~Paul David Tripp
“Every day you need it. You simply can’t live without it. What is it? The heart-convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit.”
I love the hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” I especially appreciate the honest admission and plea of the third verse:
“O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be! Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.”
Here is an honest, excuse-free expression of the spiritual struggle we experience between the grace of conversion and the grace of eternity. It is what we all deal with every day. It’s what causes us to lose our way. It’s what leads us to live in a way that is contradictory to what we profess to believe. It’s what makes us susceptible to temptation. We are all still in possession of wandering hearts.
We would like to think that our hearts are perfectly faithful and true, but they are not. We would like to think that nothing could lure us away from our loyalty to our Lord. We would like to think that our moral commitments are unshakable. We would like to think that what God says is wrong would not be attractive to us. We would like to think that we always think God’s thoughts after him and that our desires are always in the right place. We would like to think all these things. But the problem is that we still have fickle hearts.
You see, our biggest problem is not that we live with flawed people who bring trouble our way. Our great difficulty is not that we live in a fallen world where temptation tends to greet us around every corner. The big issue for us is not that we live in a world that isn’t operating the way God intended, and as a result we face difficulty, disease, suffering, loss, and grief. No, our big difficulty is that sin still resides in our hearts. It still distorts our thoughts and redirects our desires.
The less-than-perfect people, the temptations around us, and the broken world in which we live are problems for us because we have this problem in our hearts. It is humbling, but it is important to remember that it is only ever the sin inside us that hooks us to the sin outside of us.
So, what we need most is not a change of location or relationship, but a fundamental rescue of heart, and that is exactly what God’s grace in the person of the Holy Spirit provides for us.