Deceitful Heart or Pure Heart?
Please stand as we read our newest memory Scripture together …
1 Peter 4:10
“Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.”
And our memory refresher verse(s) for today is(are) …
Jude 1:24-25
“To Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before His glorious presence without fault and with great joy –
“To the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.”
Please open your Bibles to Jeremiah 17:5-10
This Wednesday is the beginning of what is known as the Lenten season.
The Lenten Season is not a Biblical mandate. The observance of Lenten ritual can be spiritually beneficial or it can spiritually detrimental to your soul.
If a person chooses to observe Lent it should be done with the same attitude as a person would use to approach fasting or giving to the poor; it should be done in secret as much as possible and as a personal matter between you and the Lord.
Going through the motions of fasting or Lent are of no value in themselves, it is the attitude of the heart that matters. We as followers of Jesus must have a continual hunger to grow closer to the Lord and not just at specific times if the year.
Rituals may make you feel better. Rituals may make you feel like you are a more spiritual person, but if you are depending on the ritual itself for spiritual growth it will fail. The ritual itself can be a decoy and you know what decoys are used for.
If you are considering a Lenten fast I would urge you to do the following …
1) Examine your life and if you find that there is an area of your life that is in rebellion against God, if you find that you are living in perpetual sin, I urge you, certainly do NOT wait until Lent begins before you seek the forgiveness of God, take care of it now!
2) If you feel that the Lord wants you to participate in some type of deeper spiritual pursuit, only discuss what you are doing with the Lord and as few people as possible. If you are taking pride in telling people about your Lenten fast it will be a sin and will only push you away from God. We are always to seek to glorify God and not ourselves.
3) If the Lord gives you victory over an area of your life where you have been struggling with sin give Him the glory and do so with true humility and without bringing any attention to yourself by talking about the fast. Confess that you were unable to find victory over the sin in your own strength but that it is God who gave you freedom and forgiveness.
Rituals by themselves can kill your spiritual life by giving you a false sense of spirituality. A relationship with Jesus is not static but should always be growing and developing into a more beautiful relationship 365 days a year. (Quote Matthew 22:37-40)
Continually be asking, “How can I love you better Jesus? How can I serve you better?”
It’s all about the heart. Rituals can be carried out by the most hardhearted person; even by truly wicked people. A love relationship with God take intentional effort.
And, now … speaking of the heart …
Let’s read … Jeremiah 17:5-10
(Prayer for help)
We see the heart mentioned three times in this one passage:
Jeremiah 17:1 says:
“Judah’s sin is engraved with an iron tool, inscribed with a flint point,
on the tablets of their hearts and on the horns of their altars.”
In Jeremiah 17:10 we see,
“I (Yahweh) the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.”
And then we have the verse that gets the most attention.
Jeremiah 17:9 NIV
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
And, I remember memorizing it as a child from the KJV Bible.
Jeremiah 17:9 KJV
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
Is this a universal statement?
Is this a state of the soul we are cursed to live with no matter how hard we pursue God?
Are we cursed to live a Romans 7:7-24 existence the rest of our lives????
You might just think so if you were to take that verse out of its context and centered your life around it. Such an existence would be so horrid that you would just want to go jump off a cliff or spend the rest of your days in a drug induced stupor.
If you heart was eternally beyond cure and that was the end of it there would be no hope, right?
But there are at least two facts in play that we need to recognize:
1) In the NIV the heart is referenced 725 times, so, there must be MORE that the Lord wants to say about the human heart condition, and …
2) The very same God who inspired Jeremiah to write, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” is the same God who inspired Matthew to write …
Matthew 5:8
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
And Asaph to write in …
Psalm 73:1
“Surely, God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.”
So … how can a heart that is desperately wicked and beyond cure become pure?
WE NEED A HEART TRANSPLANT …
“The indication for heart transplantation is defined as: ‘End-stage heart disease not remediable by more conservative measures’.”
In simple English it means that you need a heart transplant when there is absolutely nothing that can be done with your current heart and you will die without a transplant.
The first requirement is an awareness of the disease!
This is true both physically and spiritually.
The Holy Spirit must make us aware that our heart is “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.”
- Wait a minute! My spiritual heart is NOT “deceitful above all things and beyond cure!”
Have you ever seen sheep out on a hillside where the grass is lush and green and the sun is shining brightly? They look so clean, right? But what about when winter is starting in and there is a fresh covering of snow and the brilliance of the sun is reflecting from the snow, what then? Then the sheep look drab and dreary.
Did the sheep change? No. The background against which they are being compared has changed.
The same goes for us. If we compare ourselves to the wickedness of the world we might look pretty good.
We don’t murder or rob banks.
We aren’t involved in prostitution as pimps, hookers or johns.
We don’t sell drugs knowing that a huge percentage of the users will fall into devastating addiction, that they may lose their family or their job or go to jail or that they may even die.
We don’t kidnap people and sell them into slavery in what has become known as human trafficking; literally stealing their lives for money.
We’re not that bad, right? We even actually look quite good in comparison.
Why on earth would I ever need a spiritual heart transplant???
Isaiah probably though he was pretty much one of the most righteous people in Judah before he had a vision of the Lord. I mean the rest of the people in Judah were wicked so he must have seen himself as being pretty good. But is says in …
Isaiah 6:1-5
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw (Yahweh) the LORD, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above Him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory.’
“At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.’”
What was it that made Isaiah feel that he needed a spiritual heart transplant? The presence of the Lord revealed wickedness in his heart.
So, is it really possible to have a spiritual heart transplant?
Out of the 725 references in the Bible there MUST be SOME verses that say so or else we should totally abandon the idea!!!
Ezekiel 36:26 says,
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
Psalm 51:10 says,
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a steadfast spirit within me.”
And 2 Corinthians 5:17 says,
“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”
Will God change the entire creature but leave the same old heart in him?
Let’s look at a couple of examples from Luke …
Jesus and the Rich Ruler (Luke 18:18-30)
- The rich ruler believes he is good
- What must I do to inherit eternal life
- Keep commandments
- Been there, done that
- Sell everything you have, give to the poor, follow me
- Wickedness revealed
o His god is his wealth
o He turns away
- Heart transplant rejected
Jesus and Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10)
- Wants to see Jesus
- Jesus approaches him
- Jesus has dinner with him
- Don’t know what they talked about
- Jesus presence reveals Zacchaeus’ sins to himself
- Zacchaeus knew not only that he was wicked but what his sins were
- Zacchaeus wants and receives a heart transplant
- Zacchaeus’ heart transplant changes his priorities
- Z gives half of his money to the poor
- Z repays anyone he has cheated
- Z loses earthly wealth but gains eternal wealth
The Lord’s presence will reveal whether a person has a wicked heart that is beyond cure.
When that realization comes about a choice must be made; do you want a heart transplant or not?
You see. Jeremiah 17:9 is all about a wicked heart and Matthew 5:8 is all about a holy heart and Jesus is all about turning the wicked heart into a holy heart!
You see. We have a wrong image of holiness. We think of holiness as sinlessness. The vast reduction of sin in a holy person’s life is a result of holiness and not a path TO holiness.
Holiness results in a life that is virtually free from intentional sin.
Why? Because when you have a wicked heart your desire is to please yourself. This results in constant sin.
But, when the Holy Spirit creates a new heart in you, you no longer live to please yourself but to please God.
Your new desire becomes a desire to know God’s desire for you so intimately that following His desire is what pleases you the most!
Let’s say that before you have a spiritual heart transplant you want to become holy on your own. This will most likely flow out of legalism; do this and you will be holy, do that and you won’t.
What if you could see holiness on the surface of a person.
What if before you allowed the Lord to give you a spiritual heart transplant you outwardly looked like this.
Now, I was raised on a small farm and I imagine that the outward appearance of a sinful, unsaved person would look like someone who had rolled around in a barnyard after a week of heavy rain. That would be a place where all of the grass has been trampled under the hooves of the cows and there is a mixture of mud, manure and cow urine. Sounds delightful, huh?
Now suppose that person wanted to look outwardly holy by covering that barnyard gunk with whitewash. Eventually, the whitewash would peel off exposing the filth underneath or you would roll around in the barnyard filth of sin some more and you’d have to whitewash yourself again. It would be endless maintenance but the underlying filth would always be there.
Now, suppose you got tired of that and the Holy Spirit convicted you of your sin and you allowed the Lord to create a new, pure heart within you. How would that work?
Well, the Holy Spirit would clean you from the inside out. You would be clean inside and that inside cleanness would start working its way to the surface pushing all of that sinful, barnyard filth off from you. Not scraping it off from the outside but pushing it off from the inside.
Your outside would look spiritually clean and holy because your inside would be clean and holy. Eventually some of the barnyard filth could splash up on you again because that is where you live, in a barnyard world.
But, when that happened it would disgust you because you have a new heart which is in alignment with the heart of God and you would repent and confess your sin to Him and He would clean it off from you again.
And do you know what your desire would be? Your desire would be that the holiness that is oozing out of you from the inside would get on other people so that they could get a glimpse of what it would be like to have a spiritual heart transplant.
What about you? Is your heart deceitful above all things and desperately wicked or have you allowed the Lord to create in you a pure heart?
Just one more thing.
Jesus said in Matthew 24:37
“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”
What was it like in the days of Noah?
Genesis 6:5 AMPC
“The LORD (Yahweh) saw that the wickedness (depravity) of man was great on the earth, and that every imagination or intent of the thoughts of his heart were only evil continually.”
Genesis 6:6 ESV
“And the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart.”
It is much today like it was in Noah’s time.
The wickedness and depravity of mankind is great on the earth …
Every imagination or intent of humanities heart is evil continually …
Can you imagine humanity becoming so evil that the LORD regrets making humanity?
Can you imagine God being grieved in His heart?
If you are in rebellion against God you are a part of that regret and grief.
But you can change that today by submitting to a spiritual heart transplant.
Final thoughts and prayer.
