At our ‘Little Big Church‘ service tonight, Garry explored the sensitivity of touch with the children, getting them to feel objects such as an apple, onion and lemon and then placing these objects into a pillowcase and finding out if they could guess which was which through touch alone. To make it harder, they then had to do the same thing with oven gloves on, and not surprisingly found it much harder to discern which was which when hampered in that way!
The sensitivity of touch is dulled when we wear gloves, and this reminds us of the fact that God has promised to give us a new heart and put a new spirit in us, to remove from us our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. (Ezek 36:26) A heart of stone refers to a stone like marble; the word is also used to describe a bone callus that forms at a break. There is a loss of feeling when such a callus forms, similar to the loss of vision associated with grief (Job 17:7). Jesus is often described as being distressed by the hardness of people’s hearts (see Mark 6:52, Mark 8:14-21). What is even worse than having this kind of hardness is when we stubbornly refuse to believe or care. (Mark 3:1-5)
Hardened hearts refuse to acknowledge what God has done (Heb 3:7-9), but God has promised to transform our hardened hearts into hearts of flesh. We need to have softened hearts, to be humble and teachable, tender and open to change. We need to feel the way God feels and not to become insensitive, dulled and dimmed.