It is a tough situation when you can’t even trust your own heart. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (17:9). When biblical writers speak of the ‘heart,’ they are referring to the governing centre of the individual, the seat of intention and motivation. According to Scripture the heart has become like a faulty navigation device. It is a tangle of disoriented desires, confused motivations and irrational fears all undergirded by delusional ambitions. Modern psychological research has confirmed that we are likely to have inherited the main disorienting traumas of up to three and four generations of our forebears. Wrongs done by them and to them, if left unaddressed, carry down to negatively influence subsequent generations. That was always understood to be the case in Old Testament times (Exodus 34:7) which is why a standard form of confession is multigenerational confession (see 14:20 and Psalm 106:6). That makes the human heart a very complicated thing; certainly, something we cannot fix on our own. You would have heard the cliches about ‘following your heart’. In one sense, without divine intervention, we inevitably will follow our hearts. We will always capitulate to our strongest desires. The good news, however, is that God has intervened. He has filled our hearts with a more powerful force, that of his desires in the person of his Holy Spirit. We have the option now to make choices with the power of God’s will at work within us. The Holy Spirit works in us to bring healing and to reorientate our desires. So as Paul says, “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16).
Ask God to fill you anew with his Spirit today.
Read Jeremiah 17:1-18
