“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
The strong words of Jeremiah 17:9 are penetrating. But – let’s be honest – we don’t tend to operate as if those words were true. Somehow and somewhere along the way, most Americans jettisoned the clear Biblical teaching that humankind is inherently evil, and we’ve thoroughly embraced the opposite perspective – now believing that most people are intrinsically good. Such a rejection of God’s truth does not come without consequences, and we’re feeling those consequences in every corner of society.
I would remind you of the rich young man who knelt before Jesus and asked a loaded question: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answered with a needed correction: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:17-18). There you have it, straight from the Lord’s mouth. You and I are not good by nature. But, slowly but surely, we’ve been duped into trusting the human heart.
“Follow your heart!” The line has echoed in a thousand songs and movies. That idea has sunk so deeply into the fabric of our culture that we assume it’s good advice. At this point, friends, “follow your heart” is a linchpin in the metanarrative of the Western world. As we slide into a completely emotionally driven understanding of reality, we face an increasing inability to determine any moral center. The unspoken rule is this: rationality must give way to emotion. Wrong! Unless we want Hollywood to determine virtue, this is our call to discernment.
Here’s the deal: because we’re trusting blindly in our emotions – we’re giving ourselves way more credit than we deserve. We think that we can fix the world by fixing politics, for example. Please don’t get me wrong. We are called to light and salt – to have an illuminating and preserving influence on the world for Christ – but presuming that we can change people without the gospel is a dead-end road to nowhere.
Pride corrupts everyone and everything. We seem to have forgotten this. Look no further than God’s Word …
The Sadducees were more liberal, so they denied the more unexplainable parts of the Bible because those passages didn’t line up with their progressive worldview. Ring any bells? When the time was right, Jesus let ‘em have it. He let them know that they had no right to pick and choose what portions of the Scriptures to uphold. By so doing, they were eclipsing God’s power and glory. (See Matthew 22:23-33.)
The Pharisees were more conservative, so they distinguished themselves as the arbiters and gatekeepers of public purity – but they did it in a manner that was arrogant and harsh. Ring any bells? When the time was right, Jesus let ‘em have it. He let them know that they had no right to cherry-pick the sins of others in such a way that the Pharisees came off as righteous in and of themselves. (See Matthew 23:1-36.)
I would remind you that Jesus had trouble with the Right and the Left. Both missed the mark. Both showed signs of malignant self-righteousness. Both attacked Christ when they deemed it expedient to do so. Sometimes willing to set aside longstanding differences between them, the two sides would on occasion bury the hatchet and join forces – when they perceived the perfect opportunity to bring Jesus down. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” wrote Shakespeare.
Pride doesn’t keep proper boundaries. But God does. He who made everything, seen and unseen, has called us to trust Him with what’s broken about our world – though we often find it far easier to attach our hopes to anything or anyone else. Only our sovereign, holy, and gracious God can produce the needed heart-level transformations in the ways in which people – His image bearers – regard and treat one another. Especially in a prolonged season of division and derision like 2025, we’re in desperate need of Christ’s wisdom, Christ’s righteousness, and Christ’s love.
We need Christ’s heart. Without Him, ours is entirely unreliable.
Ultimately, the problem of our human nature is our misplaced trust in ourselves. Sadly, we’re trusting in us. It’s a fulfillment of the Apostle Paul’s prediction of full-blown moral and societal upheaval, which he described quite fittingly like this (2 Timothy 3:1-9): “People will be lovers of self … always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”
Lovers of SELF. Lord, keep us out of that number!
Friends, drama is universal. Somebody somewhere is always upset about something. Sometimes the only perceptible thing we have in common is our shared humanity: “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). We’d be foolish to abandon God’s perspective on human nature in order to fashion humanistic idols for ourselves. False gods never deliver!
God is working out all things for our good and for His glory. We can take that to the bank. And our God is good. We can trust Him, even when we don’t know precisely what He’s doing.
But we can’t be Him. And we can’t do His job.
My favorite quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” is his poignant description of fallen human nature on a fallen planet. Today I submit that we’d all do well to remember: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
Pastor Charles
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