Keeping a Pure Mind

If we're going to enjoy happiness and fulfillment, we're going to have the kind of joy that causes our heart to rejoice and gives us the freedom to serve God gladly and happily and without constraint, then we have to have a clear conscience. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. You've probably heard the slogan, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Well, what could be a greater waste than to load your mind with sin, to daydream of immorality, or to harbor bitterness, or to think selfish thoughts and never think of others?

So how do you keep your mind pure? How do you prevent outward temptations from becoming sinful thoughts, possibly even leading to wicked actions? Find out here on Grace to You as we bring you one of John MacArthur's classic sermons on defeating sin and temptation, Keeping a Pure Mind.

It's part of John's study, Foundations Volume Two. Now to help you attack sin where it starts, here's John MacArthur. Turn, if you will, to 2 Corinthians chapter 1, and let me just read verse 12 to you to set the context for a further discussion of this matter of conscience. Paul writes, For our proud confidence is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in holiness and godly sincerity, not in fleshly wisdom, but in the grace of God, we have conducted ourselves in the world and especially toward you. Now you remember that the apostle Paul was being assaulted as to his integrity, as to his righteousness, as to his authority, as to his credibility, as to his effectiveness. He was being attacked on every front, and in defense of himself, he appeals to the highest court. The highest court that is on earth, apart from God Himself, is conscience. He doesn't ask for the testimony of some other men to come to his aid.

He doesn't ask for some group to write a letter of commendation. He simply says this, Whatever you may be saying, our proud confidence is this, the testimony of our conscience. And his conscience was affirming that he was holy and he was godly.

He was sincere. He did conduct himself properly in the grace of God in the world and toward the Corinthians. Conscience, then, is the highest court on earth. It is conscience, according to Romans 2, 15, which either accuses us or excuses us.

That is, it either affirms us as being good and righteous and holy, or it indicts us as being evil and sinful and wicked. And frankly, conscience is the best critic because it knows the innermost secrets of our heart, and nobody else does except for God. If we are going to have a peaceful life, if we are going to have a tranquil life, as Paul called it, a quiet and peaceable life, if we're going to enjoy happiness and fulfillment, if we're going to have the kind of joy that causes our heart to rejoice and gives us the freedom to serve God gladly and happily and without constraint, then we have to have a clear conscience.

That should be really the desire and the goal of every believer, to be able to say what Paul said. You can bring all the accusation against me you want, but the proud testimony of my conscience is that I am living in holiness and godly sincerity. We want to experience that kind of affirmation from our conscience, and that's challenging because sin pervades us, all of our inmost being. Sinfulness is at the very core of the human soul. Jesus said, for example, in Matthew 15, 19 and 20, out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders.

These are the things which defile the man. And then He said, the evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth what is evil, for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart, Luke 6, 45. In other words, down deep in the human heart is pervasive sinfulness, and it rises to create the kind of words and the kind of actions that we label as sinful. Frankly, it is human nature to love sin and hate God.

The carnal mind, Romans 8, 7 says, is enmity against God. We are born loving sin, loving ourselves, hating righteousness and hating God. Yet, though we are born that way, mark this, sin is not a weakness or a flaw for which we cannot be held responsible.

It is an energetic, purposeful antagonism toward God that rises out of our will. Sinners freely, willfully, and gladly choose sin. In other words, the sin that is in us manifests itself in a deliberate, willful rebellion against God. The Bible says that sinners will reason in their hearts like this, Psalm 12, 4 says, with our tongue we will prevail, our lips are our own, who is Lord over us. As if to say, God's not making any claim on my life, I'll say what I want, and I will do what I want.

Isaiah 57, 4 characterizes sinners as rebellious children who open wide their mouths and stick out their tongues at God. Sin would dethrone God, depose Him, usurp His authority, and set self in His place. All sin is therefore at its heart an act of pride, pride. Pride says, move over God, I'm in charge, I'll do what I want. Therefore, all sin at its core is blasphemy.

All sin at its core is blasphemy because it attacks God. And when we come into this world, we love sin, and so we love our rebellion, and we love our pride, and we love our blasphemy. We delight in it, and we seek every opportunity we can to manifest it. But we have a problem. We have a conscience. And conscience tells us we are guilty. It hammers us. It is like a relentless ringing in our spiritual ears. And so what do we do? We try to silence conscience by camouflaging our sin, or redefining our sin, or disavowing our responsibility. Now, you could summarize how we do this maybe in three ways. First of all, in order to quiet our conscience, typically we try to cover up sin, mask it.

This isn't new. Adam and Eve did this in the garden. It says in Genesis that when they sinned, the eyes of both of them were opened. They knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. And then they hid themselves from the presence of the Lord. They tried to hide.

They tried to cover up. King David tried in futility to cover his guilt. When he sinned against Uriah, he committed adultery with Uriah's wife Bathsheba. When she became pregnant, David first plotted to try to make it seem as if Uriah was the father of the baby, according to 2 Samuel 11, 5 to 13.

That didn't work, so then he had to scheme to have Uriah killed. That only compounded his sin, and for all the months of David's having to deal with Bathsheba's pregnancy, he continued to try to cover his sin. Later, when David was confronted with his sin and repented, he said, When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For night and day, thy hand was heavy upon me, my vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer. Psalm 32, 3, and 4. David tried to cover it up, and his conscience just plagued him so that his life juices dried up.

What's that saliva, blood flow, the fluid that conducts the nervous system? He literally became a sick, sick man. The second way we try to deal with our sin in order to salve or camouflage and help our conscience survive is to attempt to justify ourselves. Sin is always somebody else's fault. Again, you go back to Adam, and Adam blamed not Eve, but actually God.

He described Eve as the woman whom thou gavest to be with me, and therefore was blaming not just his wife, but his God as well. Typically, people try to excuse their wrongdoing because they think they have some valid, compelling reason. They convince themselves that it's okay because they really are victims of some outside power, some other source. In our day, we even label sin as sickness, label ourselves as victims, deny that we have ever done anything really wrong. The human mind is endlessly creative in trying to justify itself.

Perverted thinking causes us to do that. Thirdly, and just briefly, we are oblivious to our sin. We try to camouflage our sin by covering it up, attempting to justify ourselves as victims, or we are oblivious to our sin. In other words, we may sin in absolute ignorance. We're so ignorant, we're so unknowing in terms of God's law that we just sin inadvertently, and that's characteristic of us as sinners. We, like the psalmist, have to pray, who can discern His errors?

Equip me of hidden faults. And that's what David said in Psalm 19, there are things going on in my life I don't even know about, as well as keeping me back from presumptuous sins. There are the things we know about and plan and premeditate. There are the things that just are the inadvertent activities of our fallenness. We naturally tend to be insensitive to our own sin.

That's why Jesus said, before you go poking around in somebody else's eye in Matthew 7 to take out a toothpick, why don't you take the two-by-four out of your own eye? And we can see sin very often better in others than in ourselves, and sin is very deceitful. Sometimes we think because we don't see the act of sin that we don't have to deal with the attitudes of sin that are in our hearts. So we as human beings, we're just talking categorically in general now, we as human beings have a conscience. Conscience is triggered when we sin. It is triggered by the highest law known in our hearts, and since even pagan people have the law of God written within them so they know what is right and wrong, their conscience afflicts them with guilt. They have to deal with that.

How do they do it? Usually they cover it up, justify it in some way, or just flatly ignore it because they're so busy in their life, they're so uninformed about the things that God says about their sin, and even if they sometime in the past knew about it, they've long forgotten what they once knew, and so sin can go on in the lives of people and they aren't even sensitive to it. It's becoming such a pattern in their life that they don't even label it as sin. Now that's a dangerous way to live because ultimately it's going to damn you. Ultimately it's going to send you to hell because you're camouflaging the very thing that you have to recognize in order to come to a Savior, right?

And we've talked about that. Now I want to go a little bit deeper into this because I'm very concerned about it for all of our lives, and I want to just ask a few questions and try to answer them so we can dig a little deeper into this. The first question is, what is sin? Let's get some kind of a clear idea of what sin is. Sin, according to Scripture, is, 1 John 3, 4, the transgression of the law. That is to say, sin is any violation of God's law. Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness, says the New American Standard in that same verse, and sin is lawlessness. It is a violation of God's law.

Any lack of conformity to the perfect moral standard of God is sin. Now the central demand of God's law is this. What is the first commandment?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, right? And the second is, like unto it, love your neighbor as yourself. So the epitome of all sin is to violate those two. The epitome of all sin, then, is to fail to love God.

That is the primary violation. And it shows up when John 16 says that the Lord's going to send the Holy Spirit, and He will convict the world of sin. What is the sin? Of sin, because they believe not on me. In other words, that's the partner to loving not the Lord is loving not the Lord Jesus Christ. That's why 1 Corinthians 16, 22 says, if any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be damned. So the ultimate sin, the epitome of sin, the summation of sin is lack of love for God, lack of love for Christ. That is the epitome of all sin.

That is the summation of all sinfulness. The carnal mind, Romans 8, 7, again, is not subject to the law of God, and it can't be. So an unregenerate person cannot keep the law of God, and therefore he sins and sins and sins and sins, and the compelling sin that leads the parade is lack of love for God, lack of love for Christ, and along with it, the attendant love for self which manifests pride.

Our natural hatred of the law is such that even knowing what the law demands does nothing but stir up more disobedience. Listen to what Paul wrote. The sinful passions are aroused by the law. I would not have come to know sin except through the law. I would not have known about coveting if the law had not said, You shall not covet. But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment produced in me, coveting of every kind, Romans 7, 5 to 7. Paul says, I read about a sin, and then I knew what it was, and then I saw myself doing it. Rather than the law of God helping me to defeat sin, the law of God just aroused sin. The more sins I learned about, the more things my heart desired to commit. Such is the sinner's penchant for sin that the more he learns about God's law, the more he sins.

The law is not going to help him. The law is just going to excite sin. In fact, Romans 1, verse 32 says, I suppose the sum of it all, even though they know the law of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but they give hearty approval to those who practice them. They know the law of God, and they know it leads to death, but they do it anyway, and they applaud the others who do it.

Amazing. Now, our entire culture today reflects this passion for sin. We live in a culture where the passion is now legitimate. In some cultures, it isn't, and so there are social restraints on it.

But not in ours. Our entire culture reflects this passionate love for sin, and nobody wants to seem to hinder it. Nowhere is this more visible than in the media world.

The media...the media have become the spokespeople for the base sins of man. Its programming is purposely designed to appeal to the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. It is not intended to make people moral, to make them good, to make them think deeply. It is not intended to educate them.

It is not intended to inform them. It is intended to release their passion. That is all it is intended to do.

That is its entire purpose. The entire production, the entire defense of sin reminds me that we live in a culture given over by God to its own evil lusts. People love their sin, and they will go to extreme ends to justify and rationalize it. And as long as they do that, they damn themselves, right? Because if you don't define the disease properly, you're never going to come to the proper cure. You can't come to salvation unless you understand sin. Obviously, then, this kind of thinking is deadly and damning to those who are deceived by it. But it is also true, and this is where I want to move at this moment.

We don't have much time left. This kind of thinking, and this is what concerns me, this kind of thinking has invaded the thinking of Christians. It has. Christians are casualties to the culture's redefinition of human behavior. Churches are. Churches which once would not tolerate adultery and fornication and homosexuality and lying and cheating and whatever other kinds of thing, very tolerant of it now. Churches that once would want to confront sin don't confront it anymore.

We've all fallen into the psychological game-playing of self-esteem and ego-building. This is typical in all the movements of the Christian church. It isn't in every church, but it's certainly where the thrust is.

And if you speak against it, you're really anathema. We have allowed the world to redefine God's moral law and even to redefine God's character and make Him more tolerant of sin than He is. Constant exposure, then, to the Word of God is essential. What people desperately need, constant exposure to the Word of God, which is the only thing, listen to this, that's going to keep you sensitive to the divine morality week after week after week as you're assaulted by the other stuff. When we need that so desperately to keep our sensitivity to God's standard and to true holiness and true purity, churches are jettisoning that in favor of entertaining their people. It's an amazing time in which we live. Now, I want to ask a second question.

We'll see how far we get. What sin is the most serious? We know what sin is. It is any violation of the law of God, and we're never going to be sensitive to sin unless we are constantly made sensitive to the law of God. And you do that through the teaching of the Word because the culture is just drowning people, including Christian people, in this new morality and this new psychological explanation for iniquity and this new garbage about self-esteem and the need to build your ego.

We know what sin is only as we are exposed to the Word of God, and I think it has to happen all the time. This is not a time for short sermons that are interesting. This is a time for long sermons that are demanding. Keeping a pure life is very, very challenging in this time, and we need to hear the Word of God.

But let's go a little deeper. What is the most serious sin? What sin is most serious?

And I'll tell you what the answer is. The medieval theologians had it right. It's the sins of the mind. It's the sins of the mind. Jesus said it. It's out of the heart that the mouth speaks.

It's what's in the man's heart that comes out that is so defiling. And the real challenge in our lives, beloved, is to keep a pure mind, and that is very challenging. And I believe the only way that's going to happen is to be continually brought, as it were, to the feet of the Word of God and to have it convictingly proclaimed. Actually, the seven deadly sins of medieval theology were not behaviors at all. They were sins in the mind, all of them. And no sin is more destructive to the conscience than the sin that takes place in the arena of the mind. The sins in the mind assault the conscience like no other sins because, listen to me, the conscience is their only deterrent. A Christian friend can be a deterrent to a sin of the tongue, can't he? You're going to watch what you say if you're around another Christian.

Is that not true? A Christian friend, a husband, a wife, a child is going to be a deterrent to sins of action, but the only deterrent that you have in your entire life to sins of the mind is your what? Your conscience. And you need to feed the Word of God constantly into your mind so that your conscience really operates with full power. Your conscience needs to be able to be so sensitive to the sins of your mind so that you can enjoy the kind of thing that Paul enjoyed when he said our proud confidence is this, the testimony of a good conscience.

You've got to deal with the sins of the mind. Only you and only God know about them. 1 Corinthians 2 11 says, who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Who knows?

Nobody knows, just you in your own spirit. Many people who won't do evil deeds are nevertheless boldly evil in their thoughts. They won't act out evil things because there's peer pressure and there are compelling reasons not to but they are very involved in evil in their minds. A man who, for example, abstains from fornication for fear of getting caught might convince himself that it's all right to indulge in his own mind in salacious fantasies because he thinks no one will ever discover such a private sin. The fact of the matter is the sin he deliberately entertains in his mind may be a thousand times more evil than anything he would ever think of doing before others. And Scripture says his guilt is the same before God as if he acted it out. That's why his conscience is so demanding, so relentless.

That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His lesson today on grace to use titled, Keeping a Pure Mind, and it's part of a collection of sermons that we've titled, Foundations Volume 2. Well, if you're going to fight sin, the obvious first step is you need to recognize it for what it is, sin. That said, John, it's not uncommon for people to recognize a sin and hate it and deal with it, only to fall back into the same sin again as a familiar story and a frustrating one for many, many people. Well, yeah, and I would say it's a frustrating thing for all believers because we never will gain the final victory over our fallen flesh while we're still living in this fallen flesh. And it is also true that we have particular besetting sins. Not everybody has the same sins as somebody else that they battle. So yeah, there's going to be a frustration, and I think the best illustration of that is Romans 7, where the Apostle Paul no less, probably the leading Christian in the world at that time, or maybe any time, says, oh, wretched man that I am. I do what I don't want to do. I don't do what I want to do, and I'm a wretched man. So at any point in your Christian life, you could look at yourself and say, that's still true of me. But Paul would also argue that he was being sanctified and conformed to the image of Christ.

It just wasn't perfect. I want to mention a booklet that I think will help you with this. It's a really fascinating story. The title of the booklet is Hacking a Gag to Pieces. That might sound a little weird, but it's a story in 1 Samuel 15. King Saul was not fully obedient to the Lord, which led to horrible, horrible consequences. It's a convicting and accurate picture of what happens when a believer only partially deals with sin instead of really mortifying it or killing it. But how exactly do you do that?

How do you rid yourself of its influence? Hacking a Gag to Pieces will offer some practical wisdom for mortifying sin in your life. Booklet gives you seven simple biblical commands that when obeyed will allow you to put sin to death. It not only shows you what mortifying sin is not, five misconceptions, but what it is. Twenty-six pages.

That's a short read, but practical and very important as you struggle to be sanctified. So we'll send you a copy of Hacking a Gag to Pieces. Are you ready for this? Free of charge. All you need to do is let us know you'd like one.

That's right, friend. This booklet will equip you to deal with temptation and the day-to-day struggle with sin. Again, we'll send you a copy free of charge. Just ask for the title Hacking a Gag to Pieces when you contact us today. Our number here, 855grace, and our website, gty.org. John's booklet, Hacking a Gag to Pieces, will show you how to live in the spirit and the dangers of partial obedience and how to tear out sin at its roots. Again, for your free copy of Hacking a Gag to Pieces, call 855grace or go to gty.org. And while you're at gty.org, be sure you take advantage of the thousands of free resources we have there. At the Grace To You blog, you can read practical articles on subjects including mortifying sin in your life.

Just look for the series of articles titled How to Slay Sin. It's a great supplement to the lesson you heard today. And don't forget, at our website you can download all 3,600 of John's sermons for free. Look for those Bible study tools and more at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Remember to watch Grace To You Television, Sundays on DirecTV channel 378, and be back tomorrow to find out how damaging sinful thoughts can be, even if no one else ever even knows about them. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace To You.