God’s fourth miracle on our behalf was the last thing he needed to do before his major objective could be accomplished. When he gave birth to our new heart, God did something very special with it. What God promised in stage four of his new arrangement was this:
“I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it.” (Jeremiah 31:33)
The moment of our new birth, God actually wrote his law on our heart. That’s kind of an incredible statement, but what law is he talking about here? Is he talking about the Law of Moses? God gave Moses 613 laws. Are each of those laws written on our heart? Is something written on our heart that says, “You shall not eat shrimp”? Or “Don’t boil a young goat in his mother’s milk”?
Not exactly. There were reasons for those laws. But when God promised a new arrangement with humanity, the first thing he said was this:
“Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers on the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt . . .” (Jeremiah 31:31-32, emphasis added)
God said the new arrangement would not be like the arrangement that came through Moses, one based on laws and regulations. God is hardly going to promise that, then turn around and write the Law of Moses on our heart! Rather, the new arrangement would be based on him actually coming to live in us.
So what does it even mean for something to be written on our heart? It means that’s the passion of our heart. That’s what we truly want to do. That’s our deep desire. If we say of someone, “His patriotism is written all over his heart,” that means patriotism is really important to him. If we say, “Her love for her husband is written all over her heart,” that means she really loves him.
Shortly before he was crucified, Jesus said to his disciples, “I’m leaving you with a new commandment: love one another, as I have loved you.” The Apostle John wrote that Jesus only left us with two commandments: to believe in him and to love one another. That’s it. The Apostles Paul and James wrote that God’s whole law is summed up in one command: love one another. James called it the law of liberty. Why? Because loving others is not, in the end, burdensome. It’s incredibly freeing. It frees us from selfishness, and hatred, and bitterness, and indifference. It frees us to live with real peace and real joy.
God has written these two things on the depths of our heart: to trust him, and to love others. We want to do those things. Our new inner being loves to do those things, because we have the very nature of God. These two things bring us joy. In the depths of our being, we are on the same page as God. We’re not in conflict with what he wants. We used to be, but we aren’t that way anymore.
Having a new heart, and God’s desires written on it, doesn’t mean that we can never have thoughts or feelings that conflict with what God wants. What it means is that those things are not coming from our deepest being—the new creation in Christ that we are. We don’t truly want the wrong things. It may seem like we do, but as the Holy Spirit shows us what we truly want in a situation, we’ll see that it matches what God wants.
Why is that important? Because it means that we aren’t fighting a civil war against ourselves! When we say no to something wrong, we aren’t saying no to our deepest desires. We’re saying yes to them. Which is incredibly freeing! The Christian life is not one of constantly saying no to what we want. It’s constantly saying yes to what we truly want in the depths of our being—because God wrote those desires there.
Never again do we have to question, “Do I even want to do what’s right?” or “Do I really want what God wants?” The answer to that question is always yes. If it doesn’t seem like it, we haven’t dug down deep enough, to our true desires.
In our new heart, we want what God wants. It may take a while to learn to get in touch with those deepest desires instead of our surface-level thoughts and feelings—that’s part of growing up in Christ. But we can be at peace, knowing that we want to do the right thing. God has written it on our heart.
Here are some of the places in the Bible where God explains what we just discussed:
Our new heart is on the same page as God: “For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man …” (Romans 7:22)
Jesus left us with two commandments: “‘This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.’” (John 15:12)
Also, “This is His commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as He commanded us.” (1 John 3:23)
Also, “If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well.” (James 2:8)
Also, “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.” (Romans 13:8)
God’s new arrangement with us is based not on law, but on the Holy Spirit within us: “Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.… But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.”
