[Darris McNeely] When I first began to read the Bible and have it taught to me as a young man, there was a scripture that kept being mentioned over and over again. It’s a scripture in Jeremiah 17:9. I can almost still memorize it. It says, “The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” And I remember hearing it quite a bit to describe the general nature of humanity, of human nature, as we call it – that man’s heart is deceitful and against God.

Now, many of you may know that verse, and it’s a rather popular one. I’m talking here in a series called “Fellowship of the Heart”, and this is part one, that will allow me to talk about something that I think is very important for us to understand about what God is doing and where God is working today. We go back to Jeremiah 17:9 and look at that statement that man’s heart is desperately wicked – that shouldn’t take us too long to look around today’s world and understand that yeah, it explains a lot of things about people and what happens. In fact, Jesus made a statement in Mark chapter 7, in the beginning, in verse 21, that backs up what is recorded in Jeremiah. Beginning in verse 21 of Mark chapter 7, Christ spoke to what defiles a man. And He’s basically saying it’s the things that come out of the heart that defile a man. He said, “From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications” – sexual immorality – “murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these things – all these evil things,” He said, verse 23, “come from within and defile a man” (Mark 7:20-23). From the heart. From out of the heart of a person, which really, when we look at what the biblical heart is and what that is telling us right here – that it’s more than just the muscle that is beating there in the center of our chest that is really the essence of life and circulating the blood throughout our body. The biblical heart speaks to our emotions, our attitude, our intellect to a certain degree, and the seat of our emotions and our thoughts, and that’s what is meant by the biblical “heart”.

So when Jeremiah and even Christ says that out of that heart comes a lot of bad thoughts and wicked deeds ultimately as they are translated into certain actions, it does describe human nature to us. But are we to remain that way? Do we remain evil? Do our thoughts, our attitudes, our heart remain wicked? Or is there a change that should take place? Does the Bible talk about that? It does. And it’s that focus that we should really put our mind on. Once we understand the source of human nature and why this evil comes out of one’s heart, there’s a way to change that, and that is what I call the fellowship of the heart, and that area and work that God is doing today.

Next time, I’ll talk about exactly how that is changed and what scriptures show us about that when it comes to the working of that heart and changing it from the evil and the adulterous types of attitudes into a different frame of mind. That’s BT Daily. Join us next time.