Jeremiah 17:9 (NASB)
The heart is more deceitful than all else
and is desperately sick; who can understand it?
I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man
according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.
Have you given serious thought to what the
Lord thinks about you as a human being; that is a human being without His
presence in your life? He thinks that
you are sick; indeed you are desperately sick.
Your heart—your natural tendencies in life apart from the Lord—is
deceitful. The Message Bible says that
your natural self is “hopelessly dark and deceitful, a puzzle that no one can
figure out”.
While you may not think of yourself like
this (we have too many blind spots), don’t you think of others like this? Don’t people around you, especially those
closest to you, sometimes baffle you?
You think that you know someone close to you, then you find out that you
really don’t. Haven’t you ever thought,
even said, to your spouse, “Here I thought I knew everything about you, but
obviously I don’t” or something like that?
Haven’t you ever been lied to?
And, if you are totally honest with yourself, haven’t you lied before
and been deceptive to someone else?
The heart is more deceitful than all else;
the heart is desperately sick. Wow, can
you believe this about your natural inner being? You say to yourself, “no, I don’t believe
this about myself”. This proves how
deceptive your heart is. Proverbs 28:26
says “he who trusts in his own heart is a fool”. I John 1:8 says that you deceive no one but
yourself if you think that you have no sin.
God says
that He searches the heart, He examines the mind, He gets to the heart of the
human, He gets the root of things, He treats humans as they really are, not as
they pretend to be (Message Bible). When
you measure yourself not by your own standards, but by God’s standards, you
will clearly see how far you are from where you need to be. The human heart will deceive you if you
don’t allow God to change it.[1]
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