You can ignore the symptoms, try one more remedy, even rub essential oil on a broken bone—until the pain makes denial impossible. At Israel’s rock bottom, Ezekiel 36 lays God’s people on the physician’s table and names what stricter rules and harder effort cannot heal: a heart hardened against its Maker.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Ashes where glory dwelt, Jerusalem shrouded in silence, the temple in ruins, its people far from home. Yet, in darkness, hope speaks—a future foretold, a new and forever promise: a return to glory, a nation restored, and the temple rebuilt. But even this wasn’t the end. The prophets spoke of a king whose dominion would forever be. We awaited this savior, this deliverer of His people, to accomplish what we never could.
All right, season three, episode 10. Episode 10 means we are halfway through the story and we’re at a pivotal point of the story as well. If you’ve been joining us from the beginning of this series, we’ve been going through the Bible from cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation. And we’re at this point in the story where essentially we’ve got to rock bottom. The story started on a very high note with God and with man, and we’ve descended all the way to just this pit of the story where now the people of God are in exile. They’ve hit rock bottom. There’s a recognition now that something’s wrong. And as much as we’ve tried to fix everything ourselves, we’ve only descended further down into the pit.
And now here we are, episode 10, in Ezekiel chapter 36. If you want to grab your Bibles and open there, Ezekiel chapter 36. It’s an interesting chapter because at rock bottom, we now get God looking at His people and diagnosing the problem. And essentially He’s had to wait until they’ve admitted that they can’t do it themselves.
Anybody here want to admit about yourself that you’re the kind of person where if you’re feeling sick, you just don’t go to the doctor until you have to? Is that anybody here in the room? Anybody who is like, “I’m not going unless there’s like an emergency”? I will cough all week on people. I will have fevers. I will limp around, whatever it is, but I’m not going to get fixed until I’ve tried everything on my own. Like you’ve tried to rub some essential oil on broken bones and like it’s not working. It’s not working. But eventually you get to this point where you realize I need somebody who knows what’s going on with the body. I need someone who can do something about it as well because I’ve tried, I’ve tried, I’ve tried, and I’ve tried again and nothing seems to be working.
And I think we do that with our bodies, but I’m guessing there’s a lot of you who do that with your soul as well. You look at your heart. You look at your soul. You see the decisions you’re making in life. You see the things that you want in life, but really your soul is hungering after other things, and you end up doing things that you don’t want to do. And the things that you do want to do in life, you’re not doing, and you’re doing the things that you don’t want to do. And you get to this point where you’re like, man, is anything ever going to change in me? Maybe someone else is looking at you and you’re feeling the pressure of everybody else looking at you saying, “I mean, is anything ever going to change in you? I’m tired of hearing you say I’m sorry for the same things over and over and over.” And the reality is you’re tired of having to say I’m sorry for the same things over and over and over.
We get to these moments of hitting rock bottom where we have to evaluate not just our choices and the decisions and the history of what led us here, but we have to evaluate our soul and begin to realize that there’s nothing we can do about our soul. We’ve tried. And that’s actually why we’re at rock bottom.
That’s where Israel finds themselves here in Ezekiel chapter 36. And in Ezekiel 36, God begins to give them this diagnosis. At rock bottom, God lays them out on the physician’s table and He looks at the people of Israel. He looks at their heart and He says this about them: He says, “Here’s your problem. Your heart has hardened towards its maker and you cannot heal it on your own. Your heart has just become hard. You can’t even hear my words. You can’t even understand my desires for you. You can’t see the vision that I have for this world around me. And you’re trying to fix your heart on your own, but you can’t do it on your own. And now you don’t need a creator. What you need is a recreator of your heart. Now you need a healer. Now you need a physician to fix what is going wrong deeply inside of you.”
And once you get to that point where you can just submit over and say, “You know what? I’ve tried everything. It’s not working. Here I am, Lord. Have your way with my heart.” That’s when life begins. That’s when it starts.
St. Augustine, he put it nicely when he said this: “I hide not my wounds. You are the physician. I am sick. You are the physician. I’m the sick one. I’m not hiding my wounds from you anymore, God. I’m not trying to fix it on my own. I’m just going to admit my guilt.”
Here at rock bottom, I admit that I can’t do it and that maybe you can heal what I haven’t been able to heal in me. That’s a great place to be. In fact, that’s where Israel finds themselves.
Ezekiel 36 verse 24, God begins to give them not just the diagnosis but the treatment plan saying, “Okay, if you’re at rock bottom, if you’re in exile,” the people of Israel are outside of Israel. Life has fallen apart. Seemingly in their minds, God has abandoned them. God doesn’t love them anymore because life is bad. God begins to come in and say, “All right, now that you’re here at rock bottom, let’s have a conversation about what’s going to come next if you’ll allow Me to take you there as your physician.” He starts this way: He says, “I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land.”
Now, that’s what the heart of Israel wanted. Ultimately, what they wanted was, “God, just take us out of Babylon. Take us out of these foreign countries and bring us back to Israel. Bring us back to the temple. Rebuild the temple. Rebuild the land. Rebuild the walls. Bring us all back.” That’s what we want. And so God starts that way. He says, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to bring you back.” But He doesn’t stop there because there’s a little bit of a problem with that. If God does bring them back, which He has in the past, what keeps them from making the same mistake again? I mean, that’s been the story of the whole Bible so far, hasn’t it? The people of Israel, they’re with God and then they turn their back on God. Then they go into exile. And God rescues them and brings them out of exile, brings them back. And what do they do? They do the same thing again. They turn their back on God and they leave God again.
So what keeps them from repeating this same cycle once again? And essentially what He’s going to tell them is, it’s not just giving you a land, that’s not going to fix the problem. It’s not giving you a new law, new guidance on what to do and what not to do. That’s not going to fix the problem. It’s not going to even be giving you a temple, a place where you can worship. That’s not going to fix the problem. Because the problem is not in the law, in the land, in your family. The problem is in you. And so here’s what you’re going to need. If I’m going to put you in a new land, I’m going to need to give you a heart transplant first.
And that’s the treatment plan that God lays out, a heart transplant. In the coming verses here, the next few verses, He tells them what that’s going to look like. And first He tells them this: that it’s going to start with, “I’m going to wash away your past. I’m going to wash away your past.”
Before we get to the land, we need to deal with the things that have already happened. And it’s not just making you pay for the past, but I want to wash you clean from the past so that we can start a new story. He says it this way in that verse: “I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean from all of your uncleanliness. I will sprinkle clean water on you.”
I love the image of water in scripture. I don’t know if you’ve seen it from the story of the story that we’ve gone on, but water is really a symbol of a new beginning in the scriptures, that anytime a people crosses through water, it’s almost like flipping a new chapter of what was is no longer, and what is, is what is ahead.
You look at the beginning, the very first few verses of the book of Genesis, and we see that the world is dark and void, and there’s darkness over the deep, and then the Spirit of God is hovering over the waters. And then new life comes. Creation comes. Water symbolizes a new beginning.
You get to the people in Egypt. They’re slaves in Egypt. They’ve had this horrible past. They’re living in slavery, and then God delivers them from the past into the future by doing what? Crossing through the waters. They go through the Red Sea, and they’re delivered to a new chapter.
In that new chapter, they mess up. They wander from God. They complain about God. They want to go back to Egypt, so they wander in the desert, and finally we get to these people who desire God. They desire a new story, so what does God do for them? He leads them to the promised land. But to get there, they got to cross through the waters. They got to cross through the Jordan River, and so God leads them through the waters.
And now here they are in Babylon, and God says, “I want to take you to a new land. I want to gather you together. But in order to do that, we have to deal with the past first. I need to sprinkle clean water on you to cleanse you of the past so that we can start a new future.”
Start with a cleaning. This is how God closes chapters on the past and begins new chapters in the future. And so to cross through the waters, to be sprinkled with clean water essentially means God desires to forgive the sins of the previous journey, and He invites Israel into that. He says, “I want to forgive you of your sins from the past.”
In the waters, it signifies a new part of the story. It signifies a new life where your sins are washed clean, your guilt is washed away, and you get a fresh start. And then that thing that you wish you could undo from the past, it no longer defines you. It’s washed away, it’s forgiven, and it’s forgotten. But the question is, what good is it to cross the waters if it’s the same hard heart that goes with you into that? It’s one thing to be forgiven of the past. It’s another thing to have a heart that no longer makes those decisions in the future.
And so God doesn’t just tell them, “I’m going to wash away your past.” He then goes on to say, “I’m going to then heal you of your broken heart. I’m going to wash the sins away from your heart, but then I’m going to heal it.” It’s almost like a doctor who cleans the area first, cleans the area and disinfects the area first, and then does the surgery, and then makes the cuts, and then brings healing to the heart.
He says it this way in the next verse, chapter 36, verse 26: “I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you.” He says, “I’m going to do something new with your heart, and that spirit inside of you, that darkness inside of you, I’m going to make that new as well. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”
He’s like, your heart’s turned so hard that it can’t even experience Me. It can’t experience the joys that I have. So not only am I going to forgive you of the past, but I’m going to renew your heart.
Now, the thought of the Jewish mentality of this day is, this is what the law was supposed to do for us though, right? I mean, we’re a people that we left God, and so what did God do? Well, He gave us a law. He gave us guidelines so that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes before.
And so what some people think today is, you know, the law is just worthless. Like the Old Testament law, all of those laws that are in here, they were bad. They actually, we don’t need them. We’re New Testament people. What purpose does the law serve?
And what I want you to know is, the law did serve a good purpose. I think of the law, the Old Testament law, like I think of a cast. Has anybody ever had a cast on before? Maybe you’ve broken an arm and the bone was broken and you put a cast on. What does a cast do? What’s the purpose of a cast? A cast, it lines up the bone and it guides it. It guides where the healing happens, right? It’s a hard shell around it. You wrap it in different layers. Those layers harden to now where your bones have a guide and a direction.
That’s what the law was meant to do. It was meant to provide a guide and a direction.
But here’s what a cast can’t do. A cast cannot heal the bone. There is no healing power in a cast.
All the cast do is it lines things up. It shows the direction of where healing is to happen. But the healing must happen on the inside. The healing comes from within.
And so God said, I gave you the law as a direction and a guide. Here’s what I want to do for you now. I want to heal you from the inside. I want to bring the healing to your heart.
Unfortunately, what I think a lot of us do though is instead of dealing with the heart stuff, what we do is, like, “God, I don’t need a heart change. I just need my behaviors changed. I just need essentially more laws.”
And eventually what we begin to do is begin to say, “God, if this cast isn’t working, the way I’ve set up my life, it’s not working. What I’m going to do is I’m just going to wrap my life in stricter laws. I’m going to say, well here’s another thing that I’m not going to do. And here’s another thing I’m not going to do. Here’s another thing I’m not going to do. Here’s something else I’m going to avoid. And I’m going to try really hard to avoid this. I’m going to try really hard to stop looking at my phone at that time of night. I’m going to stop really trying to have those conversations. I’m going to stop avoiding the drink. I’m going to avoid the drugs and the addiction.”
I’m just going to try harder, more laws, stricter laws we wrap around our hearts, stronger promises that we know we’re never going to keep.
But what does that do? All it does is add more layers over a hardened heart. That’s all it does. It adds more hardness to a heart and does nothing about the inside.
Here’s God’s invitation. If you’ll be still for a moment, give me your heart and I’ll begin to unwrap it. And then I’ll wash it clean. I’ll wash it clean and then I’ll make it new. Not by adding more laws, but by dealing with the problem on the inside and giving you a new heart.
Now, for a moment, I know this might be hard for some of you to do. Imagine living your life with a new heart.
Imagine the same circumstances, same setting, same relationship—all of that. It’s the same, but it’s the heart that’s different in the middle of it.
Imagine that life where all of a sudden you’ve got this heart that seeks out the deeper, more spiritual aspects of this world. And it’s not just a heart that responds to the pains of this world. And typically that kind of heart responds pain for pain, hurt for hurt.
Imagine a heart that responds hurt with healing. Imagine a heart that instead of holding grudges at every offense, a heart that automatically leads with forgiveness. A heart that loves people where it wants to shut out people.
Imagine a heart that desires good for others. Imagine a heart that just seeks God above all things. And a heart that just knows as long as I’m with God, everything else is fine. And the anxiety and the fear goes away. And now what’s bubbling through the heart is peace.
Imagine a heart at peace. Imagine an unanxious presence. Imagine a heart that doesn’t lead with fear. A heart that doesn’t lead with anger, but a heart that leads with gentleness. Imagine a heart that is settled even in Babylon. Imagine a heart that’s no longer wandering.
And I’ll tell you this, one of the things that we desire most as Christians in the evangelical world today is that God forgive us of our sins. And I think we get so focused on the idea of God forgiving us of our sins that we miss out the promise that comes after that.
And I’ll tell you this, God will forgive you of your sins. He will wash the past away, but His best work is not in the forgiveness of your sins. It’s in what He can do with your heart afterwards.
God’s best work is not just, “Hey, forgive you of your sins, wash you clean, forgive the past,” but it’s changing that heart, renewing that heart, giving you a new heart so you don’t repeat the past. And that’s God’s promise. He says, “I want to wash away your sins, but then I want to heal your broken heart. I want to bring healing.”
And it’s something that only He can do, which is why He goes on and says this. He says, “I will do in you what you could never do alone.”
Verse 27, He says it this way: “I’m going to put my spirit within you. I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”
I know you’re trying to walk in God’s statutes and what He desires for your life on your own. That might be why you’re failing because you’re doing it on your own. You know where success comes from? Not in trying harder. It comes from His Spirit within you who does what you can’t do.
His Spirit within your heart, where whenever your heart of stone wants to respond in jealousy or in anger or in anxiety, there’s a different response for some reason. And that reason is the Spirit of God has been put in your heart. A heart that has been cleaned. A heart that has been healed. And now a heart that has become the dwelling place of God.
With verse 27 here, Ezekiel announces a radical reorientation of God’s promises in the Old Testament. A radical reorientation. Up to this point, God’s promises have been given and the interpretation of those promises has been that God wants physical healing on the land. God wants physical buildings on the land. God wants physical bloodlines in the land.
And all of a sudden, with this announcement, there’s a reorientation of that. Where now the people are beginning to be told, “My desire is not to give you laws written on stone tablets to guide you. My desire is to have those laws written in your heart.”
Where it’s something inside of you that is guiding you, not just your actions, but now your desires. Because really, your actions come from your desires.
And so instead of just changing the actions, what if we changed your desire? And my promise to you is not just giving you a temple, a dwelling place of God. My promise is that I want to live in you and your heart becomes the temple.
That I want to put my Spirit not in a Holy of Holies, cloaked in gold, but in a heart that’s not made of stone. It’s not made of material. It’s made of flesh.
And with this promise, there’s this reorientation where God shows us His end game. And His end game is not to give us land and laws. His end game is not to live in temples or in church buildings. God’s on a mission to live with you and within you. That’s where the story’s heading.
From the very beginning, that was His desire.
I think we get so caught up on this idea that what God wants to do is forgive us of our sins. And that’s the whole purpose of Christianity, to be forgiven of your sins. To raise your hand, pray a prayer, and now I’m forgiven of my sins. To be baptized, and now I’m forgiven of my sins. To say I’m sorry, God, to repent of my sins, and now I’m forgiven of my sins.
That is not the point of Christianity. Forgiveness of sins is not the point of Christianity. Being with God, that’s the point.
I love the way Henry Scrooge says it. He says this: “True religion is a union of the soul with God. A real participation of the divine nature.”
You want Christianity, you want faith, you want religion, it’s not about the laws, it’s not about the forgiveness of sins, it’s about union with God.
Now, forgiveness of sins is a big deal because sin is the thing that keeps us separate from God. And so why is God interested in forgiving you of your sins? Not just so that you can feel good about you, but it’s so that you can be with Him.
That’s the mission of the Bible. God’s looking back to Eden and He’s saying, “That’s what I want. I’m tired of you being alone in this. I’m tired of you stumbling through life on your own in this, thinking that you can fix your own problems. Let me in. Let me back in.”
That union empowers us to live differently. Imagine a union with God where His Spirit is within you and now His Spirit is living through you and causing you to walk in His statutes and causing you to live in the way that He has asked us to live. And now our hearts are not driven by an inner rage, but all of a sudden we’re responding with an inner peace. We’re no longer walking in jealousy of one another. But now when we approach each other, we’re not jealous or judging, but now we’re generous to one another.
We no longer walk in resentment, but now we walk in forgiveness. Where His Holy Spirit comes into us and causes us to live and respond and walk in ways that the law could only point us to, but it could never change the heart’s desire. And now our hard heart is made soft and now we live through the Spirit in ways that we could only dream of.
We live with the forgiveness of our sins, yes, but the gift of a new heart. And now we’re enabled to experience what God has desired from the beginning for us. And this is God’s desire for you.
God living with us so that we can finally live with Him.
This will change your life. This will change your marriage. This will change your family. This will change the way you approach your job. This will change every relationship. This will change every single day when you wake up. And all of a sudden you have this God who is with you and you’re no longer alone. That you’re no longer in exile anywhere anymore because you were always with Him. And He’s finally living in you so that you can live with Him.
This is where the story is heading now. We’ve hit rock bottom and God is beginning to send us to the way that that happens. And soon in our story these promises are going to be made possible through Jesus Christ, His crucifixion and His resurrection, and then His gift of the Holy Spirit. And that has been sending ripples throughout history all the way to this day.
Here in a moment we’re going to see some baptisms and we’re going to see those ripples continue. But before we see them live, I want to share the story of someone who submitted their life over to Christ, where Christ washed him clean, gave him a new heart, and made it possible for him to do what he could never do on his own. Watch this story.
My childhood was very dysfunctional. Dysfunctional, man. That’s pretty much what I can say about it. Give me a second. I think I was in and out of juvie from 12 until I was 15, almost 16 years old.
Definitely felt a lot of anger and hatred and rebellion, very rebellious. I knew that Jesus died for my sins and I wanted to be saved, but I didn’t understand it completely.
I was on my way to work and during that time a lady was coming this way and I was going this way. Deer jumps out and she runs into me, head-on collision. It went through the back window.
Bones were broken and I had a bunch of tears in my ligaments, my legs. I had a hard time walking. I didn’t even know if I could keep walking.
That’s when I kind of had this moment of, “All right God, I’m here still. What do you want from me? Why am I alive? I should be dead.”
I died twice on the way to the hospital. It was very much in His hands. I had no control of what was going to happen. I think that was His wake-up call to make me realize that He was there.
But I didn’t know how to do it because I was still so angry from what happened to me growing up my whole life. So I kind of just put Him on a shelf to a certain extent, and when I did that I almost felt more lonely and like I didn’t have my life together because I was trying to push back. I was walking away.
Me and my wife both decided that it would be a good idea to find a church that was going to feel very comfortable, somewhere where we can go to and take our kids.
I kind of didn’t know if I belonged here or if I was good enough to go. I didn’t know if I was going to fit in completely because I had lived outside from Jesus for so long and God for so long that I didn’t know if I would be accepted and if I was righteous enough to actually go to church.
So when I went to these services, God was trying to speak to me in some kind of way, kind of like, “You can’t keep running from Me.”
When I came to the living room and I just broke down. I looked at Nicomas, the preacher who was in there, and I was speaking to him and he looked at me and he could tell that I was just a mess.
This presence not just in me but around me pressing me saying, “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere and you need to acknowledge Me.”
I never was one of those people that started crying. I was crying. I couldn’t handle my emotions and they prayed over me.
It was recommended that I go to a men’s group. I went there a couple times and I still kept feeling this conviction and I was like, “Okay, it’s time to get this figured out. I’m done running. I don’t want to be away from God.”
I told one of the elders, now Scott, that I really was thinking about being baptized and he spoke with Nicomas and Nicomas decided to come on a Tuesday night and baptize me.
I was nervousness but it was something that I felt like I had to do. I was convicted and I wanted it to be done and I also knew that I was putting on a new armor of God.
All this group of strangers that I didn’t know when they heard I was getting baptized that night just came to watch and support me. A group of men and I think that’s important nowadays to have the support that you didn’t think that you needed.
Feeling misunderstood, they understood that and feeling like you’re not good enough and you are good enough. You’re good enough to accept Christ and you’re good enough to be in His presence and you don’t ever have to wait around until you’re in this perfect place to do it.
I came to the conclusion that I needed to get baptized because I felt like I had been running away from God for so long that in order for me to give my life to Christ, I had to restart. I had to let that old part of me die.
When you have anger in you for so long and you have this hatred for the world and you don’t know what to do with all this energy and you’re putting it all into the wrong things, it felt like a total recreation of who I am.
I’m proud of the man I’m becoming and I feel like a lot of people feel that they’re going to be judged at the church, but that’s not always the case. You know, sometimes that’s in your head. People aren’t judging you there and you’re not there for other people. You’re there for Christ and that’s all that really matters.
That’s Jonathan’s story, but I know God’s writing your story as well. I know it’s easy to read the scriptures and the stories of the Bible and think, “Well that’s them or that’s him or that’s someone else,” but God’s heart is for you and God’s calling you into new life.
So what I want to do is maybe everybody, just right where you are, stand up with me. I want to just lead you into a time of decision. Specifically, I want to talk to those of you who you’ve been trying to do it on your own for a long time. You’ve been trying to fix your own heart, fix your own life, and you don’t really need God. You don’t need religion. You don’t need faith because you’re strong enough.
I think if you were to look deeper, you would begin to realize, “I’m telling people I’m strong enough, but man, I don’t think I am.” That’s an okay place to get to, to say, “You know what? As it turns out, I’m not strong enough. When my life is in my hands, I keep ending up in the same spots. I keep making the same decisions. Yes, I do want to do better. I want to be better. I want to be a better man. I want to be a better woman, but why do I keep ending up in the same spot?”
Maybe allow God to take a look at your heart because you might need a new heart.
The good news is we’ve got a God who can recreate one. A few more books into the Bible, we get into the New Testament, and there’s this guy named John the Baptist who looks at Israel in their heart, and he calls them to repentance, and he says what Ezekiel was telling you back then, “Today’s the day to wash your hearts clean. It’s repent of the past. It’s to get in these waters and to be washed with clean waters for the forgiveness of your sins so that God’s Son, Jesus, can make you new.”
And what I want to call you to today is that. We’re not going to cross through the Red Sea. We’re not going to cross through the Jordan River. What Jesus asks us to cross through is the baptism waters, and in baptism, we are both made new as well as filled with the Holy Spirit.
Throughout the scriptures, we see that the water and the Spirit are always together. They’re always happening together. Here in Ezekiel, it says that “I will sprinkle you with new water and fill you with my Spirit.” In Genesis, it’s the Spirit hovering over the waters. In Jesus’ baptism, it’s the Spirit who comes down.
Whenever the disciples in the New Testament ask, “What must we do?” the response is repent, be forgiven of your sins, be baptized, and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit and the water is always coming together.
And so if you’ve never been baptized, is today the day? Is today the day for that? My prayer is that you don’t leave here remaining where you are, committed to try harder one more day.
What if today is the day of a new story, a new beginning for you, where you allow God to finally do what He can do and to recreate your heart?
But I’m not asking you to do that because I’m asking you to do that or because a mom or dad’s asking you to do that or a family member or a friend who’s invited you here is asking you to do that. I only want you to do it if you really sense that the Holy Spirit is calling you to that.
And so what I want to do is just give you a moment of just quietness to maybe hear from the Holy Spirit.
I know what your mind is telling you. Today’s not the day. So many reasons not to do it today. I wasn’t expecting it today. Today’s not the day. I’ll do it some other day. Today’s not the day.
Maybe just pause a moment and just let the Holy Spirit answer that question. Is today the day?
And so with every eye closed, what I want you to do is just have a conversation with the Holy Spirit, a simple one, but I want Him to do the talking. But maybe prompt Him with this question: Spirit, is today the day?
Ask Him that question and then just listen.
Spirit, is today the day that I’m forgiven of my past? Is today the day that I’m freed from my guilt and shame? Is today the day that I surrender my life over to you? Is today the day that my life really begins?
Amen.
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