Daily Word

Regeneration is the invasion of the Spirit of God into man.

It begins in his heart.

But the Spirit cannot enter a “heart of stone” – it is not receptive to Him.

There must be a change of heart.

The heart of stone must be replaced with a soft and open heart: “a heart of flesh.”

How is this done?

By breaking and grinding the heart of stone to powder!

Who can do it?

The heart-breaker – “the stone which the builders rejected”!

It takes place in two stages.

First the heart must be broken, then “ground” – pulverized.

When is our heart broken?

When we fall!

Jesus lies there like a stone in our path with his unyielding and impossible demands for obedience, discipleship, self-renunciation and sanctification.

We try our hardest – but then we fall flat on our face and all our faith in our surrender to Christ and our confidence in our own ability to live the life of discipleship is shattered.

He lifts us up and we continue our journey with a little more humility and less comparison with others.

But we are still quite self-centred and still have many of our own dreams and ambitions about what we want to become and accomplish “for the Lord”.

And then something even worse happens!

The stone falls on us – and we are ground to powder!

It feels as if Christ has become our enemy.

He lets us suffer hard and heavy blows, sorrow that consumes us, and we sink down powerless, completely destroyed.

All our dreams and ambitions go up in smoke.

Our self-centredness and self-absorption are pulverized.

Finally, the Spirit of God gets a full grip on our heart.

We become Christ-centred, absorbed by Him, not in what WE want to do “for Him.”

His dreams become our dreams.

His goals our goals.

Christ has become the rock foundation of our life.

And we begin to live for real!