The State of the Heart

“In the seventeenth chapter of the prophecy of Jeremiah we read in verse 9: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.’ This means that man in sin is always fooling himself, and in a sense he cannot help doing so, because his very heart is deceitful, twisted and perverted; there is a mechanism in it which turns man against his own better judgement at times.  This explains the process of rationalizing our sins and our ability to explain them away to our own satisfaction.  It also explains our efforts to persuade ourselves that we are better than we really are, and that if we do a certain amount of good it will somehow balance the evil we have done.  The ‘deceitfulness’ of the heart makes a person think that God can be bought by an offering, as the Jews imagined in the time of Jeremiah.  How deceitful, how utterly dishonest are our hearts!  We all ‘put on appearances’ and know that we are doing so; and yet we do it.”  –Martyn Lloyd-Jones “God’s Ultimate Purpose – Ephesians 1” (Baker) p. 409