Never Look for Justice

Well it's happened again. The reading in My Utmost today continues to prick me with reminders of my need to sharply focus my attention on God instead of looking out for my own interests or trying to defend myself. It also reminds me of a number of things I have been collecting lately to post about self-justification or self-defending that I have not yet condensed enough to finish.

In a side note, I would like to pass along a resource that I found last night on the web if any of you are interested in utilizing it. As you can probably tell by now I am a great fan of My Utmost for His Highest and have been interested for some time in purchasing more material by him. I came across a web site that not only provides each day's readings on its cover page so anyone can read it, but also has links for purchasing all of his other materials. The version of My Utmost that they use for this purpose is the “updated edition” which is worded differently than the older one I prefer. But many people prefer the newer addition and say that it is much easier for them to understand. At any rate, I ended up ordering a volume that has all of the things he ever wrote plus a CD containing all of his materials as well.

This is the part of today's reading that brought conviction to me and really got my attention.

The Sermon on the Mount indicates that when we are on Jesus Christ's errands, there is no time to stand up for ourselves. Jesus says, in effect, Do not be bothered with whether you are being justly dealt with or not. To look for justice is a sign of deflection from devotion to Him. Never look for justice in this world, but never cease to give it. If we look for justice, we will begin to grouse and to indulge in the discontent of self-pity – Why should I be treated like this? If we are devoted to Jesus Christ we have nothing to do with what we meet, whether it is just or unjust. Jesus says – Go steadily on with what I have told you to do and I will guard your life. If you try to guard it yourself, you remove yourself from My deliverance. The most devout among us become atheistic in this connection; we do not believe God, we enthrone common sense and tack the name of God on to it. We do lean to our own understanding, instead of trusting God with all our hearts. (MUHH 6/27)

I have been reminded many times over the last couple of weeks to be very careful about getting focused on defending myself instead of trusting in truth to vindicate itself and letting God be my defense. I have been learning a great deal about this and wonder if that is not one reason why I have not finished my writing about self-defensiveness – because I had a lot more to learn before I put out my thoughts on it. I will say that I am learning some of the benefits of letting God be my focus instead of indulging in self-pity and resentment. But I have to also be honest and say it is extremely tough to keep that kind of thinking when feeling very misunderstood and alone and under suspicion by many of those who I want to love me.

I have sensed throughout this experience that the more I try to justify myself and indulge in pointing out the errors of those who are against me and the problems with their arguments, the less credible my own words become and the more doubt I end up casting upon my own integrity. As I have repeatedly noticed, my temptation is always to imbibe of the spirit of those who have misread me and are creating suspicions about me. This is always the case because of our natural response to act like mirrors toward other people. We always see our own faults most intensely in others and are in danger of using them to avoid facing them within ourselves.

While I have been learning that in principle over the past few years, putting it into practice in the tough arena of the down and dirty real world is a much harder lesson. I cannot say that I have always taken the higher road in this matter consistently. There have been times when I feel that I crossed the line and began to indulge in accusing my accusers. But the Holy Spirit has been faithful to convict me and I want to stay in right relationship to God more than anything else. I know in my heart that this is really a golden opportunity for growth and maturing in my life if I am willing to endure the pain and depend on God.

I must also acknowledge that I have been blessed with a number of people in my life who have come forward over time and supported me by believing in my heart as well as challenging me to to experience more healing. They have helped give me perspective when tunnel-vision threatened to distort my view of reality and they remind me of what they see in me when I forget or cannot see clearly through the fog of emotions and the pressure of temptations from the spirit realm. I deeply appreciate these people and value them as genuine friends in my life, and I hope to become more of that kind of person myself through this experience.

I also want to keep very high in my priority the love that I still have for those who have misunderstood me and still cling to their dark suspicions about me. I deeply care for them and want them to experience the peace and healing that is the real desire of their hearts. They mistakenly believe that they can find satisfaction through creating doubt and suspicions about me in the minds of others. But that road is always a false trail that leads only to more pain and emptiness for those who choose it. But I want to keep the trail clear of any obstacles that I am tempted to create that would hinder their return journey to joy in reconnecting with those who really love them.

But most of all I want to become totally devoted to Jesus Christ much more than to finding justice. I have to repeatedly choose each day to remember and practice the things that God is showing me and teaching my heart. I have been receiving coordinated messages from Him every day through different avenues that are synchronized around the same themes and I want to assimilate them as quickly as my heart can grasp their value and integrate them internally. I sometimes feel very confused, but I trust the One who is coordinating everything behind the scenes and is faithful to finish the work that He started. I choose not to indulge in guarding myself and thereby removing myself from His deliverance. God has been pretty clear in some of these things to me but I easily forget sometimes when I am distracted and have to be reminded either internally by my conscience or through others who remind me to continue trusting and believing in God's faithful love for me no matter what circumstances look or feel like.

I do not want to “enthrone common sense and tack the name of God on to it.” I choose to avoid leaning on my own understanding and I want to learn to trust God with all of my heart. His heart can always be trusted and His promises, not only to me but to anyone desiring to lean on them, contain the power of self-fulfillment inherent in them from the infallible Source of Life and genuine satisfaction.

Thank-you Jesus for this experience that is causing me to grow in grace and in knowing You more intimately. Use these circumstances in my life to bring honor to Your name no matter what happens to me. Cause me to walk in Your ways and use this experience to attract many others to Your beauty, Your trustworthiness and Your goodness. I love You and worship You as my own God, my personal Saviour and submit to You as my Lord. Teach me Your ways and Your wisdom and flood my heart with Your spirit, Your kindness and compassion and Your humility for Your name's sake.

Grace in Humiliation

Today's reading in My Utmost is bringing more instruction and focus to my heart during this situation. It emphasizes the need for me to draw on the grace of God in the present at all times and under all circumstances. This is how I become a true witness of the ability of God to save me as He says He will.

We make prayer the preparation for work, it is never that in the Bible. Prayer is the exercise of drawing on the grace of God. Don't say – I will endure this until I can get away and pray. Pray now; draw on the grace of God in the moment of need. Prayer is the most practical thing, it is not the reflex action of devotion....

...Manifest a drawing upon the grace of God that will make you a marvel to yourself and to others. Draw now, not presently. The one word in the spiritual vocabulary is Now. Let circumstances bring you where they will, keep drawing on the grace of God in every conceivable condition you may be in. One of the greatest proofs that you are drawing on the grace of God is that you can be humiliated without manifesting the slightest trace of anything but His grace. (MUHH 6/26)

I want this to be a description of my life and be demonstrated through me. Obviously I need to draw heavily on grace from God to do this. It is very painful to be humiliated by those you love the most without manifesting the slightest trace of anything but His grace. But we are not promised freedom from pain but grace in our pain – grace that causes us to transcend the pain into a greater glory, not escape the pain by necessarily eliminating its causes. This is a dimension of Christianity that is not popular but much more authentic and compelling when seen by those around. It is not even something we can take pride in but, like Chambers said above, makes even ourselves marvel at what God can accomplish inside of us.

I choose to continue to fill my mind with truth and grace to counteract the ill effects of all the negative thoughts and emotions the enemy has been pressing in on me. I choose to seek God to surround me with an atmosphere that will neutralize the flaming arrows of the enemy seeking to destroy my connection with God and my family. I choose to trust God with the lives and hearts of all of those damaged in this situation and for Him to demonstrate His marvelous and uncanny ability to work everything together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.

Why Jews First Revisted

Questions to look at.

Why the Jews first and then the Greek, especially in light of God not having partiality?

Who today are these Gentiles that do not have the law but do instinctively the things of the Law and show the work of the Law written in their hearts? Are they converted Christian Gentiles or are they as yet “unconverted” people externally but internally are responding and submitting to promptings of God's Spirit? We usually assume in our theology that the promises of a new heart and the law written into our hearts laid out in the Old Testament apply now to converted Christians who accept Jesus as their Saviour. But this text seems to go beyond that narrow view.

I believe the reason the Jews are first in line for both the benefits and the liabilities (1:16 and 2:9) is not because God arbitrarily determines it that way but because inherently due to their knowledge and spiritual context they are already closer to “the fire”. Since it is the same fire, always found in the presence of God, that will either cause them to glow and shine with glory or that will create heat, misery, pain and ultimately death from their resistance to it, then anyone who is already in closer proximity to it to start with will experience the natural consequences of exposure to it, either good or bad, before those who are farther away from it.

If this observation is true, then in today's environment this would more likely apply to anyone who has been exposed to more truth about God in contrast to those who have generally been at a much greater distance from a true knowledge of what He is really like. This could very generically apply to Christians verses non-Christians but that is far to broad to really apply in my opinion. There are millions of Christians who know very little about God and have no intimate relationship with Him. They are simply born and raised or possibly convinced and indoctrinated into a set of arbitrary doctrines, external beliefs and an earthly organization that claims the title of Christian. Many of these people are not much different than the Gentiles in Paul's day except that they might have a little more knowledge of the existence of Jesus and know some cursory facts about Him.

It almost seems that possibly today the line of delineation that was so usable in Paul's day between Jews and Gentiles (or Greeks) is far from being so useful in the present condition of the amalgamation of beliefs and the gradients of knowledge about God that can be found in today's world. In those days it was clear that one race of people had been favored and nurtured by God for centuries to have all the advantages possible to know Him and reveal Him to the world much more clearly than any other people on earth. But a transition came at that point that moved from God working almost exclusively with a clearly defined group of people all belonging to the same race, to creating a New Testament family-style church in which there were no racial divisions and the only real distinction left between them and the rest of the world was the internal fire of God burning with love in their hearts.

But as that fire began to cool and be diluted over the years and the centuries, it began to harden into gradients of beliefs mingled with more and more dogma and superstition and false ideas. This has left us today with myriads of ideas and notions and belief systems beyond comprehension without the clear delineation between real believers and unbelievers that was more evident in the Old Testament and in the early days of the Christian church.

That is not to say that the nation of Israel were always true believers. But throughout all those centuries God favored them in spite of that until the first coming of Christ brought about a dramatic transition to the New Covenant period and the superceding of the Old Covenant rules, symbolic restrictions and the concentration of God's focus on one race of people.

But while the clear external lines of delineation are not so evident today, it is still just as true that those who have enjoyed more light of truth, especially truth experienced at the heart level, are closer to experiencing both the positive or the negative results of fuller revelations of God's passionate fire in His presence than are those who are far more unaware of the real truth about Him. Those who enjoy great light have much greater responsibility to stay in sync with that light or risk being burned by the very light that desires to save them. Talk about playing with fire... This fire is the ultimate Fire and will soon become either our source of unimaginable pleasure and satisfaction or will become the power that will expose all of our resistance creating unimaginable pain, anguish and finally eternal death. The choice is ours to make now in how we decide to relate to the light we receive in this life.

(next in series)

Judgment Day

For there is no partiality with God. (Romans 2:11 NAS95)

I am again looking very intently at the context surrounding this verse and seeing more clearly in the light of truth that is intensifying in this passage how much of our teachings and assumptions are in serious conflict with the reality of what God is like. The clear subject of the context here and all the way through chapter 3 is the Judgment Day of God Almighty. Also found in this context are amplifying descriptions of three parties involved in the judgment: the characteristics of those who are lost, descriptions of how the saved think and where their focus is, and most importantly the characteristics of God and, by implication, characteristics that He is not.

Our opinions and beliefs about the day of judgment and the related topics of heaven and hell lie at the very foundation of everything else that we think, do and perceive about reality and affect all of our relationships both with each other and with God. To think that it is not that important what we believe about this doctrine is to put our own souls in great danger of discovering too late that our mistaken beliefs about God, no matter how popular or supposedly supported by Scripture, have created a fatal liability in our souls that have resisted the light of truth that God so passionately is trying to reveal to us about Himself. What we believe about this subject betrays what we really believe about God and is at the center of what Jesus referred to when He repeatedly encouraged people to “believe in Me”. What we see in the life of Jesus and how He treated people is exactly the same as the character of God the Father without any variation whatsoever. (see John 14:9-11)

As I examined verse 3 and 4 it occurred to me that most of us would have written this very differently than Paul did due to our misconceptions of God. That is revealed by the many things we preach and teach about the day of judgment and the final results of sin. It is easy to see that if most of us had been trying to explain what motives should be in place in the hearts of those looking forward to the day of judgment we would, on the heels of verse 3 launch into a description of all the things we need to be afraid of in order to compel us to come into line with God's will and ways and be saved.

“Do you suppose ... that you will escape the judgment of God?” What kind of feelings are immediately stirred up in your mind initially upon the first hearing of these words? Those initial, reactionary feelings betray the real beliefs in your heart about God and what you think He is really like. And because of the nature and pervasiveness of sin throughout all of the human race, I would venture to say that possibly without exception, save in the hearts of those already being transformed by God's grace, every human heart recoils with fear and dread and feelings of expectation of pain and punishments associated with varying feelings of antagonism and resistance and anger. These are all rooted in THE LIE about God that was originally instigated in heaven by Lucifer and has been perpetrated throughout all of the universe and affects every aspect of our thinking and beliefs about life.

The most startling and revealing part about this passage is the seemingly incoherent emphasis by Paul directly after focusing on the fact that judgment is unavoidable. The basis that he declares will be the very thing we will all be judged on, and by implication the motives we should use in facing the judgment, is not the fearful expectation of retribution but the beauty and kindness and mercy of God. What we think will be revealed about God in the day of judgment determines the kind of repentance that we experience now. It also determines what assumed attributes about God we will use not only in our own experience but also what we employ in our efforts to bring others into preparation for the judgment. If we step back and take a very careful examination at the beliefs and assumptions underlying all of our preaching, teaching and conversation about Judgment Day we will start to see if our motivations are really in line with what will bring about true repentance or they are echoes of the lies of the enemy of God masquerading as religious truth and embedded in our theology. This is true whether of not a person claims to believe in God or is an avowed atheist; we all have theology that we believe about God that is colored by our experiences and perceptions about the supernatural and religion in general.

Paul reveals in this chapter that by clinging to false ideas about God's character we are placing ourselves among the stubborn and the unrepentant who are storing up wrath for themselves against the Day of Judgment. Why is it that we are the ones creating the wrath within ourselves and not God who is getting angrier at our unrepentance? The answer is in verse 11 – because there is no partiality with God.

We have mistakenly assumed that to mean that God cannot be bribed or unduly influenced in His determination of who will be saved and who will be lost. Again, that is based on our faulty assumptions about the nature of the Day of Judgment and many unchallenged beliefs behind it. Verse 5 gives us the correct understanding of what the Day of Judgment is really about, “the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”

One of our biggest hurdles to overcome in arriving at a correct understanding of truth is the problem of words that have taken on incorrect or misleading meanings due to their long use in false assumptions about God. As I began to point out in a recent post, there are parallel meanings for identical words that lead to very different conclusions and create great confusion when intermingled even though they seem to sound the same. Judgment is one of those words heavy with false assumptions and dark with foreboding for most people. This is due in part to its association with very corrupt judicial systems here on earth that reflects much of the misapprehensions we have about God's judgment.

But the closer we get to the true meaning of the words that God uses by allowing the Bible to interpret itself the more beautiful and exciting and liberating truth becomes for us. And I believe there may not be another topic where this is more true than the undoing our misunderstandings about the day of judgment and its surrounding topics.

Judgment really means to reveal the way things really are including everything hidden such as thoughts, motives intents and feelings in the heart and mind that are impossible for anyone else to uncover. It means also a full revelation of the same counterparts that are in the mind and heart of God. When this becomes our understanding and our false, negative definitions of judgment are completely laid aside so as not to reinfect a proper understanding of this word, then it becomes possible to begin to see God in the proper light of truth and begin to appreciate the words Paul is using in verse 4.

Contrary to millenia of religious dogma and preaching, the only correct and truly effective motivation for repentance is an appreciation of the kindness of God, not fear of punishments, retribution or threats of an angry, offended deity. Those negative motivations come directly from the father of lies and the enemy of God who has done everything possible to destroy all knowledge of the real truth about God.

Sadly I have even listened to teachers and pastors of my own church who claim to believe the truth about God repeat similar lies about God that have so effectively turned away millions from responding to His love if they had only seen the truth about Him. These teachers claim that in the end, God's patience will finally run out and He will do His “strange work” and for a little while He will engage in anger and wrath to punish His “enemies” until they are finished being tortured and are finally annihilated. Then, apparently, He will return to His loving ways for the rest of eternity and the righteous saved will never want to repeat the experiment of sin due to the final display of God's “wrath” in the Day of Judgment.

When I hear this kind of teaching, especially coming from those who claim to know God and preach the truth about Him, I literally feel physically ill and sick to my stomach. This is a subtle mingling of error with truth that sounds so plausible in a way that many accept it as Bible truth, particularly because so many verses are lined up as proof texts to support their teachings. But this is NOT what is discovered in a careful and open-minded examination of the Word of God with a view to uncovering and maintaining the principle of consistency of the character of God. Instead, we are actually charging God with partiality. For to say that in the day of judgment God treats the saved differently than He treats the lost is, in fact, to insist that God is partial to the saved and contridicts in full face what Paul declares is the real truth about God.

God is not partial – period. And if any of our beliefs are found to be in contradiction to that truth then it is our beliefs that need reexamination, and we should not need to force the Word of God to fit our assumptions and preconceived beliefs. The system of truth is perfectly consistent as a whole and for us to come into line with it we must allow God's words to take priority over our beliefs and teachings no matter how many years people have believed them or how many texts can be construed to teach them or how many theologians subscribe to them. As Paul would say, “Indeed, let God be true but every man a liar. As it is written: 'That You may be justified in Your words, And may overcome when You are judged.'” (Romans 3:4 NKJV)

This text further reveals the true nature of the day of judgment. In our self-focused obsession in religion we often come with the assumption that the judgment is all about God determining the guilt or innocence of human beings and meting out rewards and punishments accordingly. But this is far from the real truth about judgment and is reflective of the myriads of lies embedded in so much of our assumed beliefs about God and about life.

The reality of the day of judgment is that it is really the revelation of the honest truth about what God is like and His attitude toward all of His created beings without partiality. The day of judgment is, in fact, the day when the largest jury ever assembled – the whole universe including all humanity and all the angels, both good and bad, determines whether or not God was fair, honest and consistent with what He has always said about Himself. At that time the final determination will be made as to whether God could actually do what He said He could do in transforming sinners into saints without coercion, fear, force or manipulation of any kind. All the charges brought against God by the arch-deceiver and re-presented by millions of deceived minds including our own will be tested and weighed by every intelligent mind in the cosmos as all the evidence in every detail and in every circumstance is laid out by all the witnesses called to testify for or against God. The day of judgment is all about coming to a final determination of the consistency and character of no less than God Himself who, amazingly, has submitted Himself to be put on trial by His own created beings. What incredible humility demonstrated by the Omnipotent Ruler of the Universe, and very different than the control-hungry God so popular in religion today.

The day of Judgment really means the day of revealing as Paul points out here. Jesus declared explicitly that He did not come into the world to condemn the world but to save it. He does not change His motives by the time He comes again the second time and He will not change them on the Day of Judgment. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8) Condemnation does not proceed from the heart or mind of God but is something created in the heart of those who resist His drawing love and grace and reject the beauty of His character as being a lie. Condemnation is a natural consequence of clinging to the lies of sin in the heart and resisting the light of the truth about God until there is no longer a capacity to accept truth. Condemnation is the result of resistance to God, it accumulates in the soul and becomes the fuel for the fires of hell that all of the lost will experience. It is the way that wrath is stored up for ourselves internally for the Day of Judgment.

So is there a place in the judgment for the examination of the lives of humans? Yes there is, absolutely! But the grand trial, the mother of all trials, is not about putting us on the defense stand but, as far as our participation is concerned, is all about the examination of the witnesses to discover if they are truthful or they are found to be bearing false witness against God. Our lives, our words, our attitudes, our teachings, our prejudices and bigotry, our secret motives and cravings and deceptions – all will be flushed out into the open to be transparent and naked before every other person and being in the whole universe to be examined for its relationship to all the other evidence and especially to what truth we knew at the time in our conscience. All of the testimonies, which are the records of all of our responses in every situation to what we knew about God, are made public, and our integrity or lack of it in every area of our life becomes a public spectacle and common knowledge for all the universe to take into account in the deliberation of the great jury.

In this trial on the Great Day of Judgment, every jury member will also be called to testify as well. There are no exceptions in this trial; the testimony of every created being will be entered into the record and laid out in the open so that there is absolutely no possibility for any lingering doubts as to who God is and the integrity of His character and His Word. This is the day of “revelation of the righteous judgment of God”, the right way in which He has dealt with everyone of us that is forever consistent with His character of love and absence of force. (The day of judgment and its right understanding is also the main burden of chapter 3 in Romans which I have not begun to cover yet.)

This truth about the Day of Judgment dispels the negative fear that surrounds it in the typical presentations we hear. It unmasks the lies of Satan about the character of God represented as being angry, vengeful, arbitrary or even fickle. It allows the blazing light of glorious truth about God's consistent character of everlasting lovingkindness to accomplish its drawing work of bringing repentance to our hearts and filling us with transforming grace. It challenges us to reexamine all of our beliefs and doctrines and release our prejudices and pride in deference to the real truths about God revealed in a proper understanding of His Word and by His Spirit. It takes away our false fears and fills us with real love that is the basis of all true life.

We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. (1 John 4:16-19 NAS95)

(next in series)

Heart Transplant

Selfishness is like glue, like sticky cholesterol that builds up in our arteries and chokes off the supply of life-giving blood to our heart and brain. Selfishness throughout our lifetime accumulates weight in our heart, weights that are like multiplied children created by the illicit marriage of bad experiences and memories during our life interpreted through union with lies implanted by Satan. The resulting weights multiply and fill our hearts with heaviness until they become so stiff and full of self-defensiveness and sticky selfishness that they become as hard as stone. All of this imagery can be derived from the meanings of the original Hebrew word 'eben and its root word banah from which it is derived. This is the word translated as “stone” or “stony” in Eze. 36:26 describing the heart that God promises to remove from us and replace with a heart of flesh.

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 NIV)

When I looked up the Hebrew word translated “flesh”, I received an even greater surprise. This is the description of the new heart that God promises to give us in place of the stony heart that He removes. The word for flesh in the Hebrew is basar and contains nuances of meaning referring to flesh, human body, external female sexual organs and nakedness. The root Hebrew word from which this was derived means to be fresh, i.e. full, rosy, cheerful; to announce glad news:--messenger, preach, publish, shew forth, (bear, bring, carry, preach, good, tell good) tidings. I would have never guessed in a lifetime that all of this lay beneath the surface of the word translated “flesh” before I looked it up.

When I compare these two words and their underlying meanings that are descriptions of the heart God removes from us and the heart He implants in us, I can see the dramatic contrast between them. At the same time there is also a similarity. There is the idea of reproduction going on in both descriptions. The stony heart is one that had become so filled with heaviness, the children of lies and sin in our experience, that it is not salvageable and we have to have a heart transplant if we are to continue our existence for very long. The new heart of “flesh” also has implications of children by reference to the intimacy implied in the inferences to nakedness and female sexual organs. But this reproduction of children is rooted in the Gospel, the good news that is fresh and life-giving, cheerful and exciting. This is a direct contrast to the heaviness that characterizes the “stony” heart.

This analogy came to me this morning of a literal heart-transplant and the various dangers and phenomena that occurs in those physical situations. Generally a heart transplant is required when the old heart has become so damaged and dysfunctional that it threatens our very life and it becomes urgent that we get a healthier heart or we will soon die. The search is launched for an available heart that is in much better shape and that is compatible with our body chemistry. When it is found and the surgery is completed, from that point on our own bloodstream supplies the nourishment that determines the health of the new heart.

What if, in the physical analogy, the old heart was in terrible shape because of our bad habits and diet? Our blood was full of contaminants, high cholesterol and all sorts of counterproductive characteristics that led to the hardening and failure of our first heart. What if our lifestyle continues as it was before? What would likely happen to the new, healthy fresh heart under these continued conditions?

Even though we receive a new heart from God that is fresh, open, transparent, intimate and excited with the “good news”, it can also be in danger of slowly becoming more and more contaminated itself and become sluggish due to our failure to change the habits of diet and lifestyle that lead to our previous crisis. This is why it is possible to still be lost even after a genuine conversion and the receiving of a new heart. While the new heart is full of truth and life and vigor and joy when we first receive it, if we allow compromises with our old lifestyle to get a foothold in our life and old habits get reestablished, we can slowly turn even the miracle of a new heart into a sad story of failure that is even worse than our original condition.

While they promise them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. But it has happened to them according to the true proverb: "A dog returns to his own vomit," and, "a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire." (2 Peter 2:19-22 NKJV)

There is also the interesting phenomena of “heart memory” that is just now starting to be explored and discovered, literal memories that can be recalled by the recipient after a heart transplant of events that took place in the life of the person from whom the heart came. There are even reports of abilities suddenly realized in the life of the recipient such as being able to swim that were not present before the heart transplant. All of this has much potential for exploration in this analogy to the new heart that God implants within us. But I will have to wait for more time to explore those further. Maybe you would like to share thoughts on this that you have learned. Feel free to leave a piece of your heart in the comments.