A Word in Season: What the Heart can Hide (Psalm 19:12–13)

Perhaps you have already learned not to trust your own heart. You have learned the truth of what

Jeremiah the prophet spoke when he said that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked and asked, who can know it?

Perhaps you've reached the point of David in Psalm 19 when having considered the wisdom of God as it's revealed in the book of creation and the wisdom of God as it's revealed in the book of special revelation, the truth of the

Lord, pleads, who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults, keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins, let them not have dominion over me.

Then I shall be blameless and I shall be innocent of great transgression. When we know our own hearts, or perhaps better when we know how little we know our own hearts, when we understand something of the truth and the beauty of the law of the

Lord, then we too would speak in these words, who can understand his errors?

My friends, none of us can plumb the depths of the sin of our own souls. However much we think we see, there are still things that we don't see.

We need to appreciate that because God is God and utterly and entirely holy and because we are fallen creatures, there will always be a fresh uncovering within us, not just of follies and frailties, but of real transgressions.

And so David pleads, cleanse me from secret faults, from those hidden things, some of them perhaps deliberately masked over, the things that we hold back, the things that we cover over with a veil and hope that no one else will ever see.

But when those are exposed by the word of God, when the law touches us at those sensitive points, we ought to be praying to God in advance, cleanse me from secret sins.

And when they are exposed in us, all the more earnestly, O Lord, make me clean.

Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins, says David. We have within us a fearful capacity to believe the best about ourselves, to persuade ourselves that things are true when they are not and therefore to enact presumptuous sins, to go forward with arrogance on the understanding that either what we're doing is right or that even if it's wrong, we can get away with it.

And David is fearful that out of his heart might come presumptuous sins and so he asks

God, keep me back, hold me back from that, don't let me believe a lie, don't let me indulge in transgression, do not let these sins have dominion over me, don't let me succumb to that kind of thinking and feeling and acting.

Then, and only then, I shall be blameless and I shall be innocent of great transgression.

I believe it was Robert Murray McChane who said that the seed of every sin lies latent in the heart of every man.

When we look within ourselves, we ought not to be patting ourselves upon the back that we are free from all sin and will not fall into any transgression.

We ought to be fearful lest if God were to withdraw some of those gracious restraints that he imposes upon our souls, we would fall into all kinds of wickedness and misery.

There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford, said a godly man. He was speaking of the fact that when he saw a man going on his way to the gallows, that the only thing that kept him from being in that man's place was the mercy of God toward him.

And so my friends, we need to be very conscious of the fact that we ourselves are often poor judges of what is true and right, that our hearts deceive us, that we're prone to persuade ourselves of our own righteousness.

And so it's good for us to consider the works of the Lord, to look at the world that he has made and to remember how he has revealed his

Godhead, his power in those things. And then to look at the word that he has given, the truth that he has written, and the law that he has provided.

And in the light of those things to consider that our hearts are going to go on being exposed and the truth is going to continue to be pressed into us and we need to go on learning what it means to walk in the ways of the

Lord. And so among our responses to that should be this, who can understand his errors, cleanse me from secret faults, keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins, let them not have dominion over me.

In this way and in this way only by the grace of God shall we be blameless and innocent of great transgression.