Old Testament
Ezekiel 36:25-27
25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.
26 I will also give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.
27 I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. You will keep my ordinances and do them.
New Testament
2 Corinthians 5:17-19
17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.
18 But all things are of God, who reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ, and gave to us the ministry of reconciliation;
19 namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not reckoning to them their trespasses, and having committed to us the word of reconciliation.
Ezekiel does not flatter us. He speaks to a people who have become unclean and scattered, and he names what only God can do: wash, cleanse, give a new heart, put a new spirit within. The hardest thing is not the broken law, but the stony heart that cannot love.
Paul then speaks of what that renewal looks like in Christ: a new creation, and a new relationship. God reconciles, not by pretending the breach was small, but by crossing it. He does not merely “improve” us; he brings us home.
Public life often runs on distrust. We build systems as though everyone is an enemy, or as though no one can change. Yet Scripture refuses to accept that cynicism as wisdom. The Lord is able to turn hearts of stone into hearts that can feel again, repent again, tell the truth again, keep faith again. Even small acts of honesty can begin to thaw a culture.
So today we pray for renewed hearts where power is exercised and where decisions are made. We pray for institutions that do not harden the weak. And we ask, first, for our own renewal: that Christ would make us into people who can receive mercy and therefore practise it.