Devotion Corner
Jeremiah 17:9 – The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
These sobering words are a loving alert to all who pay attention to them. Everyone is prone to elevating themselves above what they actually are. Who hasn’t at some point declared either to themselves or another, “I would never do that!” How do you know? You can’t make that statement and neither can I. For God’s Word declares that no one can know their own heart truly, and what they are as an person in all their fullness.
How many times has someone proudly announced that they would never steal, only to find themselves doing that very act when times became hard financially. How many times has someone defiantly stated that they don’t lie. Yet not long later they bend and twist the truth to unrecognisable lengths to suit their desired outcome.
Our hearts are indeed deceitful. Most of the time, we deceive ourselves the worst. We tell ourselves that we are better than what we actually are, we declare ourselves ‘a good person’. Yet when we actually stop and think deeply on this assertion and challenge it’s validity of declaration, we realise that a great debt of sin follows us everywhere we go. This self deception has filled hell with those who have dismissed God’s loving warning. It is a tragedy that God moved to deliver people from, and yet the majority deceived themselves from receiving.
This is the desperate wickedness of our own hearts, in that the Almighty God has moved so greatly to alert us to our perilous condition, and provide a way of salvation from our destruction via His only begotten Son!….only for many to proudly turn away from this free gift, and pronounce that they are good enough to deliver themselves to glory everlasting. This is the self deceiving nature of the heart. This is the desperate levels of wickedness that all humanity is born into, and no sin blackened heart can know it’s own true depths of wickedness.
Yet in the grace and mercy of God, He has moved to shine a light on the desperate wickedness of our sinful hearts, for He alone knows the true depths of what we are. He who convicts us of our sin and alerts us to our self deceiving ways, through the witness of the Holy Spirit to our hearts. Then and only then, did we become truly aware of our desperate state, and so we cried out to God, ‘How can we be saved from this burden? How can we be right before God?!’
In that broken hearted state, the Holy Spirit testified to our us that we can be made free through repentance of sin and placing of faith in Christ Jesus, believing that He is the Son of God and our Saviour and Redeemer. Finally, we were then lifted from our own desperate state, pulled from our own deceitful hearts, and when we bowed the knee before Jesus Christ, declaring Him our Lord and Saviour, we were freed! We were reborn in the Spirit, gifted a new heart and made a new creature in Christ Jesus! What a day that was, and it’s joy is eternal!
Yes the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. But praise the Lord He knows it, and that He moved to provide the way so that we can be made new in Christ Jesus. Amen.
