The Heart

 Greetings to you all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,

     Jeremiah 17:9-10 says, “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.”

     As a kid, I had secrets.  I would take a box, fill it with a few trinkets and then bury it in the middle of the huge lilac bush.  As time went on, the secrets became different and sometimes were not secret for very long.  I hated to speak out in public as I stuttered.  I would rather just be quiet than to get up and embarrass myself.  Now, as an old man, I still have a few secrets tucked away here and there.  I have some secret ambitions and dreams of doing things and if I told you all of them, I would have no more secrets.  They might  be in the next book.

     As we well know, God is quite aware of secrets and in fact there are no secrets that God doesn’t know.  In one sense, we have no secrets that can be kept from God.  The above passage asks a question in verse nine and goes on to answer the question in the following verse.  Who can know the heart of every human being that ever lived, is living and will live in the future, even before they are born.  God hears the voices of those infants who are killed before they are born.  God knows the heart of each and every person to the extent that there are no secrets.  The evaluation of the human heart in speaking of it’s intentions is fully known by God as it is brought  out in Hebrews 4:12.  The Word of God discerns the thoughts and the intents of the heart.    The evaluation of the heart in Jeremiah is that the heart is desperately wicked and that it is deceitful.  That seems to be the natural tendency of the hearts of all of mankind.    There are many  activities of men and women which seem good on the outside until we find out the real motive or the intent of that individual in the end.  As we remember the three avenues of sin, we can readily see that the pride of life is one that is coming usually from the hearts and minds of men and women.  We often feel that we deserve to have this or that or that we should be treated in a certain way.  We may say, “But I deserve to be treated in a great way because of who I am.  The truth is, we deserve nothing and everything that we get is a gift from God.  It’s grace and mercy all over again.  Every gift, the grace of God, is from Him and undeserved while what we do deserve is held back, and that is mercy.  We can praise God because  He and He alone knows every thought and intention of our hearts.