Verse of the Day for April 2

Ezekiel is speaking to people in exile whose problem was never information. They had the law, the prophets and the history, and none of it had worked.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

Every verb in that sentence belongs to God. Give, put, take away, give again. There is no instruction to the hearer anywhere in it.

That is unusual and deliberate. The passage is not asking them to try harder with the heart they have; it is announcing a transplant.

A stony heart is not a wicked heart so much as an unresponsive one — the condition of someone who has stopped being able to feel about things they still believe.

And the replacement is flesh, which is softer and more easily hurt. The cure for numbness is not toughness.

If you have gone numb about God rather than hostile, this is the passage that names it and does not scold you for it.

Every verb here is His. Ask for the operation.