Those love songs and those breaking-up songs impact the same heart, but for opposite reasons.
All parents want the best possible relationships for their children. Experience tells them that when those-head-over-heels feelings land in real life, then they had better get their-feet-firmly-on-the-ground.
The heart is easily tricked by us or someone else. The worst-case scenario, of course, is for us to knowingly enter the schemes of the deceptive. What is it about deceit that draws the bored and the reckless into its machinations? Alas, these things are learned the hard way.
Jeremiah warned us about the condition of the heart:
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
But are our hearts made deceitful? If we are to take a new-born at face value, obviously not! You would have to espouse the false doctrines of Original Sin and/or Total Depravity to believe such a thing.
Our deceitful hearts were not inherited. Instead, being born into a world already full of the accumulated effects of sin, we easily gave our hearts over to wilful sin, believing that we could escape the consequences—That’s self-deception!
That deceitful heart that Jeremiah says is “beyond cure,” can actually be cured. However, not by any form of self-treatment. It is not in us to expunge the impurities of our hearts before our Holy God; only Jesus can cleanse a soul.
Anticipating the answer, “No one,” Jeremiah asks this question about the deceitful heart, “Who can understand it?” No one that is who is not born again by the water and the Spirit.
Jesus “did not need anyone to testify about man; for he himself knew what was in man” (John 2:25). Knowing who we are and the state of our hearts, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit into the world to convict us of our sin, and by washing us clean in baptism, He has brought us into His Kingdom.
Our hearts made clean.
John Staiger
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