God is the one who can reach into our lives and do this amazing work. We can’t do it. It’s no mere adjustment: it’s a ‘creation’ or a ‘re-creation.’ It’s a total reboot.
When a computer is frozen, or when a smartphone is a ‘brick,’ it cannot reboot itself. Only from the outside can the restart be initiated.
God reboots us when we’re totally glitched, or when we’ve run into a ‘hang.’ When we crash, He restarts us.
But even more: after rebooting us, He continues to maintain our ‘operating system’ (OS), which will become corrupt and eventually crash again without His updates. As Martin Luther writes,
It is not in our power to acquire such a heart, but it comes by divine creation. This is why the Spirit wanted to use the term “create” here, for those are vain dreams that the scholastics foolishly thought up about the cleansing of the heart. Just as such a clean heart is not by our powers but by divine creation, so we cannot preserve this creation against the devil either. We see how often we are polluted by sudden troubles and sadness. Hence this prayer for the creation and preservation of a clean heart ought never to stop.
What’s the result of God rebooting us, and then continuing to maintain us? The result is that He uses us to do amazing things. When we’re running properly, which happens only through His intervention, we can be the way He helps other people.
Shortly before he died in 2013, Byron Porisch took note of this passage in a book coauthored by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay:
Whenever I see someone invest time and energy and love into something and then willingly sacrifice it, giving away what they have, it’s powerful!Halter and Smay point out what it looks like when God has created, and maintained, that ‘clean heart’ in a person. That person is transformed into a blessing toward other people.
For around 3,000 years, people have meditated on the words of the Psalm, which show us God’s action:
Create a clean heart in me, O God,
and renew a faithful spirit within me.
Do not force me away from your presence,
and do not take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore the joy of your salvation to me,
and provide me with a spirit of willing obedience.
The grammar of these passages reveals God at work. God does, or doesn’t, do the action. The person speaking to God simply asks. God creates, renews, forces, takes, restores, and provides.
