Dear BPCWA worshipper, I will be recapping during worship service the lesson the children learned during our recent Holiday Bible Program. At the same time, the theme for last year’s HBP, “Truly Truthful”, comes to mind. We often consider truthfulness as the absence of a falsehood. However, there is another aspect of truthfulness that I want us to consider in today’s pastoral, and it is the importance of an honest heart. 

A dishonest heart. Created in perfection, man became sinners in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve fell. The effect of that was immediate. Before that, Adam could commune with God face to face and was perfectly satisfied to receive His commands. But sin changed all that and when God came “walking in the garden”, they “hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God” (Ge 3:8). They had obviously known that they had sinned against God’s commandments. But when man fell, their once tender heart whose object of desire was God changed drastically. They could not face God. They did not want to face God. Man’s heart no longer delighted in God and His instructions. As a result, there was no readiness to admit their transgressions when confronted (Ge 3:10) and they instead tried to cover up the underlying reason and root cause for their hiding from God. Even when God directly addressed their sin (Ge 3:11), they were unwilling to admit their culpability for their sin (Ge 3:12, 13) and sought to shift attention to others instead. Eve blamed Satan. Adam blamed Eve and God. Neither would be honest about the fact that they were personally responsible for their sin. Their hiding from God was just an outward reflection of the inward situation of the heart. Neither would honestly face self and God and admit sin. We inherited this sinful nature. And so, today, every man born into this world continues to bear the traits of this fall. Natural men are born with dishonest hearts which are so distorted from the original creation that God says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer 17:9). A deceitful heart is a dishonest and insincere heart that gives false impressions or hide the truth. The fallen heart is so crafty that no man knows the state of their own heart. They do not know the extent of their own deceit, even deceiving their own selves and numbing themselves of their transgressions. Every single unbeliever has such a heart.

Response of dishonest hearts.  God says, “every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.” (Joh 3:20). Evasion of truth and evasion of the real issue at heart is the heart of the matter. The greatest dishonesty is the heart that won’t face up to what lies within about our real selves in the eyes of God. Like Adam and Eve, we find ways to cover up and hide. When confronted, we even make ourselves look like the victim of our “weakness” or find ways to excuse our own failings. But the reality is that we choose to sin and remain in sin rather than repent. We keep telling others our “struggles” and “desires” to overcome sin. The reality and the honest truth is we just will not bother to deal with the sin, even though we know exactly what to do from God’s Word.  We know that there is something that is hindering our spiritual life, but we want to keep it. We cover up our real intentions and veil it in what “seems” right. In our dishonesty with ourselves, we even manage to convince others to pity us. Our heart begins now to feel better because even others are trying to console and comfort us. We refuse to come to the light, lest our disinterest to repent gets exposed and rebuked. Sure, some are sincerely putting in genuine efforts to repent by dealing concretely with their pet sins by God’s grace. We certainly do our part to support and encourage them. But we have to be brutally honest about ourselves if we have done what God’s Word tells us to do in how we choose to spend our time, what we should do with the idols of our hearts, and what we should do to replace them with spiritual pursuits. Otherwise, we will continue to be dishonest with ourselves and not grow in sanctification. Our conscience will continue to prick us. Sermons will continue to always seem to “be about us”. We will start to despise God’s grace that reaches out to cause you to repent while we stubbornly continue to hold on to our own ways.

A regenerate heart. On the other hand, God tells us of a different heart in the parable of the four soils. This is “the good ground”, “which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.” (Lu 8:15). Only the believer has such a heart. Only such a heart will bear fruit. In this verse, the word “honest” is translated from the Greek kalos, one which is beautiful by reason of purity of heart and life, and hence praiseworthy and excellent in nature and characteristics. Only a believer can have such a heart that is not characterized by dishonesty and deceit, especially when facing the self within us. The change from a deceitful heart to that which is honest and good is a change that happens when one is saved. The new heart comes through the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit. I am not suggesting in the least that every born-again believer has achieved a perfect purity of heart. However, a true believer can grow in the purity of an honest heart about self by the grace of God. The question is do we want to? We will not want to have such an honest heart about self when we do not want to give up our sins. Instead, we will, like Adam and Eve, blame others and situations. We can even blame parents and the church for not motivating us to love God, that is why we continue to love sin instead. If they motivate us to love God better, we will obey His laws better. So, with blame, we can hide from facing God, and we will avoid facing the sin-loving self especially.

Have an honest to self heart. David avoided facing up to his sins of adultery and murder for months. He continued doing all the outward things the king of Israel needed to do. He managed to put up a false front to those around him. Few, if any, knew what David did in secret and why he did what he did outwardly. Of course, God knew. David lived in misery, but he chose to go on living so, “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. 4 For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah” (Ps 32:3-4). However, David chose to respond honestly to the rebuke of the prophet God sent to him. He cried to God to  “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” (Ps 51:10). The question to each of us today is this – God has, through His Word and sermons, constantly revealed to us our hearts. Have we been ignoring Him, brushing aside the Holy Spirit’s pricking of our conscience about certain matters that we need to deal with, or worse still, getting angry and excusing our own sin when we recognise ourselves in His Word’s rebuke? Don’t harden your heart while He continues to prompt you but respond in humility today. Let us not forget God’s warning when we keep brushing aside our God-given conscience to face ourselves and deal honestly with God – we will head towards deeper dangers and a shipwreck awaits,

“Holding faith, and a good conscience; which some having put away concerning faith have made shipwreck” (1 Tim 1:19)

Yours in our Lord’s service,
Pastor