Podcast: Gospel: The Wicked Heart

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The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
-Genesis 6:5-6

I have spent several weeks now trying to spread some good news. It may not seem like that’s what I’ve been doing, because what I’ve said has been what most people would consider negative. But a lot of times, if you don’t know the bad news, the good doesn’t seem all that important. A patient is not going to rejoice at a cure unless he already knows he has the disease. A criminal is not going to rejoice that his case was dismissed if he doesn’t know he was charged with anything.

So I’m done being rough on you for a while. Maybe not long, but for a little while. Today I want to talk about the evil heart, but that evil heart is my own.

I was one of those “well-behaved” kids. My teachers loved me because I had good grades and never got into trouble. I was a Boy Scout, a third baseman with a good eye at the plate. I was successful in most things I tried. Academically, I was an A student (with a rare exception), but I was big and strong, so I was a good choice in physical games too. I was raised to be courteous and respectful. I was a good kid.

By my actions, it really seemed like I had it all together. And in a worldly way, I did. I was on the road to becoming successful and well respected.

I bring all of this up because I know what lurks in the heart of a good kid. I was proud, quick to anger, and full of lust. I really thought I deserved to be rich and famous, like it was my right. I never thought much about God, because why would I? I didn’t need Him.

I bought into the lie. I bought into the lie that it’s what I do that makes me a good person. If I blow up in anger every once in a while, well, I made up for it in other ways. If I sought my own ends rather than the good of others, well, doesn’t everyone? And, hey, I was better than most!

Eventually, the darkness of my heart began to come in out in my behavior. I would get impatient more often. I got upset when I wasn’t the focus of attention. I thought I deserved that. It comes out pretty innocently, but it’s not innocent at all. When I had a problem, I expected my friends to drop everything to help. When with a group, I expected everyone to talk about what I wanted to talk about.

My outward life became very closed off and dark. There was only room for me in there, so with others weren’t meeting the needs that I had, I would get mad.

I wasn’t loving anyone at all, but I expected them to love me. I wasn’t loving God, but expected Him to honor me.

This is narcissism on the level of dictators. I wouldn’t have admitted that then, but it is. It is the worst criminals in history that seek their own needs over anyone else, and that’s where I was – I just wasn’t acting on those thoughts like the worst criminals do. And you know what, this sort of selfishness is rampant in our culture. Our laws constrain most of us, but most of us have that sort of selfish and evil heart.

I can’t tell you exactly why it happened when it did, but God opened my heart to a little of His light. I was shocked and disgusted with the evil in there. For so long I had pushed stuff aside, telling myself that my thoughts don’t matter, or that it’s not a big deal. But at once I became aware of the lust, pride, selfishness, greed, and anger in my heart.

I couldn’t put it aside anymore. I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I felt so ill that I wanted to vomit. I spent the next several days crying whenever I thought of what I had made of my life.

How do you fix that? How do you make up for that? See, I was always judging my life by my actions. You know, more good than bad. But I realized that even my good deeds were often done out of selfish motives. I realized that my actions weren’t as good as I thought, because they were done with an evil heart. The good was done with evil motives, and the evil was more of a reflection of who I truly was. It was a startling realization, and it destroyed me.

The reason I’ve done this series is because I want you to see that too. It’s counterintuitive, but the more we concentrate on our own hearts, the less we realize how dirty it is in there. I want you to look at what God says about us and realize that your heart isn’t as clean as it should be. Most of the time, we’re okay with ourselves, so we expect God to be okay with us too. Except that God sees clearly all that stuff that we hide away. God is going to judge us not only by our actions, but by our words and thoughts. How is any of us going to pass that particular test?

My pride was broken, but that still left the question – what do I do with that? You can try to bend your will to fix the problems in your life, but they’ll only bring up new ones. You know, this all happened five years ago, and I still struggle with pride and anger. It’s still plaguing me. So I can try my best to be good, and I’m still going to be spouting some sort of garbage.

The truth is, you can’t do anything with it. You can’t fix it. You can’t make it up to God. You can’t repair the damage you have done. And you can’t cover it up with good deeds, because even those get tainted by your evil heart. We are selfish at heart. We are lustful at heart. We are proud at heart. We are sinners at heart. At heart, we seek ourselves rather than God. We’re guilty. We’re guilty before a Holy and just God and deserving of punishment.

Someone must to pay for my sins. God is a just God, and He doesn’t let such crimes go unpunished. A good judge doesn’t let criminals go. If he did, he wouldn’t be a good judge. It’s the same thing. God is just, and He wouldn’t be just if He let sin go unpunished. And frankly, the punishment was more than I can pay in this lifetime, because sin can only be atoned for by the shedding of blood.

Trying harder wasn’t going to save me. I wasn’t going to be able to make up for my sins. It wasn’t going to be enough to keep pushing it back into the corner of my heart. Good deeds wasn’t going to do it. It wasn’t anything I did at all. It was Jesus.

Someone has to pay for those sins. I could have spent eternity in eternal torment to pay for them. But I won’t. I don’t have to, because Jesus did.

Jesus came to earth in the form of a man, lived a sinless life, and died on a Roman Cross. He had no sin of His own to pay for in the shedding of His Blood, so He paid for mine, and not just mine. Because He is God and of infinite power and value, He has the ability to pay for an infinite number of sins, the sins of all those who repent and put their trust in Him. On the third day He rose again, insuring that I will rise again into eternal life also.

The thing that saved me was Grace. It’s the thing that saves me today, and will continue to save me. I couldn’t do anything with the evil inside me, but He took it from me. In exchange, He gave me His righteousness. In repentance and belief in Jesus we can be saved.

But the Spirit had to knock down that pride of mine before He could really start rebuilding, because before that I could barely acknowledge that I needed a savior at all.

I think that’s where most people are. They don’t turn to Jesus because they don’t realize they need a Savior. Every other major religion in the world tells you to try harder and do better, and that’s sort of the way our brains are wired. If something is wrong, then we can fix it! What God says is this – “You can’t fix it, but I can.” Jesus can fix it. That’s what He was doing on that Cross, and if it were just a simple matter of us trying harder, then His death was in vain.

The best period in my life was that time when He revealed to me that I wasn’t making it on my own. Now I stand on Grace. Where do you stand?