When Your Heart Condemns You

From Gospel Translations

The apostle John gives us a phrase full of angst when he writes, “whenever our heart condemns us . . .” (1 John 3:20). Has your heart ever condemned you; shut up your happiness in a coffin? Has it replayed your sin on the big screen and made you watch it on repeat?

“Whenever our heart condemns us.” You have sinned; you know it. This is not someone else playing fast and loose with the facts or maligning your motives. This is you: your own heart, your own conscience. A heart that knew your secret thoughts from the beginning of the temptation now points the finger. When you resurface from the sin, there he stands, waiting. Now that you’re sober, the night is now over, his low voice asks, How could you?

“Whenever our heart condemns us” — truly, constantly, without pity. His voice threatens curses upon us. “Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. . . . Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out” (Deuteronomy 28:16, 19). He condemns us, but is he wrong? He speaks plainer than we’d like, stronger than we can bear, more exactly than we wish were true — but what can we answer? Against God — our heavenly Father, our pierced Friend, our grieved Spirit — how could we? We hear the rooster crow; we meet his eyes. Our resolves lie broken, our Savior left forgotten — what now?

How to Reassure Your Heart

Here in the deep sea, the apostle John seeks to reassure the true Christian’s heart.

By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. (1 John 3:19–20)

As a caring pastor, John comes alongside the troubled soul and seeks to uplift the child’s heart before his Father. He would remove your foot from the net, if he can. He knows how often our hearts — when finally sensitive to what we’ve done — bind and abuse us. They strike repeatedly with the rod as if to make up for lost time. Zeal for our sin consumes him; his blows can leave us limp upon his knee.

John intervenes in three ways. He considers what our heart forgets, he considers the one who knows everything, and he reminds us who is greater than our heart.

1. What Our Hearts Forget

By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him.

Your heart condemns you because, though you have been watchful in recent months, you plunged into pornography. You committed adultery in your heart — and this, perhaps, as a married man and father. How can you look your daughter or wife or Lord in the eyes after what those eyes have looked upon? Is this really the action of a true Christian? Your heart condemns you.

Hearts sensitive to sin are gifts of God (Ezekiel 36:26), but hearts full of godly grief can fixate on the transgression, forgetting all that God is doing in our lives besides. All the heart can see is guilt, not growth; fruit of sin, not fruit of the Spirit. Overzealous, our hearts wield the rod for condemnation where the Lord intends discipline.

So John shows the panorama of what God is doing in us. “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him” (1 John 3:19) — by what? By our love for the brothers, not in word or talk but in deed and in truth (1 John 3:18). Love for Christ’s people reminds us that God is really working in us. Serving Christ’s people, feeding them, visiting them while sick or in prison, praying for them, worshiping and weeping and rejoicing with them — all are evidence that whatever we did for the least of Christ’s brothers we did for Christ (Matthew 25:31–40). Surveying a life of love should persuade our hearts while in the mire of our most recent sin. “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers” (1 John 3:14).

John longs to lift the chin of every son and daughter of God caught in sin, but he is careful throughout the letter to define who those children are. He does not cheer us cheaply. He does not say, “God loves you and forgives you though you continue to practice sin, walk in darkness, and possess no evident love for Christ’s people.” As James Alexander writes, “Remorse without repentance, and self-contempt without amendment are dreadful scourges” (Thoughts on Preaching, 42). John would be horrified to see you assured in this life only to be damned in the next.

But he would have every true child of God assured. And real (yet imperfect) evidence of Spirit-wrought love reassures our hearts before God.

2. What God Knows

God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.

John instructs fallen saints to consider all the evidence. Here we find an effective antidote for the myopic introspection of a sunken heart. Consider the Spirit’s work in your life; consider the real fruit of love to God and man that hangs from your branches, fruit that is — praise be to God — supernatural. You are safe to consider all the evidence (it is not presumption) because John tells us that God does. “God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.”

Your heart doesn’t know everything and often forgets what it does know. God does know everything, and he doesn’t forget. He sees more than your most recent fall — the sin that breaks your heart and sheds your tears — he sees a new life and fruit (even in this contrition) that gives honor to his dear Son and indwelling Spirit. He saw what you did last night — and he sees repentance in the morning. He saw the last week of apathy, of lust, of anger, of covetousness, of resistance to his presence, but he also sees this last year of growth in purity, in evangelism, in service to the local church, in self-control, in prayer, and in knowledge of Christ Jesus.

Peter is a great example of how God’s knowing everything — not just our fall — comforts the child of God. Three denials and many heart accusations later, Peter swims out of those cold waters to meet Jesus on the shore for breakfast. Three affirmations must follow three denials. But as Jesus asks three times, “Peter, do you love me?” what does Peter say? Not, “I think so, Lord,” or merely, “Yes, Lord, I love you.” He affirms three times the Lord’s knowledge of that love. Of the third time, we read,

Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” and he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” (John 21:17)

If he allowed his heart to only consider his three denials, he might have chosen Judas’s end. But the Lord had prayed for him, and he knew Peter’s denials were a sorrowful chapter in a larger story. Peter really loved the Lord, and he reassured his heart that the Lord knew it too. God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.

3. Greater Than All

God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.

Finally, John wants to offer another argument to limit the violence our hearts can offer us: God is greater than our heart. Your heart does not sit on the judgment seat — praise God. With our heart, all we can expect is justice. You would condemn you. If even we stand against us, why wouldn’t a holy God? Because this God who knows everything — not only what we just did, and not only that we truly love him and his people despite what we just did — he knows what he has done.

And what has he done? He has sent his only Son into the world, not to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him (John 3:17). What has he done? He has not spared his only Son but has given him up for us all (Romans 8:32). If God is for you, can even your own heart successfully stand against you? To forget mercy toward us is to forget his own beloved Son and stand deaf to that Son’s intercession for us.

“Father, as your love has freely chosen this son, as we have accomplished that daughter’s redemption before she was even born, pour out your mercy afresh. Have we not already dealt completely with the sin? Have you not laid all upon me — and did I fail to separate condemnation from them as far as the east is from the west? Give heaven another occasion to sing of our great salvation.”

The Father receives such pleading with fresh satisfaction. This is the God greater than your heart. His ways of mercy are not your ways, neither are his thoughts of grace your expectations of grace. His ways of grace are higher than man’s — as the heavens are higher than the earth, the angel above the ant. Go to him anew, wander home to him, even as your heart rehearses how unworthy you are to be called his son. Look up: already he runs to you. Already he commands the robe and ring to be brought. Already he begins to quiet you with his love.

Have you done evil before him, and your heart now condemns you? Forgiven one, God is greater than your heart. His word is decisive. He holds the gavel. If you are his, you may yet be further chastised, but in Christ, you are never condemned. Beloved, “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:19–20).