How's your heart?

The heart is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure. Who can understand it? Jeremiah 17:9

Jesus said, It is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly... Mark 7:21

I read in the paper the other day that a top chess player - a “grand master”, no less - had been booted out of a tournament for cheating. Apparently he had been visiting the bathroom suspiciously often during a match, and when they went to investigate they found some kind of computer app which helped him make his next move hidden in one of the cubicles. 

I am myself a keen if decidedly rubbishy chess player, so naturally my eye was drawn to the story. It created in me a sense of head-shaking unbelief. How could anybody be so stupid! What did he think he was doing? Couldn’t he see that he was almost certain to be found out at some point?

Not to mention the little matter of cheating. How could anybody be so deliberately, cynically dishonest?

When people do wrong things - whether serious crime or supposedly trivial cheating - most of us probably shake our heads with surprise and puzzlement.

But why? 

If we had taken any serious notice of these words from the Bible - from Jeremiah in the Old Testament and from Jesus in the New - then nothing would ever surprise us. The problem, it seems, is the heart - that is, the real you and me, the inner, unseen you and me. It has become deeply corrupted, like a once-wholesome well polluted with sewage.

This doesn’t mean - thank God! - that human beings are totally incapable of good and kind deeds. Not at all. Every day of our lives we benefit from acts of consideration from others, both friends and strangers. (It was touching, watching Liverpool against Newcastle United the other evening, to see the Liverpool fans stand to clap Jonas Gutierrez, a Newcastle player, onto the field. They knew he has been very ill with cancer, and wanted to express their sympathy and admiration.)This kind of human fellow-feeling is far from rare.

But it doesn’t alter the fact that something is seriously wrong with us at the very core of our being. Something which the Bible calls sin. 

And something which, as Jeremiah says, is “beyond cure”. (If we don’t believe what the Bible tells us, well, we can always look to another place: the murky depths within our own inner being.)

So why should we be surprised when we hear of politicians using coarse language or fiddling their expenses or outright lying, of teachers cooking the figures to meet targets, of vicars running off with someone else’s wife or husband, of celebrities descending into alcoholism, drug-taking and violence, of police officers accepting bribes, of...? But there is no need to go on... 

The fact is (I know this is a cliché, but clichés do have a tendency to be true) that there are no depths to which the human heart will not sink. Which of us hasn’t been guilty of some of those things in Jesus’ ugly list in Mark 7? I know I have!

So... Jeremiah says that the heart is “beyond cure”. But does that mean we must give up in despair? After all, the word “incurable” is never one we like to hear. 

No! The heart may be incurable - but there is a wonderful sense in which it can be replaced altogether. 

I was in my student years when news broke of the first “heart transplant” in a hospital in South Africa. I can still remember sitting at a table in a cheap cafe and reading about this new and revolutionary procedure. Somebody had actually received a new heart to replace his old diseased one! We almost take it for granted today, but it is truly a medical miracle.

And God’s renewal of the human heart is a miracle of infinitely greater proportions. Later in Jeremiah’s book we read the lovely words of God: “I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord” (Jeremiah 24:7). And the psalmist prays that most lovely of prayers: “Create in me a pure heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10). And Jesus tells us that “blessed” - which means something like “deeply happy in God” - are “the pure in heart” (Matthew 5:8).

This spiritual heart-transplant is a miracle that takes time, because the Holy Spirit who brings it about works very gradually, day by day. 

But it is available, make no mistake! Available for me. Available for you.

Lord God, I don’t always like what I see when I look honestly into my heart. Grant me, I pray, a new, Christlike heart, directed always by your Holy Spirit. Amen.