“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.” (Ezekiel 36:26). A couple of months ago my car battery was completely dead. I wasn't using my car super often so I decided that I would just get a portable jump starter until I got around to actually replacing the battery. So whenever I needed to go anywhere, I would pop the hood, connect the leads, precariously balance the portable battery so the leads didn't snap off, get in the car, turn the key, push all of the buttons on my fob multiple times in a panic until the alarm finally shut off, get out of the car, remembering to leave the door slightly ajar (because once it half closed and all the doors were locked and it took a bona fide miracle to get the door back open), unhook the jumpstarter and close the hood and then plug the jumpstarter into the USB charger in my car so it could recharge by the time I got where I was going, and then do the whole thing again whenever I needed to go back home. Somehow I thought this was less hassle then driving down to Autozone to replace my battery (although we're not even going to get into the struggles that I had once I finally did replace it). But don't we sometimes spiritually have the equivalent of a dead battery? And rather than offering up the sacrifice of our broken heart so that Christ can replace it with a fresh, new one, we let ourselves get sucked into these overly complicated rituals to jumpstart our battery, only for us to have to repeat the whole thing over again as soon as we've stopped running for even a minute. If we have only half repented of our sins, or are holding onto those one or two transgressions that we are too afraid or embarrassed to confess, we can pay extra tithing or go the extra mile or redouble our efforts to be righteous in all kinds of ways, and maybe this will jumpstart us for a while and we can genuinely feel good about the service and ministering efforts we are providing, as we should, but we are only making things harder for ourselves in the long run. Nobody benefits from us trying to drive a car with a dead battery, least of all us. We think that the sacrifice of a broken heart is going to be this big painful process, but really it's the end of the pain. Giving our dead battery to Jesus means that He's going to give us a brand new one in return, one that turns on with little effort. And if for whatever reason our battery dies in another two weeks, that's OK. We just replace it again, as often as every single sacrament meeting if we need to. Otherwise, we're basically just jump-starting our car every Sunday and driving to Autozone, but never buying a new battery. I know that our current heart has seen us through a lot of bad times and good, but if we have to keep defibrillating it all the time, then maybe it's time for a new heart. I'm sure we'll love our new heart even better, and the one after that, and the one after that.
