How Grace Circumcises Our Hearts

Deut. 30:1-10 (NIV) 

    When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come upon you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, [2] and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, [3] then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. [4] Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. [5] He will bring you to the land that belonged to your fathers, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers. [6] The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. [7] The Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you. [8] You will again obey the Lord and follow all his commands I am giving you today. [9] Then the Lord your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your land. The Lord will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your fathers, [10] if you obey the Lord your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

Our universal human problem – we know what to do but we are powerless to do it!

[6] The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.

The heart is the seat of the entire acting self – all our imaginations, thinking, decisions are shaped by the heart. 

1. A circumcised heart is when we serve and obey God not because we have to but because we want to and because we love to

Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before, since we have seen his beauty, are joined to part no more: (Olney Hymns; Book III, Hymn 3, p. 293)

A circumcised heart exists when our duty to God and our pleasure in God are joined together as one

Romans 2:29 (NIV)

     No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God.

 [6] The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. [7] The Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you. [8] You will again obey the Lord and follow all his commands I am giving you today.

Deut. 29:4 (NIV) 

    But to this day the Lord has not given you a mind that understands or eyes that see or ears that hear.

2. Signs of a Circumcised Heart:

Love – A circumcised heart exists when we not only understand God’s love and teachings but when we finally experience, taste and see it

Obedience Change – We don’t obey to get a changed heart; rather, the obedience is the result of the changed heart

Living – We don’t just exist amid the changing waves of life but we live fully because of real spiritual growth

Genesis 15:9-10; 12, 17-18(NLT)

     The Lord told him, “Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.”  So Abram presented all these to him and killed them. Then he cut each animal down the middle and laid the halves side by side…As the sun was going down, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a terrifying darkness came down over him…After the sun went down and darkness fell, Abram saw a smoking firepot and a flaming torch pass between the halves of the carcasses.  So the Lord made a covenant with Abram that day

Col. 2:11-12 (NIV) 

    In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, [12] having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.

3. Begin to fully grasp the depth of what it took for Jesus to be cut off and make possible a new heart, if that moves you, that is the beginning of a new heart

To see the law by Christ fulfilled
And to hear His pardoned voice
Transforms a slave into a child
And duty into choice. (Book III, Hymn 62, p. 344)

I am grateful to Tim Keller, from whom much of this sermon came from…