SOILED HEARTS

"Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” - Genesis 2:7

When man fell into sin in the Garden of Eden we exhaled our eternal breath of life.  Now born in iniquity, the desires of our hearts are soiled, wicked, and deceitful.  Mankind was formed from dust and brought to life by the breath of God. The fall of sin has petrified our hearts to stone. We must see the pit of sin down deep and become a student of our own heart. The awareness of sin is not permission to sin and ignorance of sin is not bliss. Ignorance of sin is a walk in darkness down the path of destruction. We must come to know intimately our indwelling sin and it must cut to the heart.

Grace gives us eyes to see the depth of our complex, disordered hearts, and our double minded motives. The roots of sin intertwine around our hardened hearts in complicated knots opposing the gospel simplicity of surrendering our life to Christ. “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?” - Romans 7:21-24. The heart quake of the Holy Spirit stirs the vipers in our hearts complicating every step of the way as we see what before was little observed. Trials are designed to prevent us from living at peace with our sin. A painful snap of affliction stirs the vipers of our heart with the intent to expose and drive out sin. Indwelling sin humbles us in our awareness of its presence. The deeper and darker the sin, the more the light of Christ’s redemptive work on the cross is magnified. When we whitewash the darkness of our sin it gives way to pride and blinds our need for a savior.

Wandering in sin is a painful and restless journey, but there is a rest for God’s people, “for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” - Hebrews 4: 10-13

We must feel the sting of our disease before we appeal to a physician for a solution. The gospel affords a spring of hope to a contrite and broken heart. The quake of sin is a sure mark of the Holy Spirit’s work germinating in the heart’s soil. “But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.” - 1 Tim 1:15-16