His Mercy Is First
There is a kind of tired that sleep doesn't help.
It's the tiredness of a person fighting the same battle in their head for years. Now they begin to suspect they're losing. They pray. They read. They try to think the right things. Still, old thoughts of resentment, lust, and envy come back. Then this thought: Am I really saved? Does God care about these thoughts?
A man asked a pastor what to do about intrusive thoughts like these that he couldn't shake. The pastor told him grace would work like tree roots under a sidewalk — that as the Word took deeper hold, it would slowly buckle and break the concrete of those old thought patterns and sin practices.
It's a picture with which I can generally agree, but it left this man cold because he didn't hear how to repent. He heard wait. And waiting, for a soul already convinced it isn't holy enough, is just one more reason to despair.
This week, I ran across an old book that I think would help that man (and the rest of us). An old Puritan named Thomas Goodwin wrote The Vanity of Thoughts, which has a cure for the despair hounding this man.
Goodwin pictures the heart as a boarding house. Before God sets up new management in it, the house keeps an open door. Every wandering person that drifts through finds a welcome there — fed, entertained, given a bed for the night. So also, before faith in Christ, our hearts allow any and every thought to find lodging.
God changes the heart. Christ atones for our sins, and we receive full forgiveness by faith in Him.
But Goodwin saw something else that many of us know by experience: The old thoughts will keep coming. Yes, they will come as long as we live in these houses of clay. A man's heart is a thoroughfare for vain thoughts, no matter his state.
The difference is not whether they pass through. The difference is whether you allow them to lodge.
Goodwin says that if anger comes in the morning, turn it out before night. If something unclean comes to your bed, do not let it sleep there. You cannot stop the knocking. You are not failing because there is knocking. You are failing only if you make up the guest room. Most people generally understand this.
But Goodwin also knows what a tender conscience does with a book like this. It hears again that your thoughts are sinful, and the heart sinks. It adds up the multitude of them. They fall like sand through an hourglass. Sleeping or waking, they never stop pouring in.
He gives another image, a coin mint that is never still. Instead of making small change from valuable metals like copper or silver, this mint makes it from worthless dross. Soon, a man realizes half his wealth is made up of small change, but worthless small change. What will he do? The man concludes that he is hopeless. Look how many. Look how often. Look how worthless. Grace could never keep up.
Then Goodwin applies this in a way I did not expect.
He stops and says: "Consider them [your thoughts] to humble thee, but not, for all their multitude, to discourage thee."
Humbled and discouraged are not the same thing. We might confuse them.
To be humbled is to lay your hand over your mouth. Stop arguing that your thoughts are innocent. Stop pretending they're harmless. Stop excusing them. It is honest, good, and the beginning of repentance.
To be discouraged is something else. Discouragement looks like humility, but it is pride wearing sackcloth. It says, I am so far gone that even grace can't reach me — so the only thing left is to try harder, and fail, and grieve, and try harder again. It keeps the self at the center the whole time. It just makes the self the villain instead of the hero.
To that man —the one who is sure his rebellion has finally outrun the mercy of God — Goodwin says the truest thing in the whole book:
God hath more thoughts of mercy in Him than thou hast had of rebellion.
You have been counting your sins like sand. Goodwin tells you to count something else. He points to Psalm 40:5 that says: You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you!
Goodwin says God's thoughts toward you are of mercy! Then he picks up on this by saying that you began thinking thoughts of rebellion only the day you were born. His thoughts of mercy toward you have been running from everlasting, and they reach to everlasting, and they cannot be numbered.
Then he points to Isaiah 55:7-9 that says:
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Goodwin interprets this by saying:
...because this objection of the multitude of them might come in to discourage men from hopes of mercy, therefore purposely he adds, "he will abundantly pardon"; and to assure us that he hath thoughts of mercy to outvie ours of sin, he adds, "for my thoughts exceed yours as heaven doth the earth."
Your rebellion is old. His mercy is older.
You did not start the rebellion as early as He started the love.
Goodwin also has practical remedies — and they are good ones, the brass tacks a man wants. Fill your heart with truth in the morning before the day's business crowds the door. Keep watch. Stay at your work so your thoughts have somewhere to run. Commit your way to the Lord. But these are not rungs of a ladder that you climb to save yourself. Every one of them is the humble response and daily work of a man who already knows he is loved — not the labor of a man trying to get there.
The roots will break the sidewalk, but you do not lie awake waiting for the concrete to crack. You wake up, and before the suitors crowd your door, you go and speak with the One whose thoughts of mercy toward you outnumber the sand and have done so since before you drew your first breath.
Be humbled by what you find in your own heart, but don't be discouraged.
God's mercy got there first.