In what ways are our hearts still hard? How is the LORD calling us to move beyond them? There are things which the LORD overlooked in our lives that we cannot indulge forever. The people of Israel weren't ready to change until they received the new hearts promised by Jesus. The manifestation of that new heart, the living from that new heart, is a gradual process in each one of us. The LORD in his mercy gives us time to change, time to be transformed. The risk is that habit and familiarity can cause us to take advantage of his mercy and to build these faults of ours into the fabric of who we are. We can't imagine functioning without them. Yet if we insist on maintaining these faults of ours we actually lose the ability to live our relationships in accordance with God's purpose for them.
Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate.
What are we separating because it is easier to separate? Where are we running away because to run is easier than to repair. What purpose of God's in our lives are we trying to pull into separate pieces because holding them together would require our own hearts to be transformed? This need not apply only to relationships. Any time we divorce a sphere of our lives from God and his plans for it we are guilty of this same separation. It might seem easier at first but we realize eventually that these separated pieces lose their purpose.
some, because they have renounced marriage
for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven.
We should try to seek the greatest goods, the places wherein we can have and experience the greatest unity with God himself, whether in marriage or in religious life. In all of this we are not initiating, not heroic, but only reciprocating the love of the one who first sought us.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish (see Ephesians 5:25)
Let us avoid the temptation to be captivated by our own beauty, to use our renown to make ourselves harlots, and to lavish every passer-by as we read of Israel in the reading from Ezekiel today. Let us instead welcome the utterly astonishing ways in which the LORD comes first to us, to capture our hearts, and to win back our love, the love in which we were always intended to live.
Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you when you were a girl,
and I will set up an everlasting covenant with you,
that you may remember and be covered with confusion,
and that you may be utterly silenced for shame
when I pardon you for all you have done, says the Lord GOD.
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