One New Humanity (Ez. 36:22-28, Ephs. 2:8-22, Matt. 5:43-48)
One New Humanity
February 18, 2026
Ash Wednesday
By: Pastor Mike
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Each of these scriptures testifies to the renewing of our human condition that God’s grace makes possible. During the days of Israel’s exile in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel declared that the scattered ones would be gathered, and that those who were unclean would be cleansed. A new spirit would be given to the people in place of the old spirit, and a heart of cold stone would be replaced with a heart of warm, beating flesh.
In the days of the early Church, the Apostle Paul expressed what renewal in God would mean for our relationships with one another. Those who are far off are brought near, because God in Christ embraces all people. Hostility is replaced by peace. Strangers become fellow members of God’s household. The fundamental division in Paul’s mind was between Israel, God’s chosen covenant people, and the gentile nations, “strangers to the covenants of promise.” That these two groups could be brought together as one united people through the death and resurrection of Christ means that all brokenness in our social relations can be overcome.
Finally, Jesus calls us away from a practice of love based on merit (I love you because you love me) to a practice of love based on unconditional mercy and forgiveness: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Each of these transformations, from the internal experience of a new heart to the external experience of a new community, are implied in Jesus’ command, Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. The word that is translated here as perfection means being mature, complete, whole; it means realizing the purpose for which we are made, just as God can ever only be what God is, which is love.
I have brought these words from Ezekiel, Paul, and Jesus together because they produce a rich and colorful vision of what it means to live as an Easter people, a people filled with the Spirit of resurrection:
From being scattered to being gathered. Instead of living a life of disordered desires, pulled this way and that by things that ultimately distract from what we most deeply want, we can be drawn into our deep personal center, where God’s spirit meets us and tells us who we are.
From a heart of stone to a heart of flesh. Where we have been hardened to the wonders of life or numb to the suffering of others, we can experience a new freedom for connection and joy.
From hostility to peace. Where we have been obsessed with patrolling the boundaries in church or country or neighborhood between insider and outsider, worthy and unworthy, or where these boundaries have been used to push us away, we can experience a radical new openness and sense of belonging to one another.
From love based on merit to the love that is God himself. Where we have reached an impasse with our own anger over the daily violence, deception, and injustice of our times, we can learn to give that anger expression in lament, and be filled with a divine compassionate love that even extends to our enemies.
Who would I be, who would you be, who would we be if our humanity was remade in this way?
Lent is a season to ask that question. It is a season to hunger and thirst for the new humanity which Jesus inaugurated and opened to us.
Lent grew out of the early Church’s sense that the celebration of Easter Sunday required spiritual preparation. That preparation was framed around the movements of baptism. By reminding ourselves of all that God wants to do in us, through us, and for us, we become aware of the things standing in the way of that work, how we resist, domesticate, or sabotage our own remaking.
Which is why Lent is a season, not only of hunger—hunger for God’s will to be done in us—but of self-examination and repentance. Sometimes this takes the form of a decluttering, letting something go so that we can embrace something else, even if what we embrace is a felt lack, a sense of need, that sweetens over the forty days into solitude and silence.
Sometimes this repentance takes the form of commitment, engaging in a spiritual practice or stepping into a vein of service that challenges our resistance to grace.
Through it all, we notice—personally and collectively, Where am I, where are we, being ruled by fear, anger, or greed? By pride, envy, or apathy? We don’t notice those false spirits because God wants us to be ashamed. No, they are instead revealed by an infusion of light, a meditation on the perfection to which Jesus has summoned us. We see what we need to be freed from in the light of what we’ve been freed for.
Scattered to gathered. Unclean to clean. Old spirit to new spirit. Stoney heart to living heart. Strangers to friends. Enemies to siblings. Calculating love to unbounded love.
For freedom to come, our posture during Lent must be one of openness to change and consent to the movements of grace within us. Both Ezekiel and Paul describe the work of conversion as fundamentally the work of God. God says, I will sanctify my great name. …I will take you from the nations and gather you…I will sprinkle clean water upon you. …A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. Jesus has made both [Jews and Gentiles] into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility, between us. He creates in himself one new humanity.
God takes the initiative. God does the heavy lifting. God works the miracle.
It is all gift: the remaking of our humanity, the disarming of our resistance. It is all gift, all grace. It comes to those who seek it, ask for it, hunger for it, wait for it. It comes to those who give themselves into God’s hands and say with the old hymn, “Have thine own way, Lord / Have thine own way. / Thou art the potter, I am the clay.”
In a way, Lent intensifies for a season the daily rhythms and tensions of living in Christ and growing in love. We have to have some sense of where God wants to take us. We have to catch a vision for the new creation and begin to long for it, to hope for it, to hunger after it. And then we have to be honest with ourselves about our own inability or unwillingness to embrace it fully. And when we reach that place of hungering for what only God can give, we are ripe for prayer, ready for the outpouring of grace:
Help me, God. Help me to release what I need to release. Help me to take on what I need to take on. Help me to embrace necessary changes for the sake of my soul. Help me to relinquish my efforts to earn or achieve worthiness. Help me to rest in Christ and what he’s already achieved for me. Create in me a new heart. Renew a right spirit within me.
And then, when God arrives to give us the miracle—of a new heart, of a new humanity—we shall live in the land. We shall be God’s people. And God will be our God.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.