Are You Deceiving Your Heart?

If anyone among you thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is useless. James 1:27 (NKJV)

What does it mean to deceive our own heart? According to James, it has to do with the words we speak.

We must remember that our spirit man hears everything that we say. Some people refer to this as our inner man, or the heart. We can speak words that cause our own spirit to doubt the validity of what we say. In other words, we can betray or deceive our own heart. How does this happen?

When we speak words we do not mean, possibly in sarcasm, those words are still being spoken, even though we do not mean them. For example, if we say, “I’ve told you a million times to clean your room,” that is an exaggeration. While you may have told the person many times to clean their room, you have not literally said it a million times. Your heart knows this, and it begins to doubt that what you say is true. When we exaggerate like that, it hurts the credibility of our words with our inner man. Our heart thinks that we do not mean what we say. This is also true of things we say in a joking manner. Our inner man of the heart takes our words literally.

Another way we deceive our hearts is to not keep our word. When we say we will do something or be somewhere at a certain time, but are not diligent to do what we’ve said, this also hurts the credibility of our words. Speaking things we do not mean or that have no real value is what the Bible calls idle words (Matthew 12:36).

Why is this important? It is important that our inner man is able to rely on our words as being true so that when we are using our faith, our spirit man is in agreement. For example, if we feel sick, but we claim that “By the stripes of Christ, we are healed,” our inner man will be in agreement with what we are saying if we have a proven track record of speaking the truth.

For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Mark 11:23 (NKJV)

This tells us that our faith decrees are only effective if we do not doubt in our hearts. For faith to work, our heart, our inner man, must be in agreement. If we say something, but deep down, our heart thinks our words are empty and meaningless, our faith will be ineffective. Our faith cannot work without our heart being in agreement, and that only happens when our hearts can believe the words we speak.

By guarding our mouths and watching what we say, we can increase the power of our faith. When we are truthful in what we say, our spirit man, the inner man of the heart, can be in agreement with our faith declarations, and we will have what we speak.