The Group Everybody Says Is Going Well

Twelve people in a room built for eight, every Tuesday, and there is a woman who drives twenty five minutes past two closer groups to come to this one.

Three of them have come to faith in that room in four years. One of them was a man nobody thought would ever sit still for an hour.

Ben runs it and he is genuinely good at it. He does not talk too much, which is the whole trick. He asks the second question. He noticed in November that somebody had gone quiet and rang him on the Thursday and it turned out to matter a great deal.

The pastor described that group to somebody as the best thing happening in the church, and it got back to Ben, and he said something self deprecating and thought about it all week.

He is forty. He knows what his own week has been.

Not a scandal. He wants to be exact about that and so do I. There is no secret arrangement and nothing anybody would need to be protected from. It is more that the man in that room on a Tuesday and the man in his own house on a Wednesday are not obviously the same person, and he has been noticing it for about two years, and it has become the quiet fact of his life.

If that is your Tuesday, this is written for you. And I want to hand you a diagnosis, because the diagnosis in this verse is not the one anybody expects and it is much better news.

The diagnosis is stone

Here is the promise.

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.

Now, look at what the problem is said to be.

Stone.

Not dirt. Not stain. Not something on the heart that needs removing from it. The heart itself is described as being made of the wrong material, and the remedy offered is not a cleaning at any point, it is a replacement.

I want to sit with that because it changes what two years of noticing means.

If the problem were dirt, then everything a person does about it would be, in principle, the right kind of action applied insufficiently. Try harder. Be more consistent. Bring more of the Tuesday into the Wednesday. And a conscientious man will run that program for decades and grade himself against it every week.

If the problem is material, then no amount of the right kind of action does anything, because you can clean a stone perfectly and what you have at the end is a clean stone.

You have a problem of material rather than of dirt, and nothing you have failed to scrub was ever the issue. Ezekiel 36:26 names the heart as stony and offers replacement rather than cleaning, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written diagnosis and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands in an empty living room.

And notice who does it. Every verb in that promise is God's. I will give, I will put, I will take away, I will give. Four of them, and not one of them belongs to the person receiving.

You have four verbs standing over you and not one of them was assigned to you. It is written entirely in the first person by the one making the promise, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written promise into a life, which is why it holds in a room where the mugs have not been washed up.

An heart of flesh

There is a word at the end and it is easy to read past, and it is the tender one.

An heart of flesh.

Now, flesh in Scripture is often a weakness word, and here it is deliberately not. Here it is the good outcome. The upgrade is from stone to flesh, and flesh in this contrast means the thing that can be moved, that responds, that feels the touch.

Stone does not have a defect exactly. Stone is entirely reliable. It holds its shape and it does not react and it stays what it is under any conditions.

That is the trouble with it.

And a man who can hold a room of twelve on a Tuesday and be somebody else on a Wednesday is not usually suffering from a lack of effort. Very often he is suffering from something in him that does not move, and that has been extremely useful to him, and that he has never known how to name.

The promise is that it gets replaced with something that moves.

You are promised responsiveness rather than reliability, and the responsive thing is the better one. Scripture makes flesh the good outcome in that contrast, and the same Spirit at work in that passage is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the gap between the Tuesday and the Wednesday has been widening, if it has begun landing on the people in your own house, if the nights have been getting long or the thinking has traveled out past regret toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in your faith. God has always worked through people, and one sitting across from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

The Tuesday is not a cover

Now the thing I want said plainly, because I suspect it has been getting heavier for two years.

The Tuesday is not a cover.

Three people came to faith in that room. A man who nobody thought would sit still sat still. A woman drives twenty five minutes past two closer groups. Somebody went quiet in November and got a phone call on the Thursday that mattered.

Those are not a performance. A performance does not ring somebody on a Thursday. A performance does not notice.

What a man like this does on a Tuesday is real ministry done by a real person who is in the middle of being changed, which is the only kind of ministry there has ever been, because God has never once had anybody else to work with.

You have been doing real work in the middle of being remade, and that is the only condition anybody has ever done it in. Ezekiel 36:26 promises the replacing to people who were already His and already in motion, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you the Tuesday man and the Wednesday man converge by Christmas, or on any schedule at all. That is not mine to promise you and anybody who hands you a date has made it up.

You are clean right now with the gap exactly as wide as it is, and the gap has never once been the diagnosis. It is written and it is promised, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a promised thing real in a body.