A Cry for Renewal
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” (Psalm 51:10)
This was the cry from King David after he committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband, Uriah, murdered to hide it.
In most cases, the Bible describes the heart as the spiritual center where our emotions and desires dwell. In its natural state, the human heart is evil, treacherous, and deceitful, as Jeremiah 17:9 says: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” (Also see Jesus’s statement in Mark 7:21-23.)
If this is true, who can know it? The Lord goes on to say in verse 10, “I, the Lord, search the heart.”
We may not understand our hearts, but God does. In Psalm 44:21, the Psalmist said that God “knows the secrets of our heart,” even if we do not.
Therefore, it’s the condition of the heart that determines not only who we are, but also how we relate to others. Proverbs 23:7 says, “As a person thinks in their heart, that is who they are.” Proverbs 4:23 says, “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.”
So it’s safe to say the heart is one of the most important spiritual organs God has given us. Spiritually, the heart symbolizes the center or core of our being, from which prayer and morality arise. This even explains the word “core,” which derives from the Latin word for “heart.”
And so we find David, a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:33), crying out to the only one who knows the heart, God, to renew and restore him, cleanse his heart, renew his spirit, and make him whole again.
We find the same message from God through the prophet Ezekiel. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh, to those who will seek Him for it, who will cry after it.” (Ezekiel 36:26)