Audio Transcript

Charlie writes in to ask this sobering question: “Pastor John, what can a person do to restore the softness of their conscience? I once had a softer conscience toward impurity, injustice, and sin in general. I desire to restore my heart to a sensitive state but feel as though time and the world have made it very callused. I want sin to bother me more. How can one gain back a tender and sensitive heart toward these things?”

I love the spirit of that question. It is a beautiful longing and it points in a frightening way to a really clear biblical reality, namely, that believers can drift into callous, hard, indifferent frames of heart.

Sin Deceives

Basically, Charlie is asking how to reclaim his heart when Hebrews 3:12–13 has begun to happen. And here is what that says: “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”

So we are hardened by sin’s deceit, and Charlie has described it clearly. He said, “I once had a softer conscience toward impurity, injustice, and sin in general. I want it back. I want to restore that sensitivity so that I won’t be callused. I want sin to bother me more. How can I gain back that tender, sensitive heart?” And that is exactly what Hebrews 3:13 says we can lose. We can become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. So I am very, very thankful that God has arrested Charlie before it is too late, which he clearly has in the way he is asking that question.

Recovering a Sensitive Heart

The key in this text is pretty clear: Sin is deceitful. Don’t be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. It lies to us. It tells us that there is no problem with doing wrong, thinking wrong, watching wrong, speaking wrong. It lies to us. And the solution to the hardening effect of those lies is truth. The opposite of being deceived is being shown the truth — seeing and loving the truth. So here is what I would suggest to Charlie.

1. Read about the glories of holiness.

First — these are from my experience and from the Bible — get a copy of Jonathan Edwards’s book The Religious Affections. Get paperback and, I would suggest, not a paraphrase, but the original wording. No book had a greater impact on making me hate my sin and long for holiness as much as that book. There may be other books that do it better for different people, but in 1971–1972, sitting in a rocking chair on Sunday evenings reading that book very slowly was an unforgettably devastating and glorious experience of being filled with the horrors of sin and the glories of holiness and the desire for the latter.

2. Read about the seriousness of sin.

Second, recently I read Stephen Westerholm’s new little book, Justification Reconsidered. There is a chapter in there on the depth and seriousness of sin, and it had a very similar effect. So if you want a shorter, small thing, that little chapter on Paul’s view of the exceeding sinfulness of sin can help.

In other words, we just need help from the Westerholms and the Edwards of the world who have thought deeply and seen deeply about these things. We need to be confronted with truth about sin so that it wallops us like it may not be walloping us when we are reading the Bible for ourselves because we have got some kind of blinders on that these guys may break through.

3. Read portraits of purity.

Third, on the other side, God uses beautiful portraits of purity and holiness to fill us with a longing for goodness and a tenderizing, a melting sense of how wonderful it would be to be a kind and godly and tenderhearted person. So here I would say, get Jonathan Edwards’s, “Heaven is a World of Love.” It is the last chapter of Charity and its Fruits, which is an exposition of 1 Corinthians 13. And the whole book might have the same effect, but for me that chapter was one of the most glorious and beautiful descriptions of holiness and goodness and beauty and what God is, and is for us and what we can be in him. I was just blown away reading that with my wife years ago.

4. Pray for deliverance.

Fourth, pray that God would deliver you. Underline the word pray. Pray that God would deliver you from hardness and make you tender. Believe it or not, Charlie, I have on my phone an app called “Do” in which I can set reminders for myself. And I have a reminder set for every single day, the verse, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another” (Ephesians 4:32). And I chose that verse as a daily reminder — it has been there for weeks — because of the word “tenderhearted,” because I felt like you. I don’t want to grow callused or hard toward God, toward my daughter, toward my wife, toward my kids, toward anybody. I want to be a tenderhearted man with a steel spine, but a heart of warmth and kindness and patience. And so, join me in daily prayer reminders to go hard after God in asking him to do that miracle.

5. Jump into community.

Fifth, surround yourselves with those who are sensitive to sin and who love holiness. That is the point in the text, isn’t it? “Exhort one another every day as long as it is called today, lest there be this hard heart in you.” So evidently, community is helpful. And here’s a text that doesn’t get quoted very often because I think we tend to think it might be a little bit moralistic: 1 Corinthians 15:33. Paul said, “Bad company ruins good morals.” And I read it in Greek this morning just to make sure I had it and it is interesting that when it says good morals, it is talking about kindness. Literally it reads, “Bad company corrupts kindness.”

And so I would say, I don’t know who you are hanging out with, but a lot of Christians are trying to be missional by hanging out with worldly people and it turns out they are not being missional — they are being malleable. You didn’t convert them. They conformed you. And so now you are loving all the same things they love because you were watching all the same movies and hearing all the same stories and using all the same language, and suddenly you realize, “I guess wasn’t being as missional as I thought I was, and I was just enjoying myself with ungodly people, and I have absorbed their values.” And if that is the case, you probably need some new friends who are loving holiness and hating sin.

6. Worship with God’s people.

Here’s my last piece of counsel: Be in a worshipping community where every Sunday you stand with God’s people in heartfelt praise to God for his mercy. Focus on the beautiful love of Jesus for you in worship in particular. Sing with Paul, “He loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). I close with this, because it has been my experience in all my pastoral ministry that to stand and let the singing of the people cascade over me while I join them in it has been melting and softening to my soul and my heart like few things have been.