“Just follow your heart.” How many times has someone given you that advice? You’re at a bar, talking to someone you’ve only known for ten minutes, you’re telling him about the tenth failed relationship in your life, and you ask
him, “What should I do now?” “Just do what your heart tells you,” your new bar buddy says.
If I had a gong like the old “Gong Show” on television, I’d bang it. Wrong! The Bible gives us pretty clear advice in Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure.” Now, that’s extreme! Your heart, my heart, everybody’s heart, Jeremiah’s heart. Your heart can mislead you, and there’s no cure. There is no pill, no prayer, no seminar, no book, no conference, no song, that, at the end of it, your heart is no longer deceitful. Do you know what this means? It means you can’t trust your heart! Because your heart can convince you of anything and everything.
We all do things we know are wrong and we’re going to regret it later, and 
we’ve told God twelve times, “I’ll never do that again,” and then we go do it again. “Who can understand it?” Jeremiah says. Your heart is incurably deceitful, and it can’t be trusted.
But here’s a powerful truth: It’s painful, but when you are willing to look long and hard into the mirror of your soul, and strip away all the excuses, then you are a candidate for God’s grace to move you where God wants you to be. It is so much easier to make the transition from my will to God’s will once you have renewed your mind and renovated your thinking and been honest with yourself.
You see, your heavenly Father wants to bring about different outcomes in your life. That’s what the whole gospel is about.
