Message
According to , when a fellow becomes born again, he or she immediately becomes a new creature. In , God said that He will take away our stony heart and replace it with a heart of flesh. When people give their lives to Jesus Christ, they exchange their stony hearts for hearts of flesh. However, despite this, the world is plagued with many people who claim to be believers, but whose hearts appear not to be different from those of unbelievers.
Sadly, some people who serve as ministers of God also still appear to have hearts like unbelievers. Some of them go as far as not forgiving fellow ministers who have offended them. This is wrong, and it was not so at the inception of the Church. The Bible says that the Church was in one accord (), and believers were called Christians because they were Christ-like (). Unfortunately, however, you might find some self-professing Christians today accepting bribes or dancing in nightclubs because they still have stony hearts.
From the Parable of the Sower in , it is very clear that there was nothing wrong with the seeds that were sown. The seeds, which Jesus revealed to be the word of God, were potent, as God’s word is always potent. However, despite the potency of the seeds, only a fraction of them yielded a harvest. The reason some of the seeds did not bear fruit was the ground on which they fell, and as Jesus explained, the heart of a fellow in which the word of God is sown is the major determinant of whether the word will bear fruit in his or her life or not.
Beloved, if you are living in sin, or if you allow the circumstances around you to determine how you receive the word of God and how it will operate in you, then you have a stony heart, and God’s word will not bear fruit in you. For His word to bear fruit in you, you must repent of any sin that might exist in your life and cry out to Him to wash you clean, transform you, and give you a heart of flesh. God will answer you and make your heart a fertile ground for His word to grow. I pray that you will continually experience the blessings in God’s word as you surrender your life completely to Him, in Jesus’ name.