Are you pure in Heart?

 A pure heart abhors all sin.
1. A man may forbear sin, yet not have a pure heart.
a. A man may forbear sin for lack of occasion to sin. He may forbear sin as one may hold his breath while he dives under water, and then take breath again. The gunpowder makes no noise until the fire is put to it. The clock stands still until the weights are put on. Let a temptation come, which is like the hanging on of the weights, and the heart goes as fast in sin as ever!
b. He may forbear sin for fear of the penalty. A man forbears a dish he loves for fear it should bring his disease upon him of the stone or gout. There is conflict in a sinner between the passions of desire and fear. Desire spurs him on to sin; but fear, as a curb and bit, checks him. Nor is it the crookedness of the serpent he fears, but the sting of the serpent!
c. He may forbear sin out of a design. He has a plot in hand, and his sin might spoil his plot. Some rich heir would fly out in excess, but he behaves properly to prevent being cut off from the inheritance. How good was Joash while Jehoiada the priest lived! Prudence as well as conscience may restrain from sin.


2. A man may forsake sin, yet not have a pure heart. It is a great matter, I confess, to forsake sin. So dear is sin to men that they will part with the fruit of their body for the sin of their souls. Sin is the Delilah that bewitches, and it is much to see men divorced from it. There may be a forsaking of sin, yet no heart purity. Sin may be forsaken upon wrong principles.


a. A man may forsake sin from morality. Moral arguments may suppress sin. I have read of a debauched heathen who, hearing Socrates read an ethical lecture on virtue and vice, went away changed and no more followed his former vices.Cato, Seneca, Aristides, seeing beauty in virtue, led unblamable lives.

b. A man may forsake sin from policy. A man may forsake sin not out of respect to God’s glory, but his own credit. Vice will waste his estate, eclipse the honor of his family; therefore, out of policy he will divorce his sin.
c. A man may forsake sin from necessity. Perhaps he cannot follow the trade of sin any longer. The adulterer is grown old; the drunkard has become too poor. His heart is toward sin, but either his purse fails him or his strength—as a man who loves hunting, but his prison-fetters will not allow him to follow the sport. This man, who is necessitated to put a stop to sin, does not so much forsake sin as sin forsakes him.

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But he is pure in God’s eye who abhors sin. “I hate every false way” (Psa 119:104). This is excellent indeed because now the love of sin is crucified. A hypocrite may leave sin, yet love it—as the serpent sheds her coat, yet keeps her sting. But when a man can say he abhors sin, now is sin killed in the root. A pure heart abstains from sin, as a man does from a dish that he has an antipathy against. This is a sign of a new nature: when a man hates what he once loved! And because he hates sin, therefore he fights against it with the “sword of the Spirit” (Eph 6:17), as a man who hates a serpent seeks the destruction of it.


The pure in Heart by Thomas Watson