All of us have hearts as hardened as rock, hardened by anger, grief, disillusionment, pain, self-absorption. Our powerful God's plan for all of us is to change and form the dead stone of our hearts into hearts of living flesh, capable of tender, optimistic love. But God, slow, courteous, patient as a river, takes all the years of our lives to change us! God's river of grace is quietly, continually eroding away the hard encrustations of selfishness on our hearts, scouring our disillusioned hearts clean, forming new, beautiful channels to receive new outpourings of God's Holy Spirit of Hope and Love!
Moving water is the major agent of erosion. The shape of a coastline is changed as powerful waves constantly crash against the shore, pounding rocks into pebbles and reducing pebbles to sand.
The inner cliffs along the coastlines of our rocky hearts are bulwarks that balk against change. God sends powerful waves of change into our lives, not to drown us but to cleanse us, to pound the rocks of our prejudices into pebbles, to pound the pebbles of our numberless faults, failings, and sins, into pure sand. Then He comes to the beaches He has created, to walk with us.
The clean tides of His grace wash seashells along our beaches that we can lift to our ears to hear heavenly spiritual music to guide us, deep heart music.
"Listen to your new heart!" Jesus tells us. "I've given you a new heart and placed a new spirit within you! I have written my Law in your heart, using first a tide of powerful water, delving deep into the rock of your heart to soften it so I could carve the words and you would read them and understand them."
And Jesus whispers in our newly-softened hearts "Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water, gushing up to eternal life."
God takes His own sweet time with us. His Living River of grace wears away and erodes the hard, selfish and stubborn rock of our hearts to reveal the soft natural hearts that we've been hiding. His Living Tides of grace wear down our high rocky cliffs of prejudice and faults that prevent us from becoming soft as sand. At Baptism, His Living Rain of grace washes us clean of the soil of sin, deluging our senses in the drink that becomes a living spring of grace in us. God takes His own sweet time, the entire time of our lives to save us. Praise God forever and ever!