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    Cleaning the Deceiving Heart
    Cleaning the Deceiving Heart
    Cleaning the Deceiving Heart
    Ebook148 pages2 hours

    Cleaning the Deceiving Heart

    By James Tarter

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    About this ebook

    Biblically, the heart is the source of a person’s behaviors, beliefs, thoughts, attitudes, desires, motives, and values. The heart is so important to who we are: our inner nature that is given a new body for our eternity in Jesus. God made the heart naturally stable by making it greatly fear getting changed. This is good, but also causes the heart to be very self-deceptive. If it needs to be cleaned, how can we proceed? This book shows the Biblical picture of the heart more fully, so that we can see ways for believers in Jesus to work with Him to clean our deceiving hearts for our eternity and for our close life-giving fellowship with God on earth. I gave two related books the same cover, so that readers can choose the best fit. Purifying the Heart puts solutions of heart-problems with their discussion: this complicates the picture of the heart. Destroying Spiritual Strongholds more fully explains this picture from the Bible, which is a harder introduction to this picture.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateMar 6, 2014
    ISBN9781304817952
    Cleaning the Deceiving Heart

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      Book preview

      Cleaning the Deceiving Heart - James Tarter

      Cleaning the Deceiving Heart

      Cleaning the Deceiving Heart

      Healing the Unconscious Decision-Making that Shapes Our Lives

      Dr. James M. Tarter

      Copyright Page

      18th Edition

      ISBN 978-1-304-81795-2

      Copyright 2014, 2018 by James M. Tarter.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted to make copies for purposes consistent with furthering the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God.

      Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE® (1995 Updated Edition): 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by the Lockman Foundation.  Used by permission.  (www.Lockman.org)

      I call the New American Standard Bible the NAS.  I add boldface to specific words and phrases in Scriptures to add my emphasis for discussion.

      DEDICATION

      to

      MY WONDERFUL WIFE NITA

      Whose love for the God of truth and life

      has helped her to embrace true life

      Introduction: A Practical Picture of the Spiritual Heart

      As we see quickly in Chapter 1, the heart in the Bible is the whole inner person, everything beyond the visible body that makes a person who he/she is, one’s true nature.  The heart is the person who goes into eternity and receives a new body from God, and is the source of a person’s beliefs, values, attitudes, motives, thoughts, and actions.  The heart is the part of us that believes, and believing in Jesus will produce increasing righteousness in our lives.  As the heart is all of the above, we should see what God shows about getting it right, clean, and pure.

      When the heart is confronted with getting changed, however, it will lie to the mind to protect itself.  The mind is the conscious part of the heart, all that we are aware of or can become aware with simple, direct questions.  This widespread lying to oneself is demonstrated by the common ways people use to avoid handling troubling heart issues: self-justification, excuses, blaming others, denying reality, and other common ways to avoid facing the heart’s deep need to change.  In this book we see what God shows for us to do to work with Him to clean or purify our hearts even with the heart’s great resistance to changing.

      {The specific focus of this book is to present the picture of the heart in Chapters 1-4 with a view of cleaning it and without thoroughly justifying every new idea, without showing all of its Biblical foundation.  I gave two other books the same cover to show that they are closely related, so that a reader can decide what is best for him or her.  As I describe more fully at the end of Chapter 1 and in Chapter 5, Destroying Spiritual Strongholds (called DSS) provides a more thorough basis for this picture of the heart.  Purifying the Heart provides essentially the same first and final chapters as your book, but proceeds in a different way that puts a solution near the discussion of each heart-issue.  This way can make this picture of the heart and its actions more disjointed (harder to see) than in your book.  Likewise, your book can make it harder to see how well each solution fits its issue (to help this, I connect each pair at the end of Chapter 5).}

      Chapter 1: Fixing the Tricky Source: the Heart

      The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills the heart.  (Luke 6:45)

      For with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness.  (Rom. 10:10a)

      Believers often want to change persistent harmful behavior of themselves, family members, or other loved ones.  Many Christians realize that the bad behaviors are often empowered by wrong beliefs that give a lying world-view.  Not knowing a better way, these believers seek to change these wrong behaviors and beliefs by confronting with the truth or another way that works with some issues, but has not produced a lasting change in the persistent problem.

      Why do such solutions fail?  A key reason is that they often focus on correcting wrong beliefs and behaviors without providing what the heart needs.  Therefore some changes do not last longer than active efforts to hold them up.  The lasting changes desired by God and us will change the heart, and the changed heart will produce better beliefs and behaviors.  We can consistently make the changes that a person’s heart needs only if we listen to the Lord Jesus.

      The Heart as Shown in the Bible

      To make wise changes to a heart more consistently, we also need its Biblical meaning.  (You want a heart surgeon to know a lot about the heart before he starts cutting).  The one Greek and two Hebrew words for heart are used 998 times in the Bible, but rarely refer to a physical heart.  From the use of heart in all of the Bible, Harris’s Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (TWOT) and Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words conclude that more than any other term in the Bible, the heart is the whole inner person – the inner soul, spirit, mind (conscious awareness), will, emotions, personality – everything beyond the visible body that makes a person who he/she is, one’s true nature.  The heart is the source of a person’s beliefs, values, attitudes, motives, thoughts, and actions, and is the person who goes into eternity and receives a new body from God.  God gives us a new heart when we receive Jesus, and as we discuss later, He continues to develop or shape it carefully as we obey Him in our lives.

      The Heart as the Source of Transforming Belief

      As Rom. 10:10a says clearly, a heart is the part of us that believes: "For with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness."  A person believes with his/her heart, and belief (= faith) in Jesus will result in increased righteousness.  What I truly believe will show up in my actions or inactivity.

      An experience or a conclusion from an experience can get into the heart and become a part of it as a belief.  We often remember a wrong conclusion (as a belief) from an awful experience while not thinking about the experience.  The heart often contains contradictory beliefs.  A part of one’s heart might fully agree with God while another part agrees with a demon that contradicts God.  For example, a part of my heart can firmly believe that God loves me while another part believes I am unloved from rejection by a parent or by other important people.  Or part of my heart can firmly believe that God is faithful while another part does not trust God or anyone (often from an unhealed wound).

      The Heart as the Source of Desires, Thoughts, Words, and Actions

      Luke 6:45 shows that a heart is the source of one’s good and evil, and Mark 7:21-22 expands on this source of evil out of evil men:

      The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills the heart. (Luke 6:45)

      ²¹For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, ²²deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. (Mark 7:21-22)

      V. 21-22 show this source of one’s evil motives, values, desires, attitudes, thoughts and actions.  What comes out of my heart can reveal its wounds and will greatly affect the quality of my relationships.

      Contrasting the Heart with the Mind and Will (and Soul and Spirit)

      A mind is the conscious part of our heart, what we are aware of or can easily access by a direct question.  The unconscious part is hidden but often quite strong, a source of the great deceitfulness of the heart that Jer. 17:9 reveals:

      The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?  (Jer. 17:9)

      A heart keeps much of its inner working out of the mind, but we can know a lot of what is in the heart by what comes out of it.  Have you ever been surprised by some anger or other strong feeling that came out of your heart, or by words out of your mouth?  If one is severely or repeatedly injured, normally he finds ways to get through a crisis without being emotionally crushed – to avoid thinking about this abuse, condemnation, humiliation, terror, or other assault on him.  But without Christ, these things did not leave his heart and do affect his choices.

      The will is the part of the heart that chooses or decides what one actually says or does.  Our wills choose which thoughts to speak.  We respond to any command or request with our wills.  The will receives input from every part of the heart in making conscious (with the mind) and unconscious choices.  Getting more information than we know consciously, the will in the heart often makes decisions before we think about them.  Father God has a strong will – chooses what to do and then does it – and creates each of us in His image: it includes a will.

      A wise, loving parent does not crush or continually dominate his child’s will, but cultivates it so that he makes good choices on his own as he continues to grow.  As he grows, his will often creates extra problems as a part of learning to make good choices – good decisions – later in his life.  This wisdom with our wills is like Father God’s, even though it gives Satan ways to keep us from using our great strength in Christ now.  Our almighty loving Father has great plans for each of our futures into eternity, and Satan cannot stop them unless he deceives our hearts to agree with him against God.  If he does, then our wills are not with God: this lets

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