Cultivating a P.U.R.E. Heart, Part 2
“A message for Fathers and their Sons”

October, 2008

by: Brock Bolde

Last month we started a series that is designed to help us to cultivate a P.U.R.E. heart. We live in a culture that seeks to lure many of us and our sons into impure thoughts and actions. Ours is a day whereby modesty has gone by the wayside and the need to cultivate purity is essential. The first thing that each of us must do if we are to cultivate a P.U.R.E. heart is Pursue God! As we learned, the more we pursue God, the less likely we are to fall prey to the schemes and snares of Satan. A second thing that we must do to cultivate a P.U.R.E. heart is Unveil Sin!

John Stott, in The Cross of Christ, had this to say about sin:

Every sin is a breach of what Jesus called ‘the first and great commandment’, not just by failing to love God with all our being, but by actively refusing to acknowledge and obey him as our Creator and Lord … Sin is not a regrettable lapse from conventional standards; its essence is hostility to God (Romans 8:7), issuing in active rebellion against him. (p. 90)

If we are to be a people with pure hearts, we must view ourselves and our sin rightly. We must come to grips with the fact that it was our sin that nailed Jesus to the cross; it was our sin that caused the wrath of God to be poured out upon our loving Savior. It is critical that we understand this because far too often we do not treat our sin seriously enough. We tend to downplay it and sugarcoat it rather than unveiling it for the heinous act that it is. We cannot continue to allow this to happen if we are to cultivate a P.U.R.E. heart. We must see our sin in the same light that God sees it!

• Man calls sin an accident, God calls it an abomination.
• Man calls sin an error, God calls it enmity.
• Man calls sin a fascination, God calls it a fatality.
• Man calls sin a trifle, God calls it a tragedy.
• Man calls sin a weakness, God calls it willfulness.

Fathers and sons, I cannot plead with you enough to unveil your sin and see it as the beast that it is. Some of you have an inaccurate view of sin—you do not take it seriously enough. You do not see the danger of allowing your mind to engage in mental fornication. You buy into the mentality of the world that tells you that you can look at whatever you want as long as you don’t touch. But I ask you, is this true? “Can a man take fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned?” (Proverbs 6:27) Do you reject the teachings of Jesus whereby He tells you that “everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart?” (Matthew 5:28) Do you somehow think that you are exempt from this? That this doesn’t apply to you? Some of you need to wake up and you need to wake up quickly! Sin is a brutal task master. It does not like to be restrained and it will take whatever steps are necessary to gain control. It knows no age limits and shows no partiality to those it will place under its heavy yoke. All of us need to take a page from the life of Job such that we would make a covenant with our eyes (Job 31:1). All of us need to take heed to the teachings of Ephesians 5:3 so that there might not even be a hint of immorality or impurity mentioned among us. And the only way this can happen is for us to view our sin in the proper way. If we are to cultivate a P.U.R.E. heart, then we must learn to hate our sin—we must learn to view it in the same way that God views it and use all of the resources that He has put at our disposal to put our sin to death.