Cleanse Your Heart

May 4

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings, “ Jeremiah 17:9, 10.

The Lord our God knows us. There is nothing within ourselves that we have succeeded in hiding from other men or that we have buried so deeply within our bosom that we have hidden it even from ourselves that He does not know.

Within the heart of who we are there is the likeness of who we really are—the likeness of who we are before God. He sees us and He knows us in the reality of our personhood. We may “fool all of the people some of the time, and we may even fool some of the people all of the time,” as so wisely observed by President Abraham Lincoln, “but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

And you cannot fool God at all.

The very fact that we might want to is a sure indication that our hearts are indeed, “deceitful above all things.” We who profess faith in Jesus Christ, we who have allowed our hearts to be the abode of the Holy Spirit, II Timothy 1:14, must be ever vigilant that we do not allow His holy presence to be removed from us because we have allowed ourselves to incorporate into the inner sanctum of our lives the essence of evil that He cannot stand.

We know that the devil himself is called, “the father of lies,” John 8:44. When we give ourselves to falsehood, we are emulating the evil one. We must not allow ourselves to be “caught between two opinions,” I Kings 18:21.

We must as Joshua proclaimed to the people of Israel, “Choose you this day whom you will serve; as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” Joshua 24:15. We must not allow ourselves to give place to the enemy in this, for if we relinquish to him our solid foundation of honesty toward other men, he will endeavor to confiscate the totality of the truth we possess.

In all things, we must align lives with Jesus who is the WAY, the TRUTH, and the LIFE, because no one can ever approach the Father but by Him (see John 14:6).