Do You Realize Evil is Always Present? Even in the Human Heart? Even in Your Heart and My Heart!?! A Point to Ponder . . .

Do you have an evil heart of a pure heart?

A Devotional for August 26, 2025

From the Pen of John Bunyan Author of Pilgrim's Progress

Evil is Always Present

“So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand”

Romans 7: 21.

As the righteous man must here be taken for the best part for the I[1] that would do good, for the I . . . hates the evil. So again, we must consider of the desires of this righteous man as they flow from that fountain of grace which is the Holy Ghost within him. And as they are immediately mixed with [other] . . . channels, in and through [which] they must pass before they can be put forth into acts. For though the desire, as to its birth and first being, is only good. Yet before it comes into much motion it gathers that from the defilements of the passages through which it comes as makes it to bear a tang of flesh and weakness in the skirts of it. And the evil that dwells in us is so universal and always so ready; that as sure as there is any motion to what is good, so sure evil is present with it: “[F]or when” or whenever “I would do good,” Paul says, “evil is present with me” (Romans 7:21).

Hence it follows, that all our graces, and so our desires, receive disadvantage by our flesh; mixing itself with what is good and so abates the excellency of the good. There is a spring that yields water good and clear but the channels through which this water comes to us are muddy, foul, or dirty. Now, of the channels the waters receive a disadvantage and so come to us as savoring of what came not with them from the fountain but from the channels. This is the cause of the coolness and of the weakness of flatness and of the many extravagancies that attend some of our desires.

[1] See August 25 Devotional as segue to this reading. The “I” is the Apostle Paul.