We use the terms stony heart, hard-hearted, or cold-hearted, to describe someone who seems to be unmovable in their emotions toward someone else, or a certain situation. They lack compassion and sympathy, but most of all, their desire to please God is not first in their lives. They have rejected Him or His leading until their heart is as hard as stone.
Some people are hard-hearted because they refuse to turn to God. They have failed to see the beauty and strength of total surrender to a loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God. We find in Hebrews 3:8 the warning to not allow our hearts to be hardened.
Hebrews 3:8 “Harden not your hearts”
A hard heart is the result of continued disobedience. When the Holy Spirit pricks our hearts with conviction, and we fail to yield to that nudging to turn to God, we are on the path to a hard heart. When we put him off, thinking we will turn to Him another day we have committed a dangerous act. We have no guarantee that God will deal with us again, and unless the Father draws us there can be no salvation.
John 6:44 “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.”
When we reject God, not only do we risk His withdrawal from us, but we risk eternity without Him. Further down in Hebrews 3, we see in verses 18-19 their unbelief brought a final judgment. They would not be allowed to enter “into His rest.” When the Israelites were disobedient and acted in disbelief, they were not allowed to enter the promised land God had provided. This is a picture of what can happen to us when we continue to reject Him and live in disobedience, we seal our destiny for all eternity.
Hebrews 3:18-19 “And to whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not? So we see that they could not enter in because”
God never intended for anyone to spend eternity in Hell. His desire is that all would be saved. In Ezekiel 11:19, God offers to replace our stony hearts with a heart of flesh. The flesh is soft and pliable. It is symbolic of how a heart that has been changed by the power of God is soft and yielded to Him. When we accept Jesus Christ as our Savior, He becomes our Lord and Master. Our lives are changed. II Corinthians 5:17 makes it crystal clear. When we place our lives in Christ, we become new creatures. All things become new. How we think, where we go, and what we do, are all subject to what pleases Christ. We are no longer the master of our own lives. We surrender our will to His will, and everything looks, feels, and is different.
Ezekiel 11:19 “And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh:”
II Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
After we are saved, there will still be times when we don’t yield to what God wants for us. Our sinful nature is still hanging on trying to battle for our hearts. However, we now have the power to resist and have victory over the old man. It is vital to your spiritual health to listen and obey when the Holy Spirit convicts you of an ungodly thought or action in your life. Even after we are saved, we can become cold and hard against God simply by continual disobedience. After a while, we can become so hard that our sin won’t bother us anymore. Many become deceived, they can go to a worship service, go through the motions, and never feel any conviction for their sins. While none of us can judge when God stops dealing with a person, we do know it’s possible for them to reject until God withdraws himself from them. Hebrews 6:4-6 makes this clear. Salvation is free and available to all who will believe, receive, and obey. Saul is a good example of this in I Samuel 16:14, where Saul had chosen his own way and rejected God. The result was that God removed His Spirit from him. The absence of God’s spirit allowed the sin nature, or evil spirit to take over again.
Hebrews 6:4-6 “For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.”
I Samuel 16:14 “But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him.”
Today is the day for you to allow God to replace your stony heart with a heart that is turned toward Him. If you are His child but have things in your life that need to change, now is the time. The longer you put it off the harder your heart will become. Don’t buy the lie that you will take care of things tomorrow, tomorrow may not come for you. No one knows when they will die, or when God will stop convicting. Don’t take that chance. Hebrews 3:7 encourages us that “today is the day,” and II Corinthians 6:2 teaches us “now is the accepted time.”
II Corinthians 6:2 “(For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.)”
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