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

Berkoff: "The law was not substituted for the promise; neither was faith supplanted by works. "

The giving of the law did not effect a fundamental change in the religion of Israel, but merely introduced a change in its external form. The law was not substituted for the promise; neither was faith supplanted by works. Many of the Israelites, indeed, looked upon the law in a purely legalistic spirit and sought to base their claim to salvation on a scrupulous fulfillment of it as a body of external precepts. But in the case of those who understood its real nature, who felt the inwardness and spirituality of the law, it served to deepen the sense of sin and to sharpen the conviction that salvation could be expected only from the grace of God . L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans publishing co., 1938), 498–499.

John Stott on the "old man" and the "body ruled by sin" in Rom 6 v 6

There are, in fact, two quite distinct ways in which the New Testament speaks of crucifixion in relation to holiness. The first is our death to sin through identification with Christ; the second is our death to self through imitation of Christ. On the one hand, we have been crucified with Christ. But on the other we have crucified (decisively repudiated) our sinful nature with all its desires, so that every day we renew this attitude by taking up our cross and following Christ to crucifixion. The first is a legal death, a death to the penalty of sin; the second is a moral death, a death to the power of sin. The first belongs to the past, and is unique and unrepeatable; the second belongs to the present, and is repeatable, even continuous. I died to sin (in Christ) once; I die to self (like Christ) daily. It is with the first of these two deaths that Romans 6 is chiefly concerned, although the first is with a view to the second, and the second cannot take place w...

F.F. Bruce: ...know their father's will...

The NT does not contain a detailed code of rules for the Christian. Codes of rules, as Paul explains elsewhere, are suited to the period of immaturity when the children of God are still under guardians; but children who have come to years of responsibility know their father’s will without having to be provided with a long list of “Do’s” and “Don’t’s.” What the NT does provide is those basic principles of Christian living which may be applied to varying situations of life as they arise. So, after answering the Corinthian Christians’ question about the eating of food that has been offered to idols, Paul sums up his advice in the words: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). Phrases current in worship, like “to the glory of God” or (as here) “in the name of the Lord Jesus,” were given a practical relevance by being applied to the concerns of ordinary life. Bruce, F. F. (1984). The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the...

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