Filling a Clean Heart
“Create in me a clean heart, O God,
And renew a steadfast spirit within me” Psalm 51:10
One of my favorite parables is found in Matthew 12:43-45. It tells of an evil spirit leaving a man’s body looking for another place to dwell. However, finding no other place as comfortable as the one he left, the spirit decides to return to the man he occupied to see what the situation is now. When he returns to the man, he finds “...the house unoccupied, swept clean, and put in order.” In fact, it’s so clean that now there is room for more evil spirits, so he invites seven of his friends to dwell there with him, and Jesus says the state of the person is now worse than it was originally.
Jesus is most likely speaking about Israel and the Pharisees specifically. The context of this parable involves Israel’s house having been swept clean, at least to some extent. With the coming of John the Baptist and ultimately, the arrival of Jesus, change is in the air, and the people in Judea can feel it. In Matthew 3:1-12, John the Baptist is preaching for Israel to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and Israel is coming to him. Verses 5 and 6 say that “Jerusalem, all Judea, and all the region around the Jordan went out to him and were baptized by him in the Jordan confessing their sins.” There is a spirit of repentance at John’s message. Israel is beginning to sweep its house clean.
However, the reformation for some, wasn’t genuine. When John sees the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he calls them a “Brood of Vipers” - a phrase Jesus uses again in Matthew 12:34. John warns them that unless they bear good fruit, fruit “worthy of repentance”, they will not flee the wrath to come.
They aren’t interested in cleanliness. In fact, on the very morning that Jesus teaches this parable, He has been in conflict with the Pharisees after having cast an evil spirit out of man who was blind and mute. The Pharisees in their desperation to explain a miracle they can’t deny, suggest that Jesus is, in fact, working in the name of Satan.
Certainly, considering His open conflict with the Pharisees immediately preceding this parable, the context is that Israel’s spiritual reformation is empty. Their “laws” may be kept, but there is no mercy, compassion, or faith. As a result of their refusal to receive the Messiah, the hardness of their hearts is worse than before. And we are told that at this point, these men are actively plotting murder.
This sequence of events, and the parable that Jesus uses, make clear that it does us no good to ask that God cleanse our hearts of evil things if we aren’t going to fill them up with good things.
We understand that we have to be clean, but part of that cleanliness is then filling ourselves up with things that will help us “bear good fruit, worthy of repentance.”
We know we cannot cleanse our hearts on our own; only God can create a clean heart. And yet, we must be a part of the process, and from personal experience, it is a daily process. A process of being disappointed in myself and dejected - embarrassed - of regretting words and actions. I have days when I just wish I could have a do-over. I want to start over with a clean slate.
In the verse that we are using for inspiration this month from Psalm 51, that is what David wants, too. Psalm 51 was written after David’s eye-opening and personally devastating meeting with Nathan where David condemns himself to death before being told he’s the man on trial. I’m so grateful that the faults of the faithful are not polished up for us. David, a man after God’s own heart, after a scandalous liaison with Bathsheba and a murderous plot to hide his sin, is humble enough to come to God and ask Him to clean his heart…to allow him to start again.
How many times have you wished you could start again? Don’t you ever wish you could just wash off all of the grime of past decisions and forget they ever happened? We can’t do that, of course. There are always the consequences to be dealt with; David dealt with his consequences just as I will deal with mine. It seems to me that being forced to contend with the results of bad choices is part of the cleansing process. IF we will accept the cleansing as God’s love, as His desire to show us a better way, only then can we see the transformative power of the pain.
In our cleansing, God doesn’t remove the consequence because that’s part of the process. In verse 8 of the psalm, David prays that God will remove his sins and make his heart glad so that “the bones You have broken may rejoice.” The bones have to be broken. The suffering must be endured. The consequence must be accepted.
The idea of cleanliness being essential in our desire to be near God is seen throughout the scriptures. In Exodus 19, the nation of Israel was about to be brought into the full covenant with God. They accepted the terms, and in order for them to know the law was of God and not Moses, the Lord was going to descend on Mt. Sinai. In verse 10, God tells Moses to “Go unto the people, and sanctify them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their clothes.” The sanctification process was intended to be two parts - both within and without. Yet, even sanctified, the nation of Israel couldn’t so much as touch the base of Mt. Sinai as God descended from heaven.
We understand the image of being dirty or rotten. Jesus calls the Pharisees whitewashed graves - clean on the outside and filthy and rotting within. Because the desire wasn’t really to be pleasing to God but to bolster their pride in knowing the law, the Pharisees had watered-down the law until it had no transformative power at all. They had stripped it of any content that would clean the heart.
We can do the same. We can be so intent on keeping a checklist of do’s and don’ts that we lose perspective on the content of our heart. I worry that we do that not only with ourselves but with our children. When John was a teenager, I didn’t want him out drinking, and I certainly didn’t want him to misbehave with girls. Those are concrete behaviors that I watched for, absolutely! However, I also didn’t want him to be arrogant or without compassion or greedy or vain.
Do we watch for those issues in our children’s hearts? Or are we so hung up on the “behaviors” - that checklist - that we, too, miss the weightier pieces of the new law of Christ? Can we teach our children to desire clean hearts without ever talking to them about what that means? I don’t think so, and we must not leave our children empty either because this world is waiting to fill them up!
We have to teach them, and that means letting them feel the discomfort of the consequences in their own lives - it’s part of the cleansing. We shouldn’t swoop in and rescue or defend them when the repercussions of their decisions arrive. There is purpose in the pain for a Christian, and that is a perspective we have to pass on to our children. They should learn it from us as we learn it from the Father in heaven. He doesn’t save us from the world; He gives us the ability to live in the world but not be a part of it. He gives us a way to return to Him when we fail, and He allows us the opportunity to learn from the pain. To find joy in being broken.
In James 1:2-4, James tells the Christians who are being persecuted, “2 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
I know he’s not talking about trials brought on by our own uncleanness; however, I think the meaning applies. It’s what David says - “Make me hear joy and gladness, That the bones You have broken may rejoice.” Help me be joyful in the trials - whether they are external and beyond my control or whether they are the result of a situation I created, help me be joyful! Test my faith and produce in me patience and endurance so that I am more complete. Create in me a clean heart. You do the creating, God, and I will endure the trial and let it transform me…brave prayer!
We have the option to find something beneficial in our circumstance. The whole world suffers, but for us we can see profit in it. However, if we become bitter about a situation and fail to see the lesson in the turmoil, which we’ve often created on our own, or if we try to avoid the inevitable disaster we sometimes create, then we are not taking joy in the necessary breaking of our bones that must happen if we are to be restored to God.
There is, of course, suffering that we do not create - life happens to all of us, but the hope that God is working everything for our own good should give us perspective in the face of any storm. And it should make us desire, more than anything, to sweep ourselves clean, to allow God to clean our hearts, despite the pain, shame, and embarrassment, and then, we should be motivated to fill our lives up with good things.
If we don’t fill ourselves with goodness and God’s righteousness, then the world will come back in, with more of its friends, and finding us empty, it will fill up the space - and we will be worse off than we were before.