‘Christians’ judge too much, where those of Christ trust the Holy Spirit to do the convicting. We must also look out to our world from the eyes of the hypocrites we are. Only the transformed can see their hypocrisy.

It’s only when we are capable of seeing our hypocrisy that we are gentler and kinder on others, because we’re too busy getting the log out of our own eye to bother about the speck in theirs.

When our hearts bleed with compassion and pump with the resolve that insists on embodying truth through love, we have no more time to judge anyone else’s sin other than our own, as we rest confident in leaving the rest of the world to God. But we must also help hold each other—the espoused transformed—to gentle yet persuasive account. Such is the grace of a love that’s committed wholly to truth. And first of all, to self-account, to ourselves and before others!

In this land of opportunity, where growth abounds, where our hearts are ever stretched, we grow comfortable in our discomfort; we sport smiles of gladness even as we rally with the contempt with which we present to God.

How wonderful it is when we can see the full and bright measure of our sin and yet feel no sense of judgement at all, and only experience the fullest measure of grace for the evidence of change in our hearts.

Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash