Since I finally had a chance to watch the panel meeting with Lady Gaga at Harvard University where she launched her foundation, Born This Way. Lady Gaga was very engaging, passionate about helping create better communities that embrace kindness, love and acceptance. She has a great message and appears very genuine in her love for people. And she is looking for people to partner with her to bring that message to multiple communities. She admits, she has few answers to the problems of hate, violence and cruelty to fellow man, but wants to bring awareness to the need for cultural change.

She has amassed a host of experts, media personalities like Oprah, author Deepak Chopra, and others to bring awareness to the idea of supporting systems to build confidence in youth, empower them to be brave and kind. Her message: Stop the hate, violence and meanness and try love, kindness and acceptance.Who can’t get behind this idea?

But while all the experts have a wealth of understanding on violence, bullying, hate and other factors that contributes to tearing down the confidence and esteem of a person, few solutions are working. Why is that?

Lady Gaga believes that we will transform the hearts of people through acts of kindness and bravery, one person at a time. She is on to something, but how to change hearts is what is missing in this conversation.

True transformation of the heart is found in Ezekial 36: 25, “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.” The Holy Spirit in us motivates us to pursue holiness and gives  extraordinary power to love under the most difficult circumstances. Christ in us causes us to be brave, to empower, to love, to have empathy, and to be kind. Jesus’ commandment was to love your neighbor as yourself.

Spurgeon said that a man’s heart is not easily softened and that hearts that are not softened grow harder and harder. We live in a culture of hardened hearts—the hard hearts of cruelty and meanness. But as Spurgeon notes, a heart of flesh is tender towards the suffering of others. It brings a tenderness of conscience, the very thing needed to make change.

So while I applaud Lady Gaga for aiming high to make a shift in the culture– from violence to love, the missing ingredient is God’s ability to change a heart of stone to a heart of flesh. This change requires spiritual surgery on the heart. He takes out that heart of stone and replaces it with a heart of flesh. Then, we are empowered to truly love one another.