“Search me, O God, and know my heart today; try me, O Saviour, know my thoughts I pray.” How many millions of times have those sobering words been sung, and how many thousands of congregations have sung them since it was written over 100yrs. ago? How sincerely do we take them? Think about it. We are told many times in God’s Word that our hearts can deceive us.
I have been mulling over for a few days a quote by A.W. Pink: “The humble Christian is happier in his cottage than a wicked man in his mansion.” If you are like me when reading that for the first time, you say, “Yes, that is the truth!” But just like singing songs without really thinking about what they are saying, so here, our sincerity may be only surface deep.
Remember our hearts can deceive us into assuming what isn’t so. The last 3 verses of John 2 close with these words: “Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name when they saw the signs which He did. But Jesus did not commit Himself to them, because He knew all men, and had no need that anyone should testify of man, for He knew what was in man.” As God, taking on human form and living here, He was the embodiment of perfect sincerity, but at the same time completely aware of the insincerity of human beings. How sad He must have felt at times! He knew that on the surface they appeared sincere, but when testing came they would fade away and He would be left alone.
John MacArthur writes: “Sincere means genuine, and may have originally meant ‘tested by sunlight.’ In the ancient world, dishonest pottery dealers filled cracks in their inferior products with wax before glazing and painting them, making worthless pots difficult to distinguish from expensive ones. The only way to avoid being defrauded was to hold the pot to the sun, making the wax-filled cracks obvious. Dealers marked their fine pottery that could withstand sun testing as ‘sine cera’—without wax.”
It seems to me that sincerity comes when a person believes in something with all their heart, whether right or wrong. We’ve all heard the saying about a person being sincere, but sincerely wrong. But for the Christian that ‘something’ is always based on the body of truth that God has given us in His Word. If we are sincerely convinced that Jesus was who He said He was; “the Way, the Truth and the Life” sent by the Father to redeem man, when we become the “redeemed” everything changes and over time what we say we believe and how we actually live grows slowly: fused into one…imperfectly for sure, by the grace (and mercy!) of God we can stand the Son test.