Head and Heart Meet Sin

It's out of fashion to speak of the difference between head and heart, but I'll follow Calvin's example and do it anyway.

Head and Heart on Faith

It's easy to give lip service to faith in Christ, and to speak with head knowledge, but still be tempted to fall away under temptation.  The head alone just talks, but it is the heart that believes unto righteousness.  Yet a person who is weak of heart in regard to faith doesn't always know it, and may speak from the head confidently and with enthusiasm about loving Christ.  (Remember the parable of the sower, and the seed thrown on rocky ground.)  A person must develop depth of faith in the heart, in order to have the spiritual fortitude to follow Christ through thick and thin.

Head and Heart on Sin

Likewise, looking toward sin, the head and heart may not agree with one another.  Repentance of the head is easy, because we all really do know the difference between right and wrong.  It doesn't take the gospel, or faith in Christ, to know this.  However, to truly repent of one's own sins takes the heart as well as the head, and is the gift of God.  There has to be a depth of heart in repentance before one's own sin is seen in its true horror.  Even then we never really know it all, because repentance is a life-long process.  Our sanctification could be defined as backing up over the lines we've crossed that we know about, and then discovering, behind those lines we knew about, ever more lines and degrees of sinfulness we had crossed negligently and ignorantly before getting to the ones that got us in outward trouble.   Discovering lines behind lines and striving to back up behind them continues throughout a life of sanctification.  Repentance toward sin, then, is the process of backing back up over not just the main line we crossed to get ourselves in outward trouble, but also all those other lines we crossed first, while we were on our way to the main one.

This is why the initial stages of repentance from any particular sin may leave a person in danger of relapse.  The sense of horror about that sin may be very low.  One is aware of a line that's been crossed, and one may think that moving back on the right side of that one line (outwardly) is good enough.  The sin is known, but the knowledge is not a deep heart knowledge.  Actually, to get back securely far from that one line that was crossed to get in outward trouble, a person will need to back up over a lot of other lines in the heart.  Staying near that main line, though outwardly on the correct side of it, tempts the Lord, and will leave a person susceptible to relapse.

The cure, which is the gift of God, is to not stop with repentance about the outward things which get us in trouble, but to begin to slaughter the inward sins that lead to the outward ones.

God said, through James, "Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you."  We should count on it.  Jesus said, "Come unto me, all you that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Also, hardness of heart, or lack of repentance, isn't something that's just relative to certain sins.  We can't be hard of heart here and soft of heart there.  If we're hard of heart about one particular sin, then we're really hard of heart about them all.

True repentance affects the whole man.