Graham: Quicken my conscience till it feels

When Jesus had finished probing the hearts of the people with whom He came in contact, He said: “Out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness” (Mark 7:21–22). Jesus taught that the human heart was far from God: darkened, unbelieving, blind, proud, rebellious, idolatrous, and stony. He taught that the human heart in its natural state is capable of any wickedness and any crime.

A teenage boy was arrested in New York for having committed one of the most vicious murders of our time. His mother exclaimed, “But he is a good boy!” She had not stopped to realize that an unregenerate human heart is potentially capable of any crime. A certain poet has written:

Quicken my conscience till it feels

The loathsomeness of sin.

That is the reason why many of the peace treaties which have been signed in human history have not been kept and war has ensued. These treaties have been signed in good faith, but they were signed on the basis of trusting the motives of the other party. They have been broken time after time and millions have died on the battlefields of the world because the human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked.

Our hearts are impure! As a result, we are filled with inner tension, pride, frustration, confusion, and a thousand and one other spiritual, mental, and physical ills. The very root of our lives is bad. The theologian William G. T. Shedd said, “Human character is worthless, in proportion as abhorrence of sin is lacking in it.”

Jesus says we will never be completely and supremely happy until our hearts are pure. Samuel Rutherford urged us to “labor for a strong and lively sense of sin . . . the more sense of sin, the less sin.”

Billy Graham, The Enduring Classics of Billy Graham (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004).

Comments

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