'I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.' (Ezekiel 36:26-27)

Have you received your new heart as yet? I did when I was forty years old. God delivered me from this perverted world and placed a new heart in me, one that He could work on and cause me to change and become more like our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. He could not work on my old heart which was made of stone, therefore, He had to put in a new one that could be molded.

As a young man growing up I used to harass Christians, Jehovah Witnesses, Muslims and anyone who claimed to be holy. I would torment them and point out all of their faults until they eventually got so angry with me, they would blow me out and then I would feel justified that they were not a good person. Back in those days, my favorite supervisor at work was what we call in local dialect 'a cuss bud'. I looked up to him because to me he seemed genuine. If things were not going right, he would come out in a friendly way and say 'We were doing crap', in a much more offensive language. Whenever you go to ask him a question, every sentence in his response had the ‘f’ word in it and to me that was cool. I vowed to be like him if ever I became a supervisor. Well, a few years after I got my promotions and I had two guys under my wings as my staff. Believe it or not, although we had some challenging managers to report to, we were a happy bunch because the swearing used to ease the frustration for us. I soon had these two young respectable men, who people liked a lot, cursing more than me and they were enjoying themselves.

Many years passed by and I came to realize that there was a true God and I turned to my religion to try to find Him. So I started going to church regularly and I tried to be a good person by the church’s standard. The reason I did this was because I heard about heaven and hell and I didn’t want to go to hell. My goal was to do just enough good deeds to get me into heaven, but deep down inside I still had a desire to cuss and continue with sin in my life. I thought if no one knew, then it would not be a problem. In the office I was known as the 'silent cuss bud'. So on the outside I would pretend to be a 'goodie two shoes' but on the inside I was battling with lust and obscenity. Eventually, I realized that I was living a lie and that the church was not helping me. Going to church became such a dull routine, there was a time when I could have recited the entire service word for word. I thought to myself, if the priest could not make it one day, I could do the service for him, because it was no big deal. In the end, I would go to church, sleep through the parts that we were seated and when it was over, driving back home, I would ask my wife 'So what did the priest say today?'  Deep down inside, I knew there was much more to God, the creator of the world, and I knew that what I was doing was not going to get me closer to Him.

I never understood what it meant to be 'born again'. I thought it was just another kind of religious ritual that would once more turn into boredom after a while. One day someone asked me if I had a relationship with the Lord. I thought to myself 'Who does he feel he is talking to?'  This guy said to me,' I know that you go to church, but do you have a relationship with Jesus Christ?'  He was from the same religious background as I was, but he told me that he had a relationship with the Holy Spirit, which was living in him. He invited me to a meeting which he said was not about religion but about Jesus Christ and it took me eight months before I finally made up my mind to go to the meeting. Something would always come up or I would feel like I was betraying my religion. No matter how hard I tried to put it off though, I felt something inside of me saying that God wanted me to hear from Him. So after eight months of procrastination I decided to go and find out what the fuss was all about with this meeting.