“… for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness …”
— Romans 10:10

For most of my Christian life, I was mystified by the verse above. I always thought belief in anything came from the mind/brain after it has weighed the evidence supporting a particular proposition.

The heart — I thought — had to do with feelings and emotions, and was therefore inherently unreliable.

Wrong.

Biblically, to believe anything “savingly,” the heart must be fully “engaged.” This is because God is calling for belief in something (for instance a truth that God declares in His word) absent the comfort of visible, physical evidence.

Usually, in such circumstances, our mind/brain will be the first to make a run for the door, believing the whole thing to be an unreasonable “leap in the dark.”

This is where the heart comes in. 

But it must be a heart that has first been made new through rebirth by God …

The unredeemed, un-reborn heart of man is spiritually powerless. The prophet Jeremiah makes that clear in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Who can understand it?”

So God must recreate the hearts of the willing to reflect His nature and not the nature they were born with, as outlined in Ephesians 2:3: “… by nature children of wrath, just as the rest.” 

In Ephesians 1:15-20, the Apostle Paul wrote of God’s radical approach to accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of opening the eyes of the blind to the glory of God’s kingdom:

“For this reason, I, too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all the saints…that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the boundless greatness of His power toward us who believe.”

I’ll never forget, it’s alive!

In the above passage, Paul breathlessly describes — through words that seem to just tumble out of Him — what happens when the human spirit is recreated in Christ: Faith > Love > Wisdom > Revelation > Knowledge > Enlightenment > Hope > Calling > Riches > Glory > Inheritance > Power > Believe.

Wow!

Did you know that when you are born again, your new spiritual heart will be able to “see” with new “eyes” the glories of God’s heavenly kingdom? No longer will you be demanding the iron-clad proof that your unredeemed mind kept insisting upon.

The countless truths set forth in the Word of God will literally leap off the page and into your new heart, causing a bubbling stream of peace and joy, in place of that old stagnant pond of dead religion.

This happened to me the instant I came to faith in Christ. I had tried reading the Bible before, only to see fuzzy words, like trying to watch a 3-D movie without wearing those special glasses.

The day after my rather dramatic conversion, the “glasses” were finally on, and those words that were so fuzzy before, were not only clear, but alive.

I felt the Holy Spirit, who was now inside me, witnessing to the truth of what I was reading, giving an internal “Amen” to each new revelation.

Opening the Bible became an internal worship service, filling my new heart with praise to the God who had revealed Himself as my Friend forever.

But for all this miraculous transformation to happen to anyone, God must start by giving them a new spiritual heart.

This was pictured by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel’s prediction of the miraculous rebirth of Israel from a barren valley of dry bones in the last days.

It was also a picture of what happens to any person when he/she is born again out of a barren life of sin and spiritual death, as described in Ezekiel 36:22-28:

“… I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you and bring it about that you walk in My statutes and are careful and follow My ordinances … so you will be My people, and I will be your God.”

How About You?

Would you like to have a whole new world open up to you, one filled with light and love? Start by asking God to give you a brand-new heart.