Erring Hearts

In Psalm 95:10, God said of His people, “they are a people who err in their heart, and they do not know My ways.”  He tells the details of the activities that showed this.  You can read it in Exodus 17 or Deuteronomy 6, 9, 33 or  a multiple of other passages in the Bible.  And erring hearts will look differently for different people but the bottom line for this post is that whatever it is, we better be all about getting rid of it. 

The first way to deal with erring hearts is running to God in prayer.  Consider the follow excerpts from a couple of prayers of John MacArthur: 

“We confess with deep sadness, that we are rebellious by nature, so we do not always serve You as we should.  We want to bask in the fullness of Your joy and find our deepest delight in the sunshine of Your glory.  Yet we are prone to wander.  We are too easily tempted.  We are weak and worldly and wrong-hearted creatures, great debtors to Your mercy and in desperate need of Your grace.”

“Dear Lord of all mercy, remove from our hearts the festering pride, evil desire, false motives, insincerity, envy, longing for worldly prominence, and every other secret sin.”

Great prayers!  I love the last part of the second quote, “and every other secret sin”.  Let’s get it all.  John Owen said, “Be killing sin or sin will be killing you.” 

And remember, as the first prayer says, “We want to bask in the fullness of Your joy and find our deepest delight in the sunshine of Your glory.”  At the end of Psalm 95, God says of the people He is referring, “Truly, they shall not enter into My rest.”

We cannot bask in the fullness of God’s joy with an erring heart!  Let’s get busy confessing, asking and dealing with the sin of an erring heart.