Dealing with Private Sins

If you're going to be a holy person, if you're going to be a righteous person, it's going to have to take place in your own heart. That's where the battle has to be fought. If you're losing the battle on the inside, where nobody knows, where nobody sees, it will show up.

You don't have to step into a boxing ring or join the military to be a fighter. Man or woman, young or old, if you're a Christian, you are already in a constant struggle with an unseen foe. That foe is temptation.

So how do you win the battle? Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur is going to give you a clear-cut strategy for dealing with private sin as he continues his series called A Course for Life. It's a study that looks at foundational spiritual principles for high school or college students, and frankly for anyone. So no matter what stage of life you're in, you're going to want to stay here and find out what it takes to fight sin and pursue holiness.

And now here's John in a message he originally delivered to students at the Master's University. Talking about holiness, talking about purity of life is, of course, absolutely critical. It is the desire of the Lord that we be conformed to the image of His Son. It is the word of Scripture that if you say you abide in Christ, you ought to walk the way He walked, and of course He walked without sin.

That is, of course, the whole point of sanctification. And dealing with this is really critical, particularly in your youth, although I'll never forget being in the hospital room. A man was 78 years old. He was dying of heart failure. And I stood and leaned over his bed and I said, Are you ready to go to heaven? And he was weeping and I was a little bit concerned about his condition.

I had known him for a number of years. He said, Well, my trust is in Jesus Christ, 78 years old. But he said, I just never got victory over pornography, 78 years old. I was fairly well shocked by that because he hadn't even lived in this generation. He didn't even have a computer.

Nor was the film industry anything like it is or television today when in the years he cultivated habits. Apparently there was access to that kind of stuff for him and here he was, 78 years old, and that was the deep wound in a sense that he was carrying into meeting the Lord in heaven. If you're going to win that battle, I'm going to tell you today where you have to win it. I'm going to get right down to the nitty-gritty of where the battle has to be won. And I want to start with an illustration of a man named Job. You remember Job, I'm sure.

Job...you don't need to turn to it, for a minute I'll turn you there a little bit later. Job was by God's own attesting a righteous man. In fact, in the first chapter of Job, first part of the first chapter, he's identified as one of the most righteous, if not the most righteous man on earth, the purest man, holiest man. That's against the grain of what you might expect because that's way back before the revelation of Scripture was even written down.

He would have lived in the patriarchal period in the time of Genesis, so he wouldn't have had any Scripture to read, certainly wouldn't have had all of the nuances of New Testament sanctification to lean on. And yet he knew what it was to love his Lord with all his heart and soul and it impacted his life to the point that God commends him as the most righteous man. And then everything went south in his life. His children, his family all went over to have dinner at one of the son's houses and Sabaians came and raided the place and slaughtered his entire family, all of his children. And then it went from there to his crops and his animals and then his own physical health and he got these terrible boils all over him. I mean, talk about disaster, one disaster after another and the question, of course, that arises in your mind is if this was what happens to the most righteous man in the world, what does blessing mean?

If being righteous is supposed to produce blessing, how does this work? But anyway, Job is in a dire situation. The only person left in his life in immediate family is his wife and she's frankly a pain. She says to him, curse God and die, which is pretty terrible advice. And his friends, of course, know about this horrifying disaster and so they come to comfort him and his friends sit for seven days and never say anything. They were dead silent for seven days. It took them seven days of just flat out mourning in silence to reach a point where they thought they could say anything. That's how profound the suffering was.

All they could do was just agonize with him. And at the end of seven days, they gave speeches. Now during those seven days, they were infinitely wise because they said nothing stupid. As soon as they opened their mouth, all wisdom left and they gave these ridiculous speeches. And the bottom line was, well, this is evidence that you are a sinful man.

This is proof positive, Job, that there's something really rotten in your life and obviously we don't know about it. Now remember, none of them knew about the conversation that God was having with Satan that brought it about. None of them knew God's assessment of Job because that was in the secret councils of heaven.

So they gave the standard deal that most people give, if you're having that kind of problem in life, you must be a bad person. And so they give their silly speeches and Job listens to them dutifully. And then he answers them in the 31st chapter of Job by doing a little bit of inventory. He says, well, I made a covenant with my eyes so I haven't been gazing at virgins. If I have walked with falsehood and my foot has hastened after deceit, then let God show me that because I look at my situation and I have integrity. If my heart has been enticed by a woman, or I have lurked at my neighbor's doorway, you know, that's a peeping Tom, may my wife grind for another, may my wife leave me and cook for somebody else, for that would be a lustful crime. If I have despised the claim of my male or female slaves when they filed a complaint against me, if I haven't treated my employees right, then let God show me. If I've kept the poor from their desire, caused the eyes of the widow to fail, you know, dropping her head in despair because you wouldn't meet the widow's need, if I've put my confidence in gold, if I've rejoiced at the death of my enemy. He's going down the litany of all the possible things he could have done wrong.

And at the end of it, he says, I just don't see any of this. And so chapter 32 verse 1, so wonderful. Then these three men ceased answering Job...listen to this... because he was righteous in his own eyes.

Boy, that is...underline that, mark that, that's really critical. Job 32, 1, he was righteous in his own eyes. It wasn't a matter of what people thought about him. They were dead wrong. They hadn't seen any of these sins. He said, If I've done any of this, tell me.

They just assumed it because things weren't going very well. But at the end of the day, he takes his stand not on what God knows because he doesn't know what God knows, not on what they think because they don't think right. At the end of all of it, he is righteous in his own eyes.

He has done an assessment of his own heart and has been exonerated. That is critical. Let me put it to you simply. If you're going to be a holy person, if you're going to be a righteous person, it's going to have to take place in your own heart. That's where the battle has to be fought. You have to be able to say what Job said, I'm righteous. I've looked at myself. I've examined myself. I've looked at my motives. I've looked at my heart and I don't buy your accusations because if it's anything less than that, it's going to blow up. I promise you, if you didn't win the battle on the inside, sooner or later it will show up on the outside. You can't keep the lid on it.

It's impossible. You're not that clever and you're not that alert. You're not that disciplined. If you're losing the battle on the inside when nobody knows, where nobody sees, and you know you're not righteous there, it will show up. Be sure your sins will...what?...find you out. Let me take you to another man in the New Testament. Turn to 2 Corinthians chapter 1. 2 Corinthians chapter 1 and, you know, this is one of my favorite books written by, in my judgment, the greatest leader that ever lived humanly, the Apostle Paul because the model of his leadership is in this epistle.

In 2 Corinthians you get a better look at the heart of Paul than you do anywhere, anywhere in the New Testament. And the reason you do is because he's under attack. It's the same thing with Job. He's under attack. Only this time it's not his friends, it's his enemies. With Job it was his friends who were attacking his credibility and his integrity and Job stood the test by saying, I've examined my life and I'm telling you, I'm righteous. Well Paul is being attacked by enemies. They...false teachers, combination of, you know, Greek philosophy and Greek oratory sort of wed together with the Judaizing elements of Judaism invading the church. The false teachers came into the Corinthian church, they wanted to teach lies.

As false teachers always do, they are agents of Satan and they bring doctrines of demons and, you know, they're like the clock that doesn't run, they're right twice a day and that gives them some credibility. And they came into Corinth and they knew that if they were going to teach their lies and upset the gospel and tear up the church and destroy evangelism, they were going to have to get rid of the confidence people had in Paul. So they decided to attack Paul. If they could discredit Paul, if they could totally undermine Paul, it happens all the time, people do it to their pastors, you know. Somebody who decides they wanted to bring some new teaching into the church or some new power structure into the church to everything they can to undermine the pastor, destroy the pastor, it happens not just in churches, it happens in any environment.

And that's what happened. So they started attacking Paul and they basically said, and I'll show you the key here, it's over in chapter 4 and verse 2, he says, "'We have renounced things hidden because of shame, not walking in craftiness or adulterating the Word of God.'" And here's what they were accusing him of. They were accusing him and you have to kind of go through the whole book to put all the pieces of this together. They were accusing him of sexual sin. They were accusing him of material greed. They were accusing him of being in the ministry for money and favors from women. They were accusing him of falsifying his apostolic credentials.

They were accusing him of overestimating his ministry impact and effectiveness. They were accusing him primarily of having a secret hidden life of shame. In other words, he was a phony, he was a hypocrite. He came on as if he was the servant of God and the man of God, but under the surface was this hidden, shameful, wretched, wicked life that he was walking in craftiness, that is he was a deceiver, that he was not true to the Word of God, he was adulterating it.

I mean, that's the sum of it. That's the worst that could be said, that underneath the surface of this apparently godly, faithful proclaimer of the gospel, there was a secret hidden life of shame and he was nothing but a hypocrite. You know, there are people in the ministry for whom that is true. They're in there preaching and teaching and under the surface there's a hidden life of shame. He just uncovered a pastor back in the Midwest who preached in his church for over 20 years. That means that he had probably people who were in that church when they were born and they had grown into their 20s when he was there and gone through their life under his leadership. They found out the church for all those 20 years had been giving him money and been giving him money because he had a desire to give money to poor families in the area as a witness for the church and they gave him cash so he could give it to the poor families.

They began to do a little bit of a study and they found out that the poor families never got that, the local prostitutes got it over a period of 20 years. Now that's a secret hidden life of shame. He was exposed and, of course, then immediately people who sat under his ministry for 20 years retroactively go back and wonder what in the world has this 20 years been if this man without the power and influence of the Spirit of God has been my teacher.

Horrific things like that happen from time to time and there are those who have a hidden life of shame and you know that, you've experienced some things like that as well. Sometimes it's even your parents who...or somebody in your family who puts on a show for people in church, but underneath it's like the whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones. So they said that of Paul. I want you to see Paul's answer, chapter 1, verse 12, because I think this gets back to the core of what we're talking about here. Second Corinthians 1, 12, this is the heart and soul of the issue.

Our proud confidence is this. Now Paul says, look, I've got to answer these accusations. Now I want you to understand, Paul is a humble man.

We know that very clearly. It comes through everything he writes. He's a selfless man. He's a Christ-exalting man. He wants to do nothing but exalt Jesus Christ and Him crucified. When you ask him for his apostolic credentials, he says, I was beaten more than you.

I was shipwrecked and all of that stoned and left for dead. He looked at his suffering as the true badge of his apostleship because in it was the essence of his humiliation for the sake of the gospel. He was not a proud man. But he was willing to defend himself against false accusations because he didn't want people to believe what was not true and therefore discredit his ministry and therefore shut themselves off from the truth which he preached. So reluctantly he hates this and you see that all the way through this epistle. He hates to have to defend himself but he will do it...he will do it.

And how will he do it? I was flying across America in one of the leading religious evangelical quote-unquote preachers, TV preachers sat down behind me on a jet, proceeded to drink too much and get to the point where he was inebriated and he saw me and he knew who I was. And he, for whatever reason, didn't like me. And so he decided in his lack of self-control to let me know that. And he just unloaded on me. And I said to him, I said, Well this is very interesting that you are sitting there and talking to me because I am right now writing a review of your book for magazine.

So maybe I could ask you a few personal questions to make sure I get this right. Well that was a pretty stunning providential meeting. Well then he launched into some furor and used some profane words at me.

I went ahead and wrote the review and it was published. Later on, about two weeks after this incident on the plane, I received a thick envelope, about that thick from him, full of 15 letters written by everybody on his staff that knew him telling me what a wonderful person he was. I work with this guy and he is a...and it went on.

I mean, paragraphs, 15 pages, 15 letters on different letterhead from all these different people in his organization. You know what? I didn't buy that. I didn't buy that.

What is that? I saw what was in his heart. When he got under the influence, the real deal became manifest. So what's Paul going to do to defend himself? Is he going to say, Here's 15 letters from my 15 buddies? You say I have a hidden life of shame? No, I don't. And here's 15 letters?

No. Look at verse 12. Here's our confidence. The testimony of our conscience. Look, Paul says, I'm telling you, I've looked inside and here's the testimony of my own conscience that in holiness and godly sincerity, not in fleshly wisdom but in the grace of God. In other words, this holiness and this godly sincerity comes by the grace of God, not by the wisdom of my flesh. But I am telling you, my conscience tells me that we have conducted ourselves in the world and especially toward you in a way that is holy and godly. Let me tell you something, folks. If you can't say that, you've got a problem. You really have a problem because it's only a question of time before that gets manifest. You're not able to say with Job, I have done a full examination and I'm telling you, I am righteous, as righteous as a man can be before God.

If you can't say that, you have a serious problem because you're losing the battle on the inside and will show up on the outside because as you think in your heart, so you are. And if they come at you and they say you've got a secret hidden life of shame, if somebody came to you and pinned you to the corner and said, are there secret things in your life, shameful things that only you know about that you're trying to cover and so forth and so on, could you stand up with the Apostle Paul and say, look, my proud confidence is this, that my conscience tells me that I have conducted myself in the world. That means in the world outside the church when nobody's looking and I have conducted myself in the church right with you in such a fashion that my conscience tells me I have conducted myself in holiness and godly sincerity, not by my own fleshly ability but by the grace of God at work in me.

There you have the...that's the safest place you'll ever be. And that's the highest earthly court. God is the highest heavenly court.

The highest earthly court is conscience. Sometimes people say to me, well, you know, John, who are you accountable to? Who are you accountable to? Huh, I'm the huge list of people that I'm accountable to. You, I'm accountable to you.

You expect a certain kind of conduct out of me, don't you? I'm accountable to you, believe me. You have expectations that I as a man of God, as a teacher of the Word of God, as the president of a college that bears the name of Jesus Christ, you have expectations of me that legitimately would establish the fact that I should live a godly life, I should live in holiness and godly sincerity. You have that expectation of me. That expectation of me is a point of accountability.

And if you have it and you're here for a time and gone and the faculty are here all the time, they have it on an enduring basis. And then there are people around me, people that I work with, they have expectations of me and so do the other people that I work with in the various ministries. So do the Elders of Grace Church and so does the congregation there. I have a lot of accountability there. My wife, she thinks that I should do everything I preach perfectly.

I tell her, honey, I preach a better message than I can live. I mean, give me some slack, just a little. That's a lot of accountability. My children hold me accountable. Do you think they have an expectation for me?

Of course they do. My grandchildren hold me accountable and expect me to live a life that supports what I say I believe. And those people are at, you know, varying levels around me, moving into very, very intimate levels where people that work very closely with me have seen me in every situation. And I'm always amazed. I was on an elevator in a foreign country not long ago and I said to a person something like, you know, which floor is such and such? And somebody spun around and said, I know that voice. You're John MacArthur.

Oh, I mean, that happens to me quite a bit. Walking down the street somewhere in some other part of the world, people will, you know, I have accountability, but let me tell you something. Nobody on this planet knows what's in my heart.

Nobody. And nobody can hold me accountable there. That is where the battle is won or lost.

And if you're losing it there, you're going to lose it on the outside because you can't keep the lid on that. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur. Thanks for being with us. Today's lesson is part of a series of messages John preached during chapel at the Master's University.

It's titled A Course for Life. John, today you said that the most persistent accountability that we have in the fight against sin comes not from other people, not from people around us, but from our own conscience. And so we're in big trouble if we weaken the conscience. So, John, talk about the danger of a seared conscience.

How does that happen, and why is it so dangerous? The conscience depends on two things. It depends on sensitivity, but it depends on truth. I suppose a terrorist who sets off a bomb and kills people is doing that because his conscience is clear. Why is his conscience clear? Why does his conscience allow him to do that? Because it's been misinformed. He's been given a warped, corrupted form of belief that he's bought into.

So you would say that is an unconscionable thing for a terrorist to blow up a bunch of people, but not for him. So the first thing to be said about the conscience is it has to be built on the truth. People do things literally freed by their conscience because they're so misinformed. So the conscience in itself is not moral. It just reacts to whatever our set of convictions are. So the first thing to know about the conscience is your conscience only functions the way God intends it to function when you're dealing with the truth. The second thing to know is you want it always to be sensitive.

You don't want to override it. And when you have a seared conscience, it means you've ignored it and ignored it and ignored it and ignored it, pushed it back, pushed it back. It's as if you've scarred it.

And when you scar tissue, it loses its sensitivity. You should respond with the first restraint that you launched in the direction of a sin. The first restraint of your conscience ought to be enough to stop you. But if you go past that and past that and past that and past that, you're basically putting layers of scar tissue on your conscience.

So those are the two dangers. One, misinforming the conscience with lies, and two, scarring the conscience by ignoring it when it tells you the truth. And if you want to be an effective, godly person, you have to be informed by the truth and respond with sensitivity to your conscience. I want to tell you about a book, one of my favorite books of all the ones I've written, called The Vanishing Conscience. The Vanishing Conscience, powerful, powerful book.

I remember, Phil, we sent it to all the Congressmen and all the Senators in Washington some years ago. The Vanishing Conscience, what your conscience is all about. Reasonably priced, you can order it from grace to you today. This book will help you in your daily battle with temptation and sin, arming you with the tools you'll need to keep your conscience clean. To order The Vanishing Conscience, contact us today. Call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org.

The Vanishing Conscience is available for $11 and shipping is free. To get your copy, call 800-55-GRACE, or you can order online at gty.org. And of course, to make sure your conscience is sharp, you need to know and apply God's word. To help with that, let me encourage you to get our flagship resource, the MacArthur Study Bible. It has introductions to each book of the Bible, dozens of maps and charts, and the standout feature, the best thing of all, 25,000 study notes from John, with detailed explanations that will help you know what each passage means, and it will help unlock the life-changing power of Scripture in your life. To get the MacArthur Study Bible, available in the English Standard, New King James, and New American Standard versions, call 800-55-GRACE, or visit our website, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff. I'm Phil Johnson, reminding you to watch Grace To You television this Sunday, check your local listings for channel and times, and then be here Monday for another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.