A Clean Heart
Back in the '90s, there was a very successful “contemporary” Christian music artist (by the way, what does contemporary mean, exactly? Like, opposed to hymns and Gregorian chants? ). The band was dc Talk. Some of you reading this had their tapes and t-shirts. One of their lyrical lines still plays in my head:
“I despise my own behavior.”
Wow. That’s pretty deep if you think about it. Especially for rock lyrics. But here I am 31 years later talking about it.
I find a similar sentiment in Psalm 51:10
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
The Hebrew word for clean is טָהוֹר (taor), meaning pure in a moral and ethical sense. So it’s a righteous, good, holy heart the Psalmist (likely David) is after. That’s what he wants God to create in him.
So here are a few obvious, but profound observations:
The psalmist recognizes he is NOT pure. The cleanness is yet to be present
The psalmist is concerned about this.
The psalmist wants to be clean (hence the request for a clean heart)
Only God can do this (he entreats God’s help)
Let me hammer on a few of these points:
We’ve got to recognize our uncleanness, our brokenness, our rotten hearts before anything good can happen. If we don’t even recognize when we’re immoral and evil, then there is no problem and we’re done here.
Then we need to be concerned about being unclean. We’ve got to be discontent with the jealous, hateful part of ourselves that wants to lie, kill, steal and destroy. We need to be unsettled about the uncleanness in us. We don’t like it and we want it gone.
I’ll be honest. Sometimes I don’t care if it’s gone. Sometimes, I’m not discontent and I only care about getting ahead and I’m not worried about how I do it. I was at a wrestling tournament for my son yesterday. There is always an admission table to take payment. Sometimes it’s not cheap, either. I don’t recall paying to enter your own kid’s sporting events being a thing in the '90s. I came in through the back (unintentionally) without paying. There was no table for taking payment there. And you know what? I was perfectly fine with that.
The difference between my wife and me is that she would be looking for the admission table to pay and I wasn’t.
Now that concerns me. I’m grateful I married up, but concerned about my crappy character.
I’m ashamed of that. I mourn that. I’m bothered by the fact that I wasn’t bothered by not paying. And that signifies a problem in my character. I have a character deficiency.
God can work with that. He wants us to admit our sin and brokenness. He sees it all, anyway. And if we’re bothered by the fact that we’re not bothered, that at least is a step in the right direction. That shows a contrite, humble heart, willing to confess God is right and we are wrong. That shows we want to be fixed, we want to be clean.
Only God can fix us. Only God can change hearts. Patrick Lencioni can’t do it with his leadership principles and Elon Musk can’t cut out the rottenness from us with DOGE. There’s no Ozempic for character faults. But there’s something way better: The Holy Spirit, who changes us more and more to look like Jesus is speaking to us. All we need to do is listen,
God, we despise our own behavior. Please change us.
-TF
