Heart Problems 3- How to Breakthrough a Hard Heart

Last week we looked at a problem we all face at some point... A broken heart. And the thing is that, if your heart is broken often enough it becomes a heartache, and if you struggle with the heartache for long enough, you eventually move on to the heart problem we are dealing with today... A hard heart!

WHAT'S CAUSED YOUR HARD HEART?

People don't get hard hearted overnight, it's a process that usually takes years. It is the result of having your heart repeatedly broken, and the problem with a hard heart is that it tends to not be specific... It other words, you're not just hardened to the one who hurt you, it affects every aspect of your life.

So if someone has broken your heart, for example an ex, then you are not only hard towards him or her, you are hard towards everyone else, even if you don't mean to be. So your kids, your family, your friends, people who had nothing to do with the initial hurt, will be hurt by your hardness of heart! You begin to lack empathy or compassion, you become legalistic and rigid, and eventually you become incredibly selfish!

Luke has just started playing the guitar, and he showed me his red raw fingertips. I have played for years, and I feel no pain from the guitar strings. Why? Because, after repeated abuse of my fingertips by the guitar strings, my fingertips are calloused... They are hard on top!

If I stripped that hard layer of calloused skin off, underneath they are as raw as Luke's. Underneath your hard heart, you are as raw and in pain as ever! You've just covered it over with a hard, protective shell, and you live in fear that somewhere, somehow, someone is going to break through your toughened shell and hurt you all over again!

Isaiah 6:10

Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”

A hard heart stops healing and blocks your relationship with others and with God.

A HARD HEART IS A PROTECTIVE RESPONSE

Humans protect themselves... It's instinctive, it's what we do. Throw a ball at someone, they duck. Hurt someone, they put up walls, and this is the basis of a hard heart.

You might have sadness, hurt, or bitter disappointment. You may have been in love, but that love wasn’t returned. You might have been left alone by someone who promised they would never leave. You might have a child that you love more than anything; one that you would sacrifice your own life for; and they have rejected your love and guidance and relationship. 

You might have a broken heart for someone who has passed on; someone you will never see again this side of heaven. You might even be experiencing a breakdown in your relationship to God because of your broken heart.

But go through this enough and you begin to harden your heart, in an effort to say, "I ain't gonna be hurt like this no more!"

A hard heart is a protective response.

And it works for sin too. When you first commit a sin you feel guilty. When you do the same sin again and again, you start to feel less guilty, less convicted. Is it his because the gravity of the sin is decreasing over time? 

No, it's because you harden your heart against the guilt, and as a result become calloused to the leading of God. The sin is just as wrong as it ever was, it's just that your conscience is so seared, so damaged, your heart is so hard, that you are no longer sensitive to the guilt any more.

You are hardening your heart, just as Pharaoh did...

Exodus 10:17

Now therefore, forgive my sin, please, only this once, and plead with the Lord your God only to remove this death from me.”

Just 3 verses later... Exodus 10:20

But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he did not let the people of Israel go.

So a hardened heart is designed to protect you from pain, from hurt, from heartache or from guilt, but it results in several things...

1. A HARD HEART ANGERS GOD

Jesus wanted to heal a man in desperate need, and the Pharisees are busy debating whether it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath. This made Jesus mad...

Mark 3:5

And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.

And your hard heart makes Him mad today!

It angers Him because it hurts you, and it hurts others around you. Hard hearted people lack empathy and compassion... Their harshness drives people away!

2. A HARD HEART DRIVES GOD AND HIS WORD AWAY

Zechariah 7:12-13

They made their hearts diamond-hard lest they should hear the law and the words that the Lord of hosts had sent by his Spirit through the former prophets. Therefore great anger came from the Lord of hosts.

“As I called, and they would not hear, so they called, and I would not hear,” says the Lord of hosts,

You cannot hear God, and He won't hear you if you have a hard heart. (Psalm 66:18) If you want the Lord to bless and guide you, having a hard heart is simply not an option, no matter how justifiable the cause is!

3. A HARD HEART HURTS OTHERS AROUND YOU

Hurt people hurt people, and if your heart is hard, you have little compassion for those around you. I recently had a situation in Lily House where someone who had been forgiven much, to whom grace had been extended several times, got really angry that we extended the same grace to another girl. This is what happens to a hard heart. We lose compassion. We forget about how the Lord has blessed us, and demand He judge others if we perceive them to be in sin.

I was reminded of the parable of the Unforgiving Servant...

Matthew 18:27-30

And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.

But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’

So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’

He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt.

Other people tend to draw away from and even avoid hard hearted people.  But having a hard heart is not God's plan for your life...

GOD OFFERS A NEW HEART, NOT A HARD HEART

To overcome a hard heart you need radical heart surgery. Bandaids won't do, you need more than that!  In Ezekiel God says this...

Ezekiel 36:26-27

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put 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 cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

God knows our hearts can be black places at times, and they can be hard as diamond. But He can remove a stony, hard, selfish, evil heart and replace it with a heart of flesh, a heart that feels and empathises and cares and loves others. 

And He does it by His Spirit. And when He does it, you need to covenant to walk with Him day by day.

A NEW HEART OF FLESH

God has a plan for your life, and it not only involves what you want, but it also encompasses God's desire to see you bless and impart blessing into the lives of others around you. You are His advertisement, His billboard to a hurting, grieving, selfish, hard hearted world and sometimes you are the only ad for Jesus people will ever see!

That's why He longs to remove the stoney heart and replace your heart with something new, something alive and fresh, something that beats for Jesus and for mankind!

HOW DOES A HEART GET HARD?

Life can be pretty tough at times. We talk about the school of hard knocks, and many of us have been through tough times. Sometimes it is of our own making, but sometimes it just slams into us, broadsides us and wipes us out.

LIFE'S CIRCUMSTANCES

We frequently see Lily House girls who have been kicked around by life, circumstances, people, parents, drugs, etc. some of these ladies are tough, some are really hard hearted. They're not bad or evil, just hard.

But God wants them to be soft. No matter what they have been through, He wants to put a heart of flesh into them.

LIFE'S RELATIONSHIPS

It might be a broken relationship. In fact, a broken relationship is one of the prime causes of hard hearts. And why does our heart get hard?

Self Preservation!

 

When someone breaks our heart, our trust is broken. We trust someone like a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, kids, parents... Or a close friend, but sometimes they let us down.

Hurt people hurt people

Hurt people actually push away those trying to help them... Even God Himself.  After the parable of the sower, Jesus quotes Isaiah...

Matthew 13:15

For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’

LIFE'S SIN

Unbelievers, or believers who ignore God and blatantly continue in sin, develop hard hearts. Look at this, talking about unbelievers and their hard hearts towards God...

Ephesians 4:18-19

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.

They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

Some people today practice clearly godless lifestyles and convince themselves that God is ok with it. How can that happen? Is God ok with stuff He has not been ok with for centuries, things clearly spoken against in His Word? Has God changed His position, has the God of Abraham and Elijah become the God if the politically correct compromiser, keeping the peace and just loving everyone despite their disobedience, or have these people calloused and hardened their hearts?

If you don't know Jesus, you are lost in your hardness of heart. If you claim to be a Christian, it's time to break through the hardness in your heart, its time to humbly and prayerfully ask God for a heart of flesh. However confronting, however difficult, however painful this might be, I challenge you to risk everything to break through your hard heart's outer shell.

IT'S TIME TO BREAK UP THE FALLOW GROUND...

Hosea 10:12

Sow for yourselves righteousness;

reap steadfast love;

break up your fallow ground,

for it is the time to seek the Lord,

that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.

Jeremiah 4:3. “Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns."

Fallow ground is ground which has once been tilled, but has gotten hard and now lies waste. Much of our lives are like this. Hard, crusty, bitter.  In other words, our heart is hard!

Our lives could be productive, and maybe once were, but has your heart been prepared for planting... Is it ready for blessings and righteousness.

Or is it unused and unusable unless something happens...

A hard heart needs to be broken up and made soft again, before it is ready to receive seed. A hard heart is not a fruitful place!

Pause right now and ask God where your heart is at.

Let's look at the Hebrew words used in Hosea 10:12

Sow: Heb, to sow, plant or scatter seed, to make pregnant

You can sow righteousness, but if your heart is fallow, nothing will grow. Sow, water, wait... Nothing good grows!

The Hebrew word for Break up means "to make a furrow", from a root word meaning to glisten, ie a furrow of glistening light.

So this passage says that, in order to see fruit and blessing in your life, you need to break up your crusty, hard heart, and this is always painful!

Breaking up fallow ground requires you to the following:

1. STUMPS AND WEEDS

You need to dig up stumps and weeds, stuff that has grown in your life but is detrimental to your walk

Removing stumps is a big, hard, painful job!  You need to it around the stump, then maybe use a vehicle or brute strength to leverage it out.

What's been growing in your hard heart previously? Hatred, resentment, bitterness, lust, greed, selfishness? These must be rooted out so a new crop can be planted. Grain doesn't flourish under the shade of trees. They must be removed so the new crop can grow in the light, however hard and however painful. You cannot sow around it, you need to dig it out!

2. CRUSTY SURFACE

You need to break up the surface, the crust, the hardness, because seed cannot sink its roots through the hard surface unless it is broken up.

Unbelief is a hard surface, and it takes time, pain and work to break the fallow ground. Maybe you've been discouraged by believing for things that have just not happened. You get hard hearted as a defence, but you must realise that this defence is killing your trust of God!

That hardness of unbelief must be faced squarely and broken up if God is to plant something new and fruitful in your heart. Heartfelt repentance and confession is one way of plowing deep. 

When is the last time you were literally on your knees broken before the Lord?

3. LARGE ROCKS

Sometimes you hit large rocks as you plough up the ground. Many of these you cannot remove by yourself, so seek the help of others.

Maybe it is a previous experience, failed relationship, a loss too hard to bear alone. Talk to a godly friend or counsellor, or the pastors.

4. THORNS AND BRIARS

Thorns must be gathered and burned!

Weeds are a scourge to the farmer. You have to constantly pull them. Fallow ground is generally covered in them, in fact weeds are pretty much the only thing that will grow on fallow ground!  They have to be destroyed.

On our farm we had a weed called groundsel. It was hardy, grew like crazy and was impossible to pull, you had to cut and poison it. So what are your thorns and briars?

Jesus describes them for us... Worries of life, deceitfulness of wealth (Matt 13:22), desires for other things (Mark 4:19), riches and pleasure (Luke 8:14).

Depending on your particular plot of land, those thorns could be sexual temptations and lust, self-indulgence, pride, anger, selfishness, a love of entertainment and recreation, addictions, greed, selfishness, laziness, etc. 

Each of these chokes the Word in your life, and ruins the crop. Do not work around them, rip them out and destroy them!

Don't just out them to one side and let them reseed into your field, burn them and be rid of them!

Spurgeon said," If my mind remains as obdurate as it was by nature, the sun of trial will scorch, and my hard heart will help to cast the heat the more terribly upon the ill- covered seed, and my religion will soon die, and my despair will be terrible; therefore, O heavenly Sower, plough me first, and then cast the truth into me, and let me yield Thee a bounteous harvest."

CONCLUSION: YOU CAN OVERCOME A HARD HEART

So, what is the state of your heart right now? Are you soft towards God, or so hurt that you've hardened up? Is the field of your heart soft and ready to receive seed, ready to produce a harvest 30, 60, 100 fold, or is it hard and crusty, a wasteland.

Here's the measure... 

How close are you right now to God? Do you long to spend time with Him? Are you having quiet times at all? Are you reading His Word, and praying all day? Are you nursing long felt hurts that have made you bitter, crusty me hard?

I find the time I spend with God is a direct reflection of where I am at with Him, and how hard my heart is. Hard hearts are really tough to examine, and often painful, and they will limit your life in Christ.

So right now is the time to sort this out before next year, so you can start afresh in 2016 with a heart of flesh, not stone!

Don't just sit there hard hearted... Don't let this seed fall lifeless upon the callous, hardened soil of your heart. Stop, examine yourself and let God breakthrough right now to set you free from the shell, the tough exterior that limits your life.

Life abundantly awaits those brave enough to break through a hard heart. Is that you?