Digging Deeper – The Heart Lies

Jeremiah 17:9 is a verse that I quoted many times during my years in student ministry. Adolescent brains develop from the back to the front; the parts of the brain that control feelings and desires mature before the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for reasoning and decision-making. In a sense, our “heart” is really in the middle of our brain. For a teenager, that “heart” is often the loudest voice in their head.

We have all lived through this stage of life, and we know that many of the decisions we made as teenagers were not especially well-reasoned or insightful. In fact, many of them were downright foolish. This is one reason I am so thankful my teenage years predated social media, so there isn’t a permanent record of all my bad decisions. The problem for many of us is that, like teenagers, we continue to trust our emotional hearts and rationalize their desires.

In our culture today, we often place extra emphasis on those desires. We use phrases like, “My heart is set on it,” or, “The heart wants what it wants.” We justify our desires with sayings such as, “Follow your heart,” or, “Trust your heart.”

But Jeremiah encourages us to do the exact opposite! He warns us not to trust our hearts, reminding us that they can deceive us. What our hearts want is often not what God wants for us. At its core, coveting is choosing to trust our hearts more than we trust our God.

Trusting God is the opposite of trusting our hearts. I love what Jeremiah 17:10 tells us—that God examines our hearts and rewards us according to our ways and the fruit of our actions. It is important to note that God is not merely concerned with our outward behavior but also with our motives. Our relationship with God is not rooted simply in what we do but in what is in our hearts.

Just like yesterday, take a moment to examine your heart. Are you trusting your heart more than you are trusting God?