21. The Signs of a New Heart
21
The Signs of a New Heart1
A new heart also will I give you.
—Ezekiel 36:26
A new heart is the office-house of Christ, and a heart delighting in God’s ways is a new heart, where the law is imprinted and engraved in the heart: “Hearken unto me, ye…people in whose heart is my law” (Isa. 51:7). “I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart” (Ps. 40:8). It’s true that for some there may be a new delight in the heart, but not a delight of the new heart (Isa. 58:2; John 5:35), for a delight in the gospel as a good thing and not as a good gospel, a delight in Christ as a prophet that feeds them and not in Christ as a Redeemer that saves them (John 6:26). This is not a new heart.
The new heart is a universal2 heart, wholly for God as God. There is a proper blending in it when the whole “spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless” “in all holy conversation and godliness” (1 Thess. 5:23; 1 Peter 1:18; 2 Peter 3:11). Half a globe, though exquisitely planed, is not a globe, nor is half a cart wheel a cart wheel. External things may be divided. One may be a hearing professor3 and a drunken professor, or a praising, singing professor in public, and not a praying or believing professor in private. Spiritual duties cannot be divided; half a faith, half a love, is not faith, is not love. Saving grace is an essence that consists indivisibly and cannot be parted.4
A new heart is fixed and established by grace. It’s a new state—not a new, transient flash—but a new heart. “All that the LORD our God shall speak unto thee…we will hear,” but the Lord says, “O that there were such a heart in them,” but it is not in them (Deut. 5:27, 29).
“God gave [Saul] another heart” (1 Sam. 10:9). So a changed heart is not a new heart. A new spirit or a new gift in Jehu is not a new heart. It’s not newness that makes the heart new, but God’s new engraving (Jer. 31:33).
A heart kept with all keeping is a new heart (Prov. 4:23). Both the words5 denote exact diligence in keeping, as watchmen and shepherds tend their charges at all times (Ps. 119:129). Some drag their hearts to pray and hear, but not until the Sabbath or during a storm of conscience, and in some company they will speak about the heart, but not at other times and in other company.
(1) The heart is new where the affections are all faith (as it were) and all sanctified, reason and zeal is a lump of angry reason, fear is a mass of shining reverence, and love is solely soul-sickness and pure adherence to God. The instinct of faith is wholly towards God, as the last and only end. (2) The heart is new when the affections are equivocally or, at least at the secondhand, set upon the creature, but as nothing can be seen but what either is color or affected with color, so nothing is fixedly sought after but God.6 Only He is feared and served (Deut. 10:20; Matt. 4:10). Only He is desired and loved (Deut. 10:12; Ps. 73:25; Song 3:2–3). The soul is sick with love for only Christ (Song 2:5; 5:8). Only He is trusted (Ps. 62:5; Jer. 17:5, 7). Nothing is all good and all desirable but God, and God in Christ (Matt. 19:17; Song 5:16). The shadow of the sun in the fountain is not the real sun. The stirrings of the pulse of the affections towards the shadowed good of the creature should be lent, and, like the beating of the pulse of a dying man, with a godly contradiction, loving and not loving, joying and not joying, mourning and not mourning (1 Cor. 7:29–30).
1. Covenant of Life, 151–52.
2. universal: entirely for God in all areas of the heart, with no limitation
3. professor: one who makes open profession of religious faith
4. According to Aristotle and Scholastic thought, spiritual substances such as the soul or abstract virtues were indivisible essences that could not be broken up into constituent parts.
5. The Hebrew of Proverbs 4:23 can be rendered “above all keeping, keep thine heart.” “Keep” (natsar) and “diligence” (mishmar) both mean “to guard.”
6. In the same way as nothing in this world can be seen without light and distinguished from other things without color, so the renewed soul comes to see all things in the light of God Himself and in connection with Him.