A Word in Season: Your Deceitful Heart (Jeremiah 17:9)

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How is your heart? Mine is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.

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That is its proper nature, because I am a fallen creature. It means that my heart cannot be trusted, that my inner being, my thinking, my feeling, and my willing are by nature desperately flawed, that I will always by instinct go in the wrong way.

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I need to understand, as do you, the deceitful nature, the deceitful character of my own heart.

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How it loves to paint things other than they really are. How it offers me false assurances about whether or not things are going well with me.

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How it often tells me that God will forgive my sin, and that sin therefore doesn't really matter.

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How it twists scripture, causing me to remember half -scraps and half -truths, and to make half -truths of whole -truths or even whole -lies sometimes, so that I am able to persuade myself that I can get away with things.

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It will deceive me with regard to what is really taking place. It will deceive me with regard to the motives that I like to imagine

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I have for some of the deeds that I do. It will help me to justify myself, telling me that I am doing things in the right way and for the right reasons, that even my most wicked and cruel actions come from a good heart and from a right disposition.

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It will tell me that I am better than other people, and therefore that I don't need to worry so much about myself.

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It will tell me that my sins are not as great as I fear them to be, or that my virtues are more worthwhile than I might otherwise imagine them to be.

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It will tell me that I can accomplish things for myself and by myself and in my own strength, which

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I cannot begin to accomplish apart from Jesus Christ. My heart is deceitful.

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It is a supplanter. It's always going to be twisting and camouflaging and redefining and messing up the understanding that I should have of the world which

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God has made, my place in it, and the God who rules over it. That's Jeremiah's statement in Jeremiah 17, verse 9.

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Who makes us to understand that he searches those depths where we're persuading ourselves that all is well.

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God knows that things are not. Where then can we get a proper understanding of our heart?

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Well, it must be from God himself. It comes in part from the light of nature when we understand the reality of humankind, when we see that we are no different, no better than other men and women, that our own hearts are as wretched as any others.

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When we study not only the present circumstances, but the history of our world and we see the ugliness and the vileness of the human heart and its productions, we'll see it even more clearly in the light of the law.

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When we come and are exposed to the searching beams of God's commandments, when we understand that we cannot hide that our imaginations, our spiritual disobediences are as wretched as our actual transgressions in the flesh.

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And we see it perhaps most clearly in the light of the gospel when we understand that nothing less than the blood of the

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Lord Jesus Christ was sufficient to deal with the sin of our hearts. And we need to stay there if we're to find its cure.

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For there is no remedy for the deceitful heart apart from the truth as it is in Jesus.

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The truth about ourselves that brings us to him crying out for cleansing.

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The truth about his finished work in which cleansing is offered. The truth about that new birth by which we can be made new from the heart out so that everything is changed.

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If our deceitful hearts are going to be altered, it must be by the power of God in Christ Jesus to make us new, to convert us, then to transform us, to teach us the truth about ourselves in the light of his word that we may come to his son and find in him salvation for our sins, for our deceitful hearts that we may be changed and may not walk in the lie.