Is the Christian’s Heart Deceitfully Wicked?

Audio Transcript

Is the Christian’s heart deceitfully wicked? You have heard that “deceitfully wicked” phrase from the Aged Testomony, but is these kinds of an indictment relevant to the regenerated Christian heart? The issue is from a podcast listener named Micah. “Pastor John, hi! I was not too long ago in a discussion with a buddy above Jeremiah 17:9: ‘The heart is deceitful previously mentioned all factors, and desperately unwell who can realize it?’ I used it to the ongoing sin-blindness in the coronary heart of the Christian. My good friend said I was having a passage about unbelieving hearts and misapplying it to the Christian heart. However, in returning to the more substantial context of Jeremiah 17:5–13, I obtain myself even additional certain verse 9 is similarly applicable to believers, primarily in mild of verses 7 and 8. What do you imagine? Is Jeremiah 17:9 about believers, unbelievers, or both?” Pastor John, how do you procedure this textual content and its context?

Permit me walk speedily by way of the stream of believed from Jeremiah 17:1–9. And I assume every person will be equipped to see how verse 9 is functioning.

Blessing and a Curse

Jeremiah commences with an indictment of Judah and a warning of destruction. It claims, “The sin of Judah is . . . engraved on the pill of their heart . . . although their small children remember their altars and their Asherim” (Jeremiah 17:1–2). Those are other gods. Idolatry is the difficulty in this article. “Your prosperity and all your treasures I will give for spoil as the cost of your superior places for sin” (Jeremiah 17:3). So, he’s going to provide judgment on them for the sin of their coronary heart and the idolatry of their worship.

And then he states what is beneath that. God says in Jeremiah 17:5–6, “Cursed is the male who trusts in man and makes flesh his energy, whose heart turns absent from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any superior arrive.” Which is the root problem of the idolatry and the sin. The root difficulty is that they are trusting in male, not in God.

And then he describes what alternatively should to be: the opposite of this and the gains that would come if it were being the case. “Blessed is the man” — not cursed is the gentleman who trusts in gentleman — “who trusts in the Lord, whose have faith in is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not worry when warmth comes, for its leaves continue to be inexperienced, and is not nervous in the 12 months of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit” (Jeremiah 17:7–8).

Just about every Coronary heart an Idol Factory

Now, that leaves us with this query: If trusting in self results in this sort of distress (no great shall appear) and trusting in God final results in these fruitfulness (you are heading to prosper), why in the globe is a complete nation acting so suicidally in self-trust and sin and idolatry? And his respond to is verse 9: “The heart is deceitful above all points, and desperately unwell who can understand it?” So, the human coronary heart is diseased with sin and in the sway of deceit. And that is why men and women act suicidally in preferring self-have faith in more than God-believe in.

So, the in general point of the passage appears to be that the root of sin and idolatry is a failure to belief in God rather than self. And the root of that failure is a deceitful and wicked coronary heart. So, I assume Jeremiah — without a doubt, I feel all the biblical writers — would say that’s the root difficulty ever because the drop of person into sin and corruption. All human beings — no exceptions — are born with this type of fallen, diseased, deceived, self-exalting, God-opposing coronary heart.

What Transpires in the New Start?

So, the question is this: When a man or woman ordeals the new beginning — will become a Christian — what takes place to that diseased, deceived, self-exalting, God-opposing coronary heart? Below are some verses that describe what takes place:

• Ezekiel 36:26 describes the new covenant like this: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will set in you. And I will take away the coronary heart of stone from your flesh and give you a coronary heart of flesh.”

• Romans 6:17: “Thanks be to God, that you who were being after slaves of sin have turn into obedient from the coronary heart to the typical of teaching to which you were being dedicated.”

• Acts 15:9: God “made no difference between [Jew] and [Gentile], obtaining cleansed their hearts by religion.”

• John 7:38 may possibly be the most wonderful of all: Jesus suggests, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his coronary heart will stream rivers of residing drinking water.’” Oh, astounding. Oh, I want to be like that, appropriate? I just want to have a form of new coronary heart that does not just get pleasure from h2o — it flows to other people today. John 7:39: “Now this he claimed about the Spirit, whom those people who considered in him had been to get.”

• 1 Timothy 1:5: “The goal of our cost is really like that troubles from a pure heart.”

• 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If any one is in Christ, he is a new generation.”

Divine DNA Infused

So, my summary is that we can say that Jeremiah 17:9 (the coronary heart is deceitful over all points and desperately ill) is true of the human coronary heart — all of them. But exactly where God is implementing the blood-bought buy of the new covenant, there is a new creation. Sins are forgiven. Holy Spirit is poured in. New mother nature is introduced into getting. That newness consists in the presence of the coronary heart-influencing Holy Spirit and in the new character. You could phone it the divine-like DNA that is far more and more becoming conformed to Christ.

A superior verse to conclusion on would be 2 Corinthians 3:18: “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being” — this previous, terrible, self-exalting, God-opposing coronary heart of mine is getting — “transformed into the similar picture from a person degree of glory to an additional.”