Don't Trust Your Heart
"The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?"
- Jeremiah 17:9
Awhile back I was talking to someone who was having an affair with a married man. That, by the way, is a sin, which I pointed out to her. She wasn't very happy with me for saying that, so I asked her if she considered herself a Christian.
"Of course I do," she said.
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"Well, do you believe the Bible is true?"
Much to my surprise she said, "Absolutely."
So then I quoted some verses that identified what she was doing as a sin. And she told me, "That is your opinion. That is your interpretation. You just don't understand."
Do what your heart tells you is a creed believed by millions today. It is one of the great cultural myths of the Western world, a gospel proclaimed in many movies and songs and television programs and stories.
But the Bible says, "The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?" (Jeremiah 17:9).
We need a higher standard of authority than our heart, a higher standard of authority than mere opinion, and that is the Word of God.
The problem we have today is a watered-down gospel. And because of that, many have a watered-down Christian life. We have Christians who have become so much like the world that the world doesn't want to become like them. And what is considered normal Christian living in the first century would be considered radical by today's standards. But that is what we need: radical Christianity. To put it another way, we need biblical Christianity.
Instead of trying to accommodate the Word of God to our changing culture, we need to accommodate our culture to the unchanging Word of God.
