Psalm 15:1 “Lord, who may abide in Your tabernacle? Who may dwell in Your holy hill?”
Here the psalmist confronts us with an important question, an inquiry directed to God himself. What follows is the answer proceeding from above. It is concise, practical, and highly penetrating. It is not my intention to cover the response in its totality. I will simply focus on one of its aspects, which is, “he who speaks the truth in his heart”.
Speaking the truth in our hearts
What is meant by “speaking the truth in our hearts”? The Scriptures tell us that the person who thinks is speaking with himself in his heart.
Do not think in your heart, after the Lord your God has cast them out before you, saying, ‘Because of my righteousness the Lord has brought me in to possess this land’; but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out from before you” (Deut. 9:4).
So here we have it, “Do not think in your heart … saying”. The same is seen a few chapters later, “Beware lest there be a wicked thought in your heart, saying …” (Deut. 15:9). And then we have the words of Paul who declares:
But the righteousness of faith speaks in this way, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?'” (that is, to bring Christ down from above)” (Rom. 10:6).
These scriptures clearly reveal that “speaking the truth in our heart” means to think truthfully.
The challenge
The difficulty we face resides in the fact that “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9). Consequently, it can easily lead us to manipulate the facts to our own interest as we process them in our hearts.
Pride is another misleader: “The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who dwell in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; you who say in your heart, ‘who will bring me down to the ground?’” (Obadiah 1:3).
How easy it is for us to think we are in the right when a argument occurs. It is brother Alex who is unfair, sister Cathleen who is irritating, fat Harriet who is lying, and the list goes on and on. Of course we, somehow, come out on top as little angels ready to exhibit our righteousness even if we have lost our temper in the process, or spoken ugly words with an appalling attitude. Actually, we can spend hours and hours brewing some unjust judgments in our heads without realizing that we are thinking falsely in our hearts. We thus create stories that don’t really exist; accept conclusions that contradict the facts; crank our frustration up with meditations based solely on the product of our imagination, and all this without realizing we are going the wrong way.
In addition, the person who utters lies openly can get caught and exposed. Therefore, he might abstain by fear of what may happen. But the one speaking lies in his heart seems on safe ground, protected enough to give vent to thoughts denying the truth.
The lovely song
The Spirit, who knows the heart of every man, inspired Paul to write:
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables” (2 Tim. 4:3).
Here the apostle points out that men tend to seek what they want to hear. In fact, what he wrote refers to nominal Christians fooling themselves by turning their ears away from the truth, and being turned aside to fables; and all this because they have “itching ears”.
Now, of all people able to tell us what we want to hear, we ourselves are the most qualified, for we know our own desires more than anyone, and if our ears are itching we have little hope to escape. We will—at times brilliantly—offer to ourselves a gratifying speech. Whether it is based on truth or not seems to have little importance. We enjoy its solace and that is what counts. So there we go, speaking with ourselves—at times truthfully, other times falsely—with little capacity to differentiate the one from the other.
Now you may think a Christian cannot act this way. Yet the Scriptures are adamant, we can and often do. Too easily we build a double standard in our heart, which says: To lie to others is wrong, but to lie to oneself is not as bad. And there we go, giving way to a deceitful heart.
The way out
Needless to say, our hope is inherent in God. He alone can circumcise our heart in such a way that we will desire truth in the inward parts (Psalm 51:6). “And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart,” declares the prophet in Deuteronomy 30:6. But the question is: Do we want a circumcised heart? Do we want to be classified with the people of God in public? Do we desire to differ from the world in their basic scale of values? Are we ready to be rejected, criticized, and sentenced. When Jeremiah wrote, “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, and take away the foreskins of your hearts”, he was asking the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to identify themselves with God on the whole spectrum of life.
Paul puts it differently, yet the conclusion is the same. “Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (1 Cor. 5:8).
Yes brethren! God desires truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part He will make us to know wisdom (Psalm 51:6).
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