Episode 589

TODAY’S READING

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Ezekiel 36:26

I wanted us to get ready for a season that is not wasted, a season that we are present in, a season in which we are able to go after God and all that He has for us. This verse is specifically important to me. Because if you knew anything about my testimony, you would have known that I grew up Catholic, so I very well know about the Bible. I knew about Jesus; I knew about his life. I knew about his crucifixion. I knew that he was raised to life again. And I had that pretty much instilled in me all my life. But I did not know the power of a relationship with God until I walked into the church doors in 2013. And it was for one day and one day only. My church was having a Womanity conference, and it was about this same verse, and our pastor, my now pastor, Pastor Mary, made us put a tattoo of a heart on the palm of our hand to signify that God wants us to have a heart of flesh. He doesn’t want us to have a cold heart. And that’s what I wanted to speak to today. And so, if you continue with my story in 2013, I did that one day. And that message, this one here that I’m going to share with you, the pastor Marissa versus spoke so many years ago, spoke straight into my heart that stayed with me, and I returned to the church in 2016 when I was ready to completely devote my life to God, and nothing has been the same since. And so back in 2013. 

She said from this verse that we can have a hard or a stone heart, and it hardens when life gets rough. When things happen, things happen because the world is full of sin, and we live in this fallen world, and God tells us that we will have troubles, we will have tribulation, and things will happen. But it is our job. To make sure that we never walk into a season hardened from what happened to us previously. So I am talking to the one in the audience right now who may have gone through some hard things and like because we don’t always get the best cards. 

Some of us get harder cards than others. I know that because I used to cry, and I used to ask God if life was hard for everybody or if it was just something that happened to me. So what he did was introduced me to many people who have had similar cards handed to them, whose parents or whose family dealt with similar things that my family dealt with. And he showed me through softening my heart that he is a good father. He is a redeeming father, and anything and everything can be redeemed. May we open our hearts to the heart of flesh. May we allow God to put a new spirit within us; we look for joy, and we look for His goodness. Maybe we look for his love. Perhaps we look for peace in our everyday. Maybe we look for it because if we look for it, we will find it, and where we put our thoughts, we shall see it replicated in front of us.

Prayer:

Father God, We love you, Lord. Thank you for this beautiful September. We are so excited for the rest of this year. Lord, we know that this season goes by real quick, and so we ask for the strength to be present. We thank you for absolutely everything in our lives, and Lord, we asked you today to soften our hearts if we have a hard heart for what has happened in our lives. We ask You for the grace, for the wisdom for anything that we need, Lord, to get past whatever happened to us. We know that you use everything for good. You know that you are still writing our stories. You are still writing our testimonies. You are going to do something with everything that we’ve ever encountered. And so we give you the praise, we give you the glory. We surrender it all to you. We thank you, and we love you. We pray this all in your son’s mighty name. Amen.