The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (Jeremiah 17:9-10)

2022-07-09

“Follow your heart” is the worst advice to give anyone. You would likely do better by telling someone to do the opposite of what their heart is telling them. The famous verse tells us:

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings. (Jeremiah 17:9-10)

The Scripture also tells us before this, “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart, and upon the horns of your altars” (Jeremiah 17:1).

Our problem of sin before God is more than what we do; it is what we are. We need to be saved from both what we do and what we are. The solution can only be for God to give us a new heart and recreate us. “And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it” (Jeremiah 18:4). “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).

Only in the person of Jesus Christ do we have this new heart. By faith, we have access to this new nature. But even for the Christian, now saved from the penalty of sin, the old heart casts a long gloomy shadow. In a moment where we do not walk by faith, we will again be deceived by the power of the stony deceitful heart. In this we say, do not follow your heart, but follow rather Jesus Christ.