When was the last time you did a self-assessment on your conscience? When was the last time you joined David and prayed: “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139: 23-24)? We have a lot of time on our hands on the moment. At least, those of us who aren’t considered “essential workers” have a lot of time on our hands. Some of us are using it to tackle all those projects at home that we’ve been putting off. Some of us are using it to get reacquainted with our family members. Some of us are using it to deep clean our houses. And some of us are using it as a wake up call from God to slow down, take a breath, and assess where we stand.
We don’t often think about our lives on a deep, introspective level. We don’t often sit down and think about our lives and the choices we’ve made and how we feel about them. We don’t often sit down and ask ourselves about our spiritual fervency. We are living in the last days. That’s a statement we’ve heard all of our lives. After all, the disciples themselves believed they were living in the last days, but I think we can look around at our world and agree that we are getting ever closer to the return of Christ. What condition will He find us in when He arrives? Will we be the wise virgins who kept their lamps trimmed and full of oil? or Will we be the foolish virgins who weren’t diligent and neglected to have enough oil on hand?
1 Timothy 4:1-2 says: “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.” We often think about people with seared consciences as being non-believers, but this verse suggests that there will be believers who fall away after false teachings as well. When we commit a sin, it’s the job of our conscience under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to convict us of that sin, but what happens if we ignore that pricking of conviction? What happens if we continue to justify what we do? Our conscience gets seared. The more we ignore the input of our conscience, the less often our conscience will speak up against us. At some point, we can corrupt our consciences to the point that they no longer no the difference between right or wrong and we feel no conviction or guilt at all. This isn’t the state we want to be in when Jesus returns.
Don’t think it can happen to you? It can. It happened to David, and he was called “the man after God’s own heart.” We know the story of David’s sin with Bathsheba. He sees her bathing and lusts after her. His lust leads him to bring her to the palace. He sleeps with her and gets her pregnant. Then to hide his sin, he calls her husband back from the war to sleep with her in an attempt to make it look like the child is his. But Bathsheba’s husband screws up the plan. He doesn’t sleep with her. Now, David decides to kill him. After all, if Uriah is dead, he can’t tell anyone that he didn’t sleep with his wife when he came home. He can’t tell anyone that the baby is not his. One sin has led to another and another and another. David knows what he has done is wrong. Obviously, he does because he tries to cover it up, but he doesn’t repent. He doesn’t feel guilty enough to confess his sin….not to his followers….not to his friends….not to God. He has seared his own conscience.
It’s possibly a full year later when Nathan comes to confront David about what he has done. When Nathan shows up, David is finally ready to admit what he did wrong and to repent. He cries out in Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” David understands something about his nature, God’s nature, and repentance that we sometimes miss. I think this understanding is one of the reasons God refers to David as a man after His own heart. David recognizes that his very nature, his very core, is sinful. He recognizes that on his own, he will never do anything righteous. His heart is damaged by sin. He needs a new heart. He needs a clean heart. He wants to feel a pure conscience to feel joy in the Lord again.
David understood these two truths:
1)God cares about our hearts more than anything else. 1 Samuel 16:7 says: “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” Why does God look at our hearts? Because our heart is our inner self. It’s the most basic, fundamental part of who we are. Proverbs 4:23 tells us to “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Everything we do flows out of what is in our heart. It flows out of our inner self. Jesus said the same thing in Matthew 12:34 “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” God wants our hearts. He wants all of us. We can do all kinds of good deeds, we can give all kinds of sacrifices, but if we do not have our heart in the right place, it’s all meaningless. David recognized this too: “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise” (Psalm 51: 16-17).
2) Our hearts are fundamentally broken and sinful. Ever since Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, our very natures have been altered. We are born with sinful natures. We may desire to do what God asks us to do, but we lack the capability. We can not be good enough. We can not be holy. Genesis 6:5 says “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” Not long after the fall, here is the entirety of mankind plotting such evil in their hearts that God decides to wipe them out and to save only Noah and his family. Jeremiah agrees: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (17:9) What’s the solution? God is. There is nothing we can do for ourselves. The state of our hearts require God to intervene.
That’s what David is asking for when he says: “Create in me a clean heart.” The word “create” here is the same word used in Genesis. David knows that it will take a divine act of making something exist that did not exist before. It’s not enough for God to adjust David’s heart. It’s not enough for God to clean him up a bit. No, David realizes that at the core what he needs is a completely new identity. He needs a newly created heart. One that’s like the one that Adam and Eve were given in the Garden before they sinned. And God wants to do this. He tells Israel in Ezekiel 36 that this is His ultimate desire: “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 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. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. 28 Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God.” God does this through the work of Jesus Christ. When we are in Christ, we are new creations. Our old heart is gone. We have a newly created heart.
Just like God creates in us a new heart, He can re-quicken our consciences as long as we repent. True repentance is more than just confessing our sin. It’s more than just listing for God all the things we’ve done wrong. God knows what we’ve done. It does not good to rehearse the list for Him if we don’t do anything more than that. We have to change our thinking so that we see our sin the way that God sees our sin. Repentance means that we change our thinking and align our thoughts, values, and actions until they align with God’s. We get back on the path that leads to relationship with God. We turn ourselves around!
“The good news of the gospel doesn’t stop with pardon. We treat grace like it’s God’s big eraser for our every wrong or mistake. But God does not only mean to rub the page clean. No, He intends to write a new story in sin’s place, replacing what was once broken, wicked and dead with love, faithfulness, and life. The gospel doesn’t just get us out of hell, it also makes us new.”
Marshall Segal
I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to these things. As the time for Jesus’ return approaches, I want to be sure that I’m all in. I want to hear “Well, done. Good and faithful servant.” I don’t want to disappoint the Lord because I was too busy with the noise of the world rather than listening for His voice and following after Him. I want to humble myself like David and cry out, “Create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me.” I want to sing like the modern worship leader: “Clean my hands. Purify my heart.”
A Beautiful Mess 