There are two primary forms of special revelation: Jesus and the Bible. With these two external sources of truth and morality, we can have a quite accurate understanding of where we are at and where we are going. Jesus shows us what real humanity is meant to look like, and the Bible offers us all the insight, instruction and guidance we need to live a life that is pleasing to God, helpful to others, and good for ourselves. It is these sources that we need to look to, not our fallen hearts and fallible minds.

The hit 1952 country song by Hank Williams – Your Cheatin’ Heart – may have been a love song about what went wrong, but it is relevant for my purposes. We all have cheatin’ hearts. That is, we all have deceptive, lying and twisted hearts. We have a busted internal moral compass in other words, and we need outside help if we want true and unerring guidance and direction.

Consider life just a few decades ago. If you were in a strange place – say a city you had never been in before, or out in the countryside on strange roads, you would likely have needed help from others, or risk being hopelessly lost. Like many of you, I would have pulled into a service station and asked a local for directions.

Or we might have depended on a street directory. In Melbourne for many years we relied on having a Melways in the car. If you do not know where you are going, you need outside help in getting there. And it is not just geographical locations.

We all need moral direction as well. Little kids do not need to be taught how to be selfish. One of their first words is “mine!”. They will readily grab a toy out of the hands of someone else. So they need to be taught about things like sharing and care for others. Usually, it is the parents who bring about such moral counsel and guidance.

All this is quite familiar territory of course. Both Scripture and human experience tell us that we do NOT have some perfect internal guidance system that will never let us down, never go astray, and never mess things up. The truth is, sin is universal, and the human heart is quite unreliable when it comes to knowing right from wrong, truth from error.

Scripture calls this Original Sin. We live in a fallen world, and we all are born with a predisposition away from God and others, and toward sin and self. This is one of the most easily noticeable truths about the human species. As G. K. Chesterton once quipped, “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”

The Bible throughout makes this case about the universality of human sin and the unreliability of the human heart and mind to properly direct us. Just a few of many passages can be offered here. They make it clear that we are ALL led astray by sin and deception, and we are NOT to trust our own failed and corrupted internal guidance system:

Romans 3:10-12 “None is righteous, no, not one;
     no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”

Ecclesiastes 7:20 Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.

Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?

Isaiah 64:6 We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

Romans 3:10-12 (quoting from Psalm 14:1-3 and 53:1-3)
“None is righteous, no, not one;
     no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”

But the world around us tells us the complete opposite. We are told to follow our hearts, to fully love and believe in ourselves, to only think the best of ourselves, to just go with the flow, to trust our feelings, to listen to self, and to make self the source of truth and goodness.

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