When you have felt the wickedness of your own heart to the uttermost
(Robert Murray McCheyne, 1813-1843)
"The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time."
Genesis 6:5
"If God places no trust in His holy ones, if even the heavens are not pure in His eyes--how much less man, who is vile and corrupt, who drinks up evil like water!" Job 15:15-16
"The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked.
Who really knows how bad it is?" Jeremiah 17:9
Learn to be humbled far more than you have ever been. None of you has ever been sufficiently humbled under a sense of sin, for the reason that none of you has ever fully seen the plague of your own heart.
There are chambers in your heart you have never yet seen into;
there are caves in that ocean you have never fathomed;
there are fountains of bitterness you have never tasted.
When you have felt the wickedness of your own heart to the uttermost, then lie down under this solemn truth: that you have only seen a few yards into a pit that is bottomless; that you carry about with you a slumbering volcano, a heart whose wickedness you do not and cannot know.
John Berridge:
O heart, heart! You are a mass of foolishness and absurdities--the vainest, foolishest, craftiest, wickedest thing in the world. Yet the Lord Jesus asks me for this heart--woos me for it--died to win it! O wonderful love! Adorable condescension!
Charles Spurgeon:
There is no wolf or lion or serpent which is so brutish as that beast, man!
Men will never value a Redeemer so well as when they have a very clear consciousness of the ruin from which He has redeemed them.
Look to the cross, and hate your sin--for sin nailed your Well-Beloved to the tree!