Ezekiel 36 - 5th part

Ezekiel 36:26

26 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.

LORD, when I looked up the word "stony" in Strong's, it said "through the mean. to build..", and it instantly made me think of Piper's message. A "stony heart" is a HARD heart – a heart of PRIDE – a heart that tries to BUILD its own way to heaven by doing good works – be it
Bible reading, church attendance, witnessing, dress, or whatever (like those who tried to build the tower of Babel, and like the Jews who …"being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.") (Rom. 10:3) I like Piper's words and illustration:

"'Good', moral, religious people, who have not been crucified with Christ and do not have his Spirit empowering them with humility and joy and love by faith, often come into the church, espouse the doctrines and undertake to work for God in the power of the flesh, and are therefore under a curse from law itself.

You recall the picture of the railroad track raised into a ladder to heaven? God gave the law to show us the route to heaven along which the engine of the Spirit would pull us if we were coupled to him by faith. But the Judaizers and many religious people today who know nothing of living union with Christ, took the railroad track of the law and raised it up on end and turned it into a ladder on which they would climb up to heaven by their own moral initiative. Wherever that
happens you have legalism, or as Paul says, you have 'works of the law.'"

You say here, LORD, that You are taking that heart of PRIDE – that heart of BUILDING away from me. You are giving me a heart of flesh (Strong's companion word – nakedness). Like Adam and Eve who realized after they had sinned that they were naked with no righteousness of their own, You have, by Your wonderful grace, shown me that there is NOTHING GOOD in me…and as I stand here NAKED before You, it is "Not by works of righteousness which (I) have done, but according to (Your) mercy (You) saved (me), by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost. (Titus 3:5)

27 And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

It's interesting that Titus 3:5 which I just quoted matches up perfectly with Ez. 36:25-27!

You are washing me; You are showing me my pride; You have put Your Spirit within me! I notice the verbs in this verse – "walk", "keep", and "do." When we walk in the power of Your Holy Spirit we are "keeping and doing", but we are not doing it in our own strength to work our way to heaven. Again I love Piper's words:

When the Spirit is leading , the law is a railroad track, and You are "highballing" it to heaven coupled to the locomotive of the Spirit – happy as a bird to fulfill the law. When the Spirit is not
leading you, and you are not walking by the Spirit, the law is a LADDER, and you are left to your own strength to climb it from underneath, and it's felt as a great burden.

In explaining Gal. 3:23-29, Piper says: (my emphasis)

We are no longer under the custodian, the law…Being `under the custodian' or `under law' means here being oppressed by God's demand when you have no power to fulfill it. You either rebel against it or you try to keep it in your own strength. In either case "the letter kills". (2 Cor. 3:6)

But that is no longer our relation to the law. We are not under it anymore, desperately trying to climb it to heaven. For us the ladder of the law has fallen and become a railroad track of joyful obedience. It is not on us anymore as a deathly burden; we are on it. What has happened? The answer is given in Gal. 5:18, "If you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law." The Spirit so transforms our life as we trust the promises of God (Gal. 3:5), that we love what God loves and hate what God hates. And so this law is no longer a burden but a mountain railroad of joy.