Supernatural Transformation: Change Your Heart Into God’s Heart (3 page)

Our attitudes are a projection of our heart.

Fresh Revelation About the Heart

This book is a journey into the human heart, exploring its purpose, motivations, and potential. We will come to understand and identify our true self and make key decisions with respect to our “inner man.” Today, there is no place for being spiritually lukewarm; we cannot remain spiritually neutral. In this day and age, God is bringing fresh revelation to His people regarding the state of our heart. I believe the reason is that the return of Jesus Christ to the earth is near, and hard times will precede His coming—as foretold by the Bible.

The apostle Paul wrote to his spiritual son Timothy,
“But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come”
(2 Timothy 3:1). Why did Paul emphasize his statement by preceding it with
“Know this…”
? Paul understood human nature and its tendency toward degradation, incurring the judgment of God. In another Bible version, the phrase
“perilous times”
is translated
“terrible times”
(niv). If there was ever a time in history for which that phrase was appropriate, it is this one. God’s judgment will come upon the earth, even if many people think it will never happen. I believe it will take place in three stages—a preliminary judgment, an intermediate judgment, and the final judgment—and that we are now in the preliminary judgment stage.

God’s grace has provided salvation and redemption in Christ, but the perpetual corruption and rebellion within humanity continue to provoke divine judgment. There is no need to blame governments, religions, or other factors for the judgment that our planet and the human race is now undergoing. The basic cause is the degradation of human character resulting from the iniquity entrenched in the human heart.

The apostle Paul listed eighteen character failings that would mark people in the end times. Again, they describe our present generation:
“lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”
(2 Timothy 3:2–5).

These negative impulses will try to pull our heart away from our heavenly Father. We are entering a period when our heart will be weighed in the balance to see on which side we will end up. The situations in our life and the circumstances of the world will soon compel us to decide where our allegiance belongs—to God’s interests or to selfish interests; to the “good treasure” or to the “evil treasure.” Will we be prepared to make the right decision?

“
Sow for yourselves righteousness;
r
eap in mercy; break up your fallow ground,
for it is time to seek the Lord,
till He comes and rains righteousness on you” (Hosea 10:12). It is time to seek the Lord with all our heart. We must have a heart that God can trust to follow Him and obey what He calls us to do, so that we may participate in the manifestation of His coming glory and the last great harvest of souls upon the earth.

Radical and Permanent Transformation

God’s plan is not to place patches over the “holes” in our heart caused by our spiritual, emotional, mental, or physical issues. He does not try to “fix” or “improve” the corruption of our heart, and He doesn’t gloss over sin. As we will discuss in chapter 2, these are the approaches that various religions take. Instead, His plan involves a radical and permanent transformation of the heart.

In the coming chapters, therefore, we will examine the original nature of the human heart. We will learn what it means for our heart to be “circumcised,” how to forgive others and thereby receive healing for an offended heart, and how to gain freedom from a heart of unbelief.

We will also discover the purpose for brokenness of heart, as well as how to surrender our heart completely to the Lord so it can be a true reflection of His own heart of love, justice, joy, and other divine qualities. And, we will learn how to experience transformation through the renewing of our mind in the presence of God (see Romans 12:2), so that we may experience both deep and far-reaching change in our life.

Do you want to change your life? Change your heart!

The psalmist wrote,
“Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom”
(Psalm 51:6). God has provided the only solution for the corruption of the human heart: repentance, identification with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, new birth through the Spirit of God, and ongoing transformation into the image of our Creator.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new”
(2 Corinthians 5:17). You can become a new person, a new creation, through the supernatural transformation of your heart
.

1. See
The Wycliffe Bible Commentary
, Charles F. Pfeiffer and Everett F. Harrison, eds. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1962), 56
1.

2

F
rom the beginning, it was God’s desire and purpose for human beings to have a heart like His. The Scriptures tell us:
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness….’
So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them
”
(Genesis 1:26–27). God also breathed into humanity His own Spirit:
“And the
Lord
God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being”
(Genesis 2:7).

Humans, therefore, were made with a heart, or spirit, fashioned after their Creator’s. This heart was pure and complete, filled with God’s nature and character.

A Devastating Change of Heart

But the first human beings, Adam and Eve, turned away from God’s heart and the nature in which they had been created. Instead of cherishing God’s instructions and wisdom, they willfully disobeyed Him. God had commanded them not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, warning them that if they did so, they would die. Tragically, they listened to the voice of God’s enemy, Satan (the devil), who told them,
“
You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4).

Enticed by a promise of “being like God”—although they had already been made in His image—the first man and woman went against their Creator. Their rejection of God’s heart resulted in a terrible change in the human heart, giving human beings an all-too-familiar knowledge of evil, because it was now within them. Their disobedience, or sin, resulted in their fall from their true selves and the loss of their innocence—it initiated the corruption of the human heart.

With their fall, human beings brought a difficult and cursed life on themselves. (See Genesis 3:1–19.) And they did experience death, for
“the wages of sin is death”
(Romans 6:23). First, their hearts underwent spiritual death. And second, they eventually—and inevitably—experienced physical death. One of the most devastating results of the fall for humans was their removal from the immediate presence of God, no longer to enjoy direct fellowship with Him. (See Genesis 3:22–24.) Yet God never departed from His faithfulness to His beloved creation or His desire that they be restored to a close relationship with Him.

A Corrupt Inheritance

All human beings descend from the first man and woman who turned their hearts away from God, and therefore we have all inherited their corrupt nature. From the point of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, humanity’s corruption continued in human history until it reached this peak:
“Then the L
ord
saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that
every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually
”
(Genesis 6:5). This was the point when God destroyed the world through a flood—the only survivors being Noah, his wife, and his sons and their wives, whom God preserved. (See Genesis 6.) If the heart of the human race was ever to be restored to Him, human beings would have to exist under vastly more humble circumstances that would cause them to reach out to their heavenly Father.

Noah was the most righteous man on the earth at the time of the flood, and that is why he and his family were spared. However, even Noah’s heart was affected by the sin nature he had inherited. And, although the earth was repopulated by Noah’s family, corruption infiltrated the world again, and people’s hearts withdrew from God once more. This is the inevitable legacy of our corrupt nature.

Ever since humanity’s initial act of disobedience, therefore, human beings have followed after the lusts of their fallen hearts, to varying degrees. We all have sinned, and we all continue to sin, in various ways. As the apostle Paul wrote,
“
All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.…Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 3:23; 5:12).

An Irreversible Condition

The corruption in the heart of humanity is irreversible in the natural. No human power can alter or remove it. It is similar to rotten fruit: There is no way to reverse the process so that the fruit becomes whole again. Once a piece of fruit is spoiled, it is inedible. Moreover, it must be separated from other pieces of fruit, or it will contaminate them.

Corruption may take a while to occur, but, when it does, the process cannot be stopped. This is why none of us can produce a pure heart, in and of ourselves. As hard as we might try to embrace goodness, the iniquity we inherited through our human descent from Adam and Eve contaminates our heart from birth.

Left to ourselves, then, we are hopelessly corrupt, exhibiting various “treasures” of the evil heart that we discussed in chapter 1, such as wicked thoughts, covetousness, deceit, pride, foolishness, selfishness, adultery, and murder. Sin leads to death in many forms. Whether immediately or in future generations, iniquity will produce its corruptive effects—always downward, always getting worse. The extreme cases of degradation we observe in our society did not take place suddenly or in one generation. Human morality has continually disintegrated until it has reached the evil condition we are witnessing today.

No human power can reverse humanity’s moral, ethical, or physical corruption.

The State of Our World

Throughout history, there have been periods when regions or even nations have experienced genuine revivals of the Holy Spirit and reformations that have brought people to God. During those periods, society as a whole has become godlier. However, it didn’t take long before people in those regions or nations forgot about God or began to turn their backs on Him, just as the descendants of Noah did, and it was only a matter of time before the effects of heart corruption manifested.

My assessment is that we are living in an age similar to the one just prior to the great flood. As I wrote in chapter 1, the condition of our current society is that of a tendency toward resentment, rebellion, selfishness, hatred, cruelty, violence, and other manifestations of evil and iniquity. I believe that the multiplication of wickedness over the last several decades is a sign of the end times, indicating, as I mentioned earlier, the imminent culmination of human history with the coming of Christ. I could cite many current examples of wickedness, coldness of heart, and so forth, to verify this. We don’t have to look far to see instances of corruption, all of which are related to the broken condition of the human heart.

The following are just a few examples of how the most vulnerable members of the human race—children—are suffering today in the midst of societies whose leaders and other citizens are corrupt of heart. These incidents reveal the depth of despair and wickedness to which humanity without Christ has sunk.

In China, on the coast of Zhejiang Province, a single woman apparently hid her pregnancy and then delivered her baby boy in a public restroom in her apartment building that contained squat toilets. The baby somehow became stuck in one of the restroom’s sewage pipes—whether he slipped away from his mother by accident or she intentionally dropped him there was not clear. The woman alerted her landlord that a baby was stuck in the pipe, and firemen had to saw off a section of the tube to open up the pipe and rescue the boy, who survived. Charges against the mother were pending.
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In Texas, USA, an eleven-year-old child was “punished” by his father and stepmother for bad behavior by being locked in his bedroom for months, and he was given only bread and water to sustain him. One day, his parents found him lying on the floor, unresponsive. They washed his body and placed it in a sleeping bag, eventually abandoning it in a wooded area. The boy’s grandfather called the police, explaining that it had been months since he had last seen his grandson. Authorities investigated and discovered that the boy had spent nine months isolated in his room, where he had lost weight until he was only about sixty pounds. He had apparently become so weak that it had been impossible for him to escape or cry out for help. He had eventually died of starvation.
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