The Mystery of the Gospel, Part 4: A New Heart

This is from the book The Mystery of the Gospel:

A New Heart

"Religion holds out the false hope that we can live as Jesus did by following a certain system. But it is impossible for us to live as Jesus did as long as we have a heart that is centered on self.

"What, then, is the solution to our dilemma?

"Long before Jesus came to implement it, Ezekiel gave us the answer:

Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My ordinances. Ezekiel 36:26, 27

"The remedy is drastic surgery! God actually had to remove our old nature--the spirit of error--and implant within us a wholly new one, so that we would automatically walk in obedience to Him. Just as it was formerly natural to sin, now it would be perfectly natural to obey. Righteousness would spring forth spontaneously!

"Jeremiah, recognizing the failure of the old covenant, looked forward to the day when the new covenant would be established. He spoke of it in terms of the internal rule of the King in His subjects:

I will put My laws into their minds, and I will write them upon their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall not teach every one his fellow-citizen, and every one his brother, saying, "Know the Lord," for all shall know Me, from the least to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful to their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more. Hebrews 8:10-12

"No longer would people try to obey God. No longer would we need to urge fellow-citizens of the kingdom to walk in close relationship with the King. Instead, God would give us a new heart--through a union between our individual human spirit and His spirit--creating in us a new spirit with inbuilt obedience. Further, the occasional failure and detours into sin would be fully covered by the blood of Jesus, so that God would not even take note of them. And in this atmosphere, free from all condemnation, the Spirit within the new heart would bring forth fruit just as naturally as a vine produces grapes.

"How does God perform His surgery upon us? How does He remove the stony heart and place a new heart within us? It is through death that we enter into life. Jesus announced a cardinal principle of kingdom life when He said that except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it cannot bring forth new life.

"In God's timeless perspective of the world, the whole human race is identified with two men--the First Adam and the Last Adam. What both of these men did has affected the entirety of mankind throughout history. Paul explained:

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive. 1 Corinthians 15:22

So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness, there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous. Romans 5:18, 19

"When Adam sinned, all of us were reckoned to have sinned. Though we were nowhere near the scene of the crime, we would all have done as Adam did in the same circumstances. Because of his sin, he became joined in spirit with Satan and from that time on all people have been born as natural citizens of the kingdom of darkness.

"But just as we were all identified with the First Adam, so God identifies us all with the Last Adam. And when He died to meet the penalty of sin, we died with Him: '. . . One died for all, therefore all died' (II Cor. 5:14).

"That is why Paul could say, 'I have been crucified with Christ.' Indeed, he wrote to the Romans:

How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death . . . Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Romans 6:2-7

"Many of us reckon ourselves on the Cross, but not yet dead. We try to keep ourselves up there, so that eventually, after a life of trying, we will finally succeed in 'dying to self.'

"But Paul doesn't say that we are presently being crucified with Christ. He says that we were crucified with Him, and that we died, and were buried. The old life came to an abrupt end.

"This death set us free from the clutches of the god of this world, who was our master. We are no longer his subjects. When we die, the government we lived under no longer has any power over us. So we are no longer subjects of the kingdom of darkness.

"But Jesus didn't stay dead. He is described as 'the first-born from the dead,' and when He rose we rose with Him. We were 'born again,' this time as citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Completely out of Satan's rule, we are now under the rule of Christ:

For He delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Colossians 1:13, 14

"The Bible couldn't be clearer: we died to the kingdom of darkness and were born anew in the kingdom of light. We have just the one Master, Jesus our Lord. As Paul expressed it:

But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. Romans 6:17, 18

"These statements strike at the jugular vein of the false teaching that man has two natures within him warring against each other. Certainly there is a war going on, but, as we shall see in due course, it is on a different battlefront and of a different style than most of us have imagined it. It is definitely not between two natures within us!

"The believer has undergone a change of heart--a change of nature. Satan ruled us from within, so that our minds and bodies were his subjects. Now Christ Jesus is King, and His internal rule from the new heart makes us 'slaves of righteousness.'

"It should be understood that by 'nature' we are speaking about what we are in our essence, in the core or center of our being. We are spirits made to live in union with a deity spirit--be it the spirit of error or the Spirit of truth. And we cannot be in union with two different deity spirits at the same time! The devil's greatest trick was to fool us into thinking that we are 'gods' because we are in the image of God and meant to live in union as expressions of Him. We are meant to contain a deity, not to be independent deities.

"Through our natural lineage 'in Adam,' we contained the god of this world. He was the one who blinded us to a true understanding of ourselves as vessels, telling us that we were independent gods. And when we walked the natural course of this world, we imagined we were 'doing our own thing,' when in reality we were simply expressions of his self-centered nature.

"But now, because we are 'in Christ Jesus' through our identification with His death and resurrection, we are now vessels of His divine nature. We have 'become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust' (II Pet. 1:4). We have completely finished with Satan's nature--escaped from his rule--and the nature we express is the love-nature of our heavenly Father.

"The trouble is that at first many of us have difficulty believing that so radical a change has taken place. This is because Satan's rule was internal and invisible (so that we actually thought it was us), even as Christ's rule is within us and invisible. But there is more to life than meets the eye.

"To be 'in Christ' is not just legal terminology. It is not just 'the way God looks at us.' God does not say we are something we are not. He does not fool Himself. To be 'in Christ' is to enter into union with God through Christ. Through Adam we were joined with Satan. Now through Christ we are joined with God. We formerly expressed Satan's nature, but now we express God's nature.

"Even as our being 'in Adam' resulted in us being born as sinful individuals who naturally fulfill the desires of their spiritual father the devil, so our being 'in Christ' results in an actual righteousness. In Adam we were born as sinners who are sinful; in Christ we are born as saints who are righteous.

"We cannot make the point too strongly. A real grasp of the fact that we have died as sinners and been born all over again as saints is the fundamental key to the operation of Christ's life in us.

"Most of the sense of failure, the discouragement, and the condemnation that many believers experience finds its root in the false teaching that this change is only one of 'legal status.' Countless born-again individuals do not know what really happened to them at their conversion, and as a consequence they inadequately experience the reality of Christ's life on a day-to-day level.

"Many have built a doctrine on 'reckoning' themselves dead, as if reckoning meant that they are to imagine something to be true that is not in fact true. They 'reckon' themselves dead without ever seeing that they really are dead!

"To 'reckon' ourselves dead is to accept as true what God says is true. It's just that simple. God says that when one died for all, 'then were all dead.' To 'reckon' is to look beyond external appearances and to believe and acknowledge what God says.

"If you owe a debt, and the debt is settled by someone else, your creditor acknowledges that account as settled and so do you. He doesn't have to pretend that it is settled and keep on telling himself that it is. It just is, and that's the end of the matter.

"Just as you can only acknowledge that an account is settled when it has been paid (any other kind of bookkeeping is plain fraud), so we can only acknowledge ourselves as having died with Christ and resurrected with Him if it is really true.

"We died with Christ and we were raised with Him--and we keep affirming that this is true despite external appearances. This is not to kid ourselves that something is true when it isn't, but it is to see that spirit is reality. In spirit our death and resurrection in Christ is a fact. We 'fight the good fight of faith,' standing on what God says of us.

"Even though we begin by acknowledging what is spirit-reality despite appearances, we finally come through into knowing spirit-reality. Faith proves to be its own evidence, and the Spirit witnesses with our spirit that what God says is indeed true. Now we no longer need to reckon because we have become fixed in this area of our inner knowing.

"When Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again, he was dumbfounded. How on earth could a person shrink back to the size of a tiny baby and again enter his mother's womb? Physically, of course, such is impossible. But Jesus asserted that such a radical event is necessary in man's spirit before anyone can enter the kingdom of God.

"Today, in the United States it is almost fashionable to say that you are 'born-again.' It can even be a respectable, or socially necessary, step to take. In some circles it is a watered-down term which means that a person raised their hand during an emotion-laden appeal at the end of a church meeting.

"Being 'born-again' certainly is a much more pleasant experience than in the early days of the Church, when a person put his life on the line to become a Christian. In those days, baptism took place at the moment of conversion to Christ, whether out on the desert road, as in the case of the Ethiopian eunuch, or in the middle of the night as was true of the Philippian jailor. (They didn't even wait for the church service!) This isn't to say that those 'new birth' experiences that don't include a similar awareness of death and resurrection aren't genuine. But it's little wonder that so many believers stay as spiritual babes for so long when they have hardly any idea of what actually happened to them at the time of their conversion.

"Christ does not come into the old heart to try to make some improvements in our character. Rather, in the new birth He comes to make an end of the old heart (the union of our individual human spirit with Satan)--its complete removal by death--and the implantation of a new heart.

"But if our former center was a union of Satan's spirit with our spirit, what is our new center--our new heart?

"Paul calls us 'vessels,' because the human spirit is like a container. We were born into this world with stagnant water in our containers, because we contained the god of this world. But when we are born again, the container is totally purged of its former contents and filled with the living water of the Holy Spirit.

"Of course, what has happened inwardly doesn't yet show at the soul (thought, reason, emotions) and body (action) levels. Both Jesus and Paul show us that we are principally inner beings (spirit) who express themselves outwardly through soul and body. And in our spirit, which is what we really are, the end of the old and the coming of the new is total.

"So we now live a replaced life. Our new nature is Christ indwelling our spirit. We contain His life and, instead of walking according to the course of the world, we are led by His indwelling Spirit.

"We may not look different on the outside. We may have many of the same thoughts that plagued us previously. But body and soul are not spirit-reality. Regardless of appearances, if we have taken Him by faith He has taken us, and what Paul calls the 'old man'--the old heart, our former center, which was the union of our spirit with Satan's spirit--has been completely eradicated through the death of Jesus Christ.

"Therefore from now on we recognize no man according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer. Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things are passed away; behold, new things have come. II Corinthians 5:16, 17

"Let Paul's words sink into you until the Spirit makes them your daily reality. Your 'old man' (the union of your spirit with Satan's spirit) has passed away. You are a wholly new creation. There is nothing left of that old union. It has been replaced by your union with Christ. And so Paul concluded:

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me . . . . Galatians 2:20

"We don't focus on externals--we don't regard anyone according to fleshly appearances. We focus on the new creature, the new heart, which is the union of our spirit with the Spirit of Christ. He is now our life, and hence Paul speaks of 'Christ, who is our life,' and asserts that 'for me to live is Christ.' This is the mystery of the gospel--'Christ in you, the hope of glory.'

"Let us now see what some of the implications of this union are, and then go on to consider how it works out in practice."