Jeremiah 17
v.5
Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength andd whose heart turns away from the Lord.
v.6
He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives.
v.7
But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him.
v.8
He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”
Do this in me, O God. The most accurate measurement of abidedness is our degree of trust in God for the human heart is deceitful. I want my roots to stay tapped to the streams of the Holy Spirit. May my leaves always be green as I rejoice in you always. May my life bear fruit in season and out of season.
Where else will you find love that will never fail, nor change, nor die? Where else will you find an object for the intellect that will yield inexhaustible material of contemplation and delight? Where else infallible direction for the will? Where else shall weakness find unfailing strength, or sorrow, adequate consolation, or hope, certain fulfilment, or fear, a safe hiding-place? Nowhere besides.
So we have not to begin with work; we have to begin with character. ‘Make the tree good,’ and its fruit will be good. Faith will give power to bring forth such fruit; and faith will set agoing the motive of love which will produce it. Thus, dear brethren, we come back to this-the prime thing about a man is the direction which his trust takes. Is it to God? Then the tree is good; and its fruit will be good too.
v.9
The heart is deceiful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
The train of thought is apparently this: If the man is so blessed Jeremiah 17:7-8 who trusts in Yahweh, what is the reason why men so generally “make flesh their arm”? And the answer is: Because man’s heart is incapable of seeing things in a straightforward manner, but is full of shrewd guile, and ever seeking to overreach others.
The Septuagint reads this verse differently, “The heart is deep above all things, and it is a man.”
In my effort to measure myself rightly in the Lord, I realize the instrument for such measurements is deceitful. Despite what units I use or what standard I set, the heart is deceitful and beyond cure. There is no hope outside the gospel for this heart of stone to become a heart of flesh. Don’t measure yourself. Watchman Nee states that self-knowledge cannot be attained through introspection.
jj see also IV To close my discourse let me remind you that IF THE TEMPTER CAN BE OVERCOME IT WILL BE EXCEEDINGLY HELPFUL TO US ALL THE REST OF OUR LIFE.
v.10
I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve.”
The answer to the question, “who can know it?” To himself a man’s heart is an inscrutable mystery: God alone can fathom it.