155. Circumcise Your Heart
Deuteronomy 30:6 And the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live.
God promises to circumcise our hearts and the hearts of our seed. This happens to us through baptism and faith in Christ. When we come to Christ and believe in Him the world in the heart is “rolled away.” The purpose of circumcision is that we may love the Lord with all our heart and soul, and when we love God fully and always we will truly live.
Circumcision of the heart = faith in Jesus. Faith in Jesus = truly living and loving. Eternal life = God’s very own life shared with us. Or: living depends on loving; loving depends on believing; believing depends on hearing the Gospel. Circumcising the heart is giving up on selfish desires and worldly distractions (repentance) to make room for the Spirit to live and breathe in us and work on us. It is being made willing, though God’s Word, to let the Spirit have His way in us.
We cannot circumcise ourselves; at least, we shouldn’t try it. So also we cannot circumcise the heart: we cannot do it ourselves. God does it for us and in us. The promise: God will circumcise the heart. The Lord God, the Holy Spirit, does it first in Baptism and then daily through life as we grow in the Word of God. The old life, the Old Adam, the “world” in us, the flesh, the sinner, is always in us and about us. It never finally leaves, but its power is slowly diminished and weakened as the Life of God (the Holy Spirit) continues to make us better people, to cleanse us by the blood, to make new life stronger, to richly and daily forgive sins, and to transform us by the renewal of the mind closer to the likeness of Christ. We love God more and then we live. We claim this promise so that we are motivated to sincerely repent and believe the Gospel. Believe God: He will do it.