The hit 1952 country song by Hank Williams – Your Cheatin’ Heart – may have been a love song about what went wrong, but it is relevant for my purposes. We all have cheatin’ hearts. That is, we all have deceptive, lying and twisted hearts. We have a busted internal moral compass in other words, and we need outside help if we want true and unerring guidance and direction.
Consider life just a few decades ago. If you were in a strange place – say a city you had never been in before, or out in the countryside on strange roads, you would likely have needed help from others, or risk being hopelessly lost. Like many of you, I would have pulled into a service station and asked a local for directions.
Or we might have depended on a street directory. In Melbourne for many years we relied on having a Melways in the car. If you do not know where you are going, you need outside help in getting there. And it is not just geographical locations.
We all need moral direction as well. Little kids do not need to be taught how to be selfish. One of their first words is “mine!”. They will readily grab a toy out of the hands of someone else. So they need to be taught about things like sharing and care for others. Usually, it is the parents who bring about such moral counsel and guidance.
All this is quite familiar territory of course. Both Scripture and human experience tell us that we do NOT have some perfect internal guidance system that will never let us down, never go astray, and never mess things up. The truth is, sin is universal, and the human heart is quite unreliable when it comes to knowing right from wrong, truth from error.
Scripture calls this Original Sin. We live in a fallen world, and we all are born with a predisposition away from God and others, and toward sin and self. This is one of the most easily noticeable truths about the human species. As G. K. Chesterton once quipped, “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”
The Bible throughout makes this case about the universality of human sin and the unreliability of the human heart and mind to properly direct us. Just a few of many passages can be offered here. They make it clear that we are ALL led astray by sin and deception, and we are NOT to trust our own failed and corrupted internal guidance system:
Romans 3:10-12 “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
Ecclesiastes 7:20 Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
Isaiah 64:6 We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
Romans 3:10-12 (quoting from Psalm 14:1-3 and 53:1-3)
“None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
But the world around us tells us the complete opposite. We are told to follow our hearts, to fully love and believe in ourselves, to only think the best of ourselves, to just go with the flow, to trust our feelings, to listen to self, and to make self the source of truth and goodness.
That of course is a recipe for disaster. That is the source of all our ills. And sadly it is the kind of thinking that far too many Christians also foolishly cling to. They should know better, but they think just like the world thinks. They need to start reading their Bibles again.
That is what I do – daily. Just moments ago in my morning reading I read this from Jeremiah 9:14: the people “stubbornly followed their own hearts”. The whole context (Jer. 9:12-16) is this:
Who is the man so wise that he can understand this? To whom has the mouth of the Lord spoken, that he may declare it? Why is the land ruined and laid waste like a wilderness, so that no one passes through? And the Lord says: “Because they have forsaken my law that I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice or walked in accord with it, but have stubbornly followed their own hearts and have gone after the Baals, as their fathers taught them. Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will feed this people with bitter food, and give them poisonous water to drink. I will scatter them among the nations whom neither they nor their fathers have known, and I will send the sword after them, until I have consumed them.”
And here Jeremiah is calling out God’s people, not some pagans in another land. So this folly of following your own heart has always been a trap and a snare for the people of God. As such we must keep reminding our selves of how corrupt the human heart is, and that even after regeneration indwelling sin continues to be a problem, and we need an external moral and spiritual guidance system.
Most of us today have a GPS in our car or on our phone. This of course stands for a Global Positioning System. Note the world “global”. The reason why we can get such good navigational directions is because of something outside of ourselves. One site says this about how they work:
“GPS is a system of 30+ navigation satellites circling Earth. We know where they are because they constantly send out signals. A GPS receiver in your phone listens for these signals. Once the receiver calculates its distance from four or more GPS satellites, it can figure out where you are.”
So something outside of ourselves gives us the bigger picture. It gives us much needed perspective. It sees what we cannot see. And that is just what we need morally and spiritually speaking. Sin and deception prevent us from seeing things as they really are. We cannot even see ourselves accurately. We need something outside of ourselves to give us true and accurate perspective and perception.
Thankfully God has not left us in the lurch here. There are two primary forms of special revelation: Jesus and the Bible. With these two external sources of truth and morality, we can have a quite accurate understanding of where we are at and where we are going.
Jesus shows us what real humanity is meant to look like, and the Bible offers us all the insight, instruction and guidance we need to live a life that is pleasing to God, helpful to others, and good for ourselves. It is these sources that we need to look to, not our fallen hearts and fallible minds.
Don't Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worshipby Williams, Thaddeus J. (Author), Carl Trueman (Foreword)
Last year Thaddeus Williams wrote an important book on all this called Don’t Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship (Zondervan). In the book’s epilogue he offers us the world’s version of events:
A new religion is sweeping the globe. Eighty-four percent of Americans believe that “enjoying yourself is the highest goal of life,” 86 percent believe that to enjoy yourself you must “pursue the things you desire most,” while 91 percent affirm the statement: “To find yourself, look within yourself.”‘ This cult of self-worship …
… promises our most awesome life, but robs us of awe.
… markets itself as cutting-edge, but is hopelessly outdated.
… commands us to follow our hearts, but our hearts are divided and depraved.
… encourages us to be true to ourselves, but makes us unwitting devotees to miserable men.
… tells us to be our own moral masters, but strips us of courage and credibility.
… calls us to the rush of unfettered experience and adventure, but becomes impossibly dull.
… tells us the answers are within, but that’s where the problems are.
… beckons us to be authentic, but makes us arrogant.
… claims we can break the structure of reality, but reality breaks us back.
… advertises itself as loving, but makes bigots and haters of us all.
He then offers us the biblical Christian version of events:
We seek to actively subvert the religious narcissism of our day by living lives marked by …
… awe for the God of the Bible.
… rejection of the ancient serpent’s lie to define our own reality.
… following God’s heart before our own hearts.
… rebellion against the doomed philosophies of self-worship ideologues.
… courage to champion the objectively beautiful, good, and true over and against the ugliness, evil, and falsehoods of the age.
… ascending the adventurous terrain of seeking God’s kingdom, rather than wandering the flatlands of our own subjectivity.
… looking to God’s Word rather than within ourselves for answers.
… authenticity before the fact that God is God and we are not.
… expressing our God-given freedoms within the God-given forms of moral reality.
… loving others redemptively, with an eye toward their temporal flourishing and eternal good.
That is a pretty good way of subverting worldly (and carnal Christian) thought and behaviour, and once again properly representing our Lord aright to a world starving for biblical truth and reality.
Bill
A very relatable way of expressing what we all need. Commonly people refer to a moral compass – though this more of a which direction am I going or should go and not a reference to where I am or where I have come from.
GPS gives you an unfiltered position of where you are. If you ask another person they can likely give you where they think you are but not where you are in relation to an unseen third point of reference. The trouble is people will try and put their 2 cents in and lead you up the garden path and over hill and dale because their reasoning is coloured by their perception of things. Like asking the way to the North Pole without mentioning which one.
Then there is the ridicule for those who are led by the spirit.
Bill
A very relatable way of expressing what we all need. Commonly people refer to a moral compass – though this more of a which direction am I going or should go and not a reference to where I am or where I have come from.
GPS gives you an unfiltered position of where you are. If you ask another person they can likely give you where they think you are but not where you are in relation to an unseen third point of reference. The trouble is people will try and put their 2 cents in and lead you up the garden path and over hill and dale because their reasoning is coloured by their perception of things. Like asking the way to the North Pole without mentioning which one.
Then there is the ridicule for those who are led by the spirit.