“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? ‘I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.’” (Jeremiah 17:9–10, ESV)
Statistics tell us that heart disease is the leading cause of death annually in the United States, claiming about 695,000 people per year. This attributes to approximately one in five deaths in our country. Every forty seconds someone in the States has a heart attack. Needless to say, a properly functioning heart is essential to a healthy life.
Yet what are the statistics for our spiritual hearts? Just as the person’s fleshly heart is vital for good health and life, the health of the spiritual heart is essential for a vibrant life. In the United States only twenty-eight to thirty-five percent of adults identify as born-again Christians, about one-third of the adult population. This means that two-thirds of the people in our country have spiritual heart disease. They are spiritually unhealthy and unless something is done, they will experience eternal death.
In this poem that the Lord gave to Jeremiah, He stated this, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick.” All people are born with a diseased spiritual heart. This heart disease started with the first sin in the Garden of Eden and it has been handed down through all succeeding generations. The only exception was the birth of our Savior, Jesus, who was born with a divine nature rather than a sinful nature like the rest of us.
So, we started out with a spiritual heart disease. What resulted from this disease? All kinds of evil. All people are born sinners and thus they sin. From this diseased heart comes all sort of wickedness and scheming of people. It causes people to transgress against the pure moral values of God. It causes people to ignore the beautiful relationship that they can have with their heavenly father and pursue the worship of things rather than He who created everything.
It is interesting that the word translated as “deceitful,” in this verse, aqob, Strong also defined as insidious (Strong H6121). Mirriam Websters Dictionary indicates that when referring to disease insidious denotes something that is developing so gradually as to be well established before becoming apparent. This is the case with every person born. They have a diseased spiritual heart and do not even know it. Two thirds in this country are spiritually dead and dying today without even knowing they have a problem.
How do you determine if you have an insidious disease? You must go to a doctor and have a checkup. Yet in the case of a spiritually diseased heart, one needs a spiritual physician. There is only one spiritual physician. He is the Lord our God. In this poem to Jeremiah the Lord stated, “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind.” Only He can discern the inner workings of the spiritually corrupt heart.
The question is this. How do people get a spiritual heart checkup? It must be by going to the spiritual doctor, the Lord. What is His main diagnostic tool for us? It is the test of His word. Look at what the writer of Hebrews indicated.
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12, ESV)
So, two things are essential for people to have a spiritual check-up. They must seek the great Spiritual Physician with a true desire to find out what is going on in their spiritual hearts. This means taking off the blinders, one’s predispositions, and seeking for the correct diagnosis. The diagnostic tool is the word of God, the Bible. It will reveal the condition of one’s heart. It will reveal the sin problem within as God by His Spirit reveals the truth of Scripture.
However, this diagnosis also takes effort by the patient. Just as one will go to the physician for a physical exam, one must go to the Lord for a spiritual exam. They must take the exam of God’s word, what He stated in all sixty-six books of the Bible. They must do so with an open and willing mind. Only by doing so will they see the true condition of their own spiritual heart and only then will they be open to the Spiritual Physician’s remedy. For the remedy, the spiritual prescription, is also found in God’s word.
What is the remedy? It is faith in Jesus Christ alone. This means trusting in Jesus and His work on the cross where He died to pay the penalty of sin, and offers the only remedy for a diseased spiritual heart. The spiritual heart is diseased and only faith in Jesus can fix it.
“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!” (2 Corinthians 13:5, ESV)
Renewing the Heart 