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Proverbs 3:5-6-Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.

One of the current cultural directives is this:  Follow Your Heart. The truth is, Our hearts can’t be trusted.  Our hearts can be misleading. Have you ever messed up big only to say, “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time?”  Our hearts can easily be manipulated.  We’re easily flattered.  We are easily flustered.  Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”

That isn’t a very glowing report on our heart’s ability to discern and prompt us to do the right thing.  Our hearts, the Bible says, are deceitful, misleading beyond all other sources.  If we are looking to our hearts to help us navigate and succeed in life, we are putting hope in something that is broken from the get-go.  Our hearts are broken from birth because of sin.  If we are going to live a righteous life, if we are going to discern what is best, what is holy, we are going to need a higher authority than our own hearts.  When we let our hearts lead, we get into all kinds of sinful, complicated stuff that comes with a heavy price tag.  Just read Romans 1.  It’s pretty plain. 

Matthew 15:19 says our hearts can house some pretty nasty stuff.  Many evil things that happen in this world, things we could all agree are evil, like human trafficking, child porn, armed robbery, the destruction of property, terrorist activity, these are things that are carried out because someone let their heart lead them.  Our hearts cannot be trusted.

Because our hearts cannot be trusted, our hearts must be tried.  We need the guts to open our hearts before the Lord and give Him permission to do an internal work in us so that our hearts are aligned with Him and His desires for our lives instead of being in alignment with our fleshly desires.

In Psalm 51, King David, the guy who messed up royally by following his heart, by having an affair with a married woman, having a child with her, and having her husband murdered to try to cover up the whole situation, that guy, became someone later God called “A man after His own heart.”  Did you catch that?  David went from being an adulterer, murderer, and liar to God’s man by allowing his heart to be tried. His heart was laid bare in Psalm 51. He said in verses 3-4: “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge.”

He had tried to cover up his sin, and it made the circumstances worse. The cover up was causing him physical problems.  Sin can do that to a person.  The guilt was overwhelming. Read Psalm 51 when you have a minute.  He felt like his bones were crushed.  Who could live well feeling like that? In order for his heart to be unburdened, to be cleansed, to be repaired, he had to expose it completely before God.  He confessed what he had done.  He didn’t try to minimize it.  He didn’t try to excuse it.  He didn’t try to defend it.  He didn’t try to blame anyone else.  He acknowledged the evil that had led him to do what he did.  He confessed that he had followed his heart instead of following God, and it cost him dearly.

It wasn’t the first and last time David willingly put his heart on trial. It became a habit. Listen to Psalm 139:23-24-Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

David asked God to put his heart to the test.  It was because of that vulnerability…it was because of that confession that God had the necessary room to work in David’s heart.  What happened after that in David’s life happened because David sought to trust God instead of trusting his own heart.  Psalm 28:7 says, “The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me.”  It’s entirely different to trust in the Lord and follow Him than it is to trust in and follow our hearts.

Our hearts cannot be trusted.  They must be tried.  Third, Our hearts must also be trained.  No one will ever trust in the Lord with their whole heart if they haven’t trained their hearts to grow in devotion to Him.  If your heart is conflicted, if in your heart you are chasing the things of the world, you are training your heart to want and pursue the things the world wants and pursues.  Like, you will train your heart to love those things.  For example, if you are exposing yourself to images that aren’t godly, to things that aren’t holy, you are training your heart to want those things. The bottom line is this:  You can grow your heart for the things of the world, or you can grow your heart for God.   

Part of training your heart is using and offensive strategy.  Do what you can to foster a love for God in your heart, and there is a lot you can do.  Psalm 119, verses 9-11 say, How can a young person stay on the path of purity? By living according to your word. 10 I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. 11 I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.

Reading and learning the Bible’s content will grow your love for God, I guarantee it.  It will transfer affections from self and from the flesh to God, and it will also empower you to do the right thing as you grow.  As you train your heart to love God’s Word and ways, protect the investment you make there!  Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” How are we doing with the guarding of our hearts?  Have we let down our guard?  Are we allowing things into our hearts that are crowding out our love for God?  Have we accepted things into our lives we would never have accepted ten years ago, all because more and more people are doing it, and well, they seem to be decent folks?  Have we been tenaciously guarding our hearts? How careful are we on the internet?  What are we allowing ourselves to watch? We need to look away when we are tempted to compromise.  We need to get away when we are tempted to compromise.  We need to not put ourselves intentionally in situations that would cause our hearts to be confused about our where our loyalty lies. 

Finally, if we are going to trust God with our whole heart,  Our heart must be transformed.  There are things we can do to invest in the quality of our hearts, but no one can transform their heart.  That is God’s job.  And that is what He has been after since He created humanity.  God’s desire is to have a relationship with us that involves having our hearts belonging to Him and set on His perfect will.  No amount of training can produce that kind of faithfulness.  It has to be a God-thing.  It has to be a supernatural thing.  It has to be a miraculous thing.

One of my all-time favorite Scripture passages is in Ezekiel 36:26-27:  26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.  It’s a brand-new heart.  It’s a complete heart transplant.  It is a removal of a heart that longs to sin, a heart that wants to be in charge, a heart that wants to go its own way, a heart that is resistant of to the spiritual promptings of the Holy Spirit.  It is a heart that is moved by God to want the things He wants us to desire.  What a gift.  You don’t have to manufacture it.  You don’t have to fake something. You don’t have to pretend to like this thing called Christianity.  Walking with Jesus will become your heart’s desire because God will give you supernatural godly desires.  It’s a total transformation.  It’s a brand-new heart.  I’m down for that!  I’ve experienced that.  Jesus is the best thing that has ever happened to me.   Romans 6:17 is a verse I think I have overlooked until now:  But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance.

What a transformation!  There is a pattern, a way of being, that claims the allegiance of a person’s heart when they have been transformed by the power of God.  That’s why a true Christ-follower can claim Psalm 37:4 which says, “Take delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” We will have our heart’s desires met because our hearts will desire what God desires for us to desire!  This is what it means to be born again.  Christianity isn’t just about believing something, but it is about receiving something.  It is about receiving a new heart, one that beats with the heart of God.  If you thought it was all about church attendance or dressing a certain way, if you thought it was about ascribing to a certain version of the Bible or a list of rules and regulations.  It’s not.  It’s about the condition of your heart.

 

Have you received a new heart? If you haven’t, you can do so today. You don’t have to get on a transplant list somewhere and wait for a donor.  One has already been made available.  The perfect heart of Jesus, one without sin, has been made available for you.  Just as in a transplant when someone’s life has expired and a heart is made available, Jesus has given His life to pay the price for our transplant.  His perfect heart and life met the requirement to pay the price for the sins of the world.  We only need to receive Him into our hearts by faith and the new heart is ours.

Proverbs 3:5-6-Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.

How straight is the path you are walking today?  When you look back at your recent steps, can you honestly say, “Yes, I know I’ve trusted and sought God to get me where I am in this moment?”  Can you say with all honesty, “The path ahead of me, is one that God has asked me to walk?”  Did you seek God’s wisdom to know what to study in college?  Did you trust God to lead you to the person you need to spend your life with?  Did you inquire of God before you took your current job?  Is the way you spend your time and your resources the way that God has instructed you?  Is how you talk about people on social media in step with the direction God has given you? 

The truth is, you can’t trust your heart.  You have to lead it.  You lead it by putting it on trial.  You lead it by training it which includes guarding it.  You lead it by allowing God to completely transform it.  This I know:  Your heart will either be transformed by the world and Satan or it will be transformed by God.  Whoever determines the transformation will determine the path you will walk.

 

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