If you are a true believer in Jesus Christ, you have great hope. How can you know for sure that you belong to Christ? The Apostle John, in First John, says, “And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.”
Soon after my attempt to take my life, after the psychiatric hospital, after the time with the man who took me through the book of Ephesians, showing me who I really was “in Christ” and the battle with the enemy, God showed me what my heart was like. It was no longer the heart of the wicked in Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” No longer could it be said, “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with the point of a diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart …”
Instead, God said of my heart, in Jeremiah 31, “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah … this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” Instead of sin being written on my heart, God’s Word was written there.
In John six, Jesus says, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” In John seven, Jesus says further, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” The next verse says what the “living water” is. “But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive …” So, the Spirit is like a “fountain” and “rivers” in the center of our heart, just like the fountain and rivers that flowed from the Garden of Eden.
Luke eight says, “These are the ones who have heard the word in an honest and good heart …” This new heart is something that I will talk further about. It is God’s creation. It is not of our own doing or efforts. Matthew 12 says, “The good man out of his good treasure brings forth what is good.” Again, this is all to the glory of God, who has called us out of the darkness and into His marvelous light.