Self-Deception

When I was a kid, there was a comedian on television. I don't remember much about him. I was young, but I do remember every time he would do skit comedy, and every time you would make a mistake or do something wrong, his big thing was, the devil made me do it. And that was his excuse for everything. He could get out of everything by just saying, the devil made me do it. You know, it was sort of common. How many know who that was? Oh, all the old people. Flip Wilson. You've got to be old. Remember Flip Wilson.

You know, we know that Satan deceives us. We know there's deception in the world. We believe we've been called out of that deception. But can we ever genuinely say, the devil made me do it? Can't Satan actually make us do things? Well, no, he can't. But at the same time, why is it that we know that he deceives the world? We have been deceived by him. And why is it so easy for us to fall into a deception where we're actually doing things that God doesn't want us to do, or thinking things that God doesn't want us to think, or feeling things that God doesn't want us to feel, or feeling things that God doesn't want us to feel, anger and jealousy? Why is it so easy to go that direction when he obviously doesn't have the power to make us do it? I'm going to talk about that today. I want to talk about deception, and I want to talk about how deception happens in us, how we go through this process. Now we can say, don't sin, don't think that way, don't act that way. But we have to know the process by which it's happening. It's one thing to say, don't sin, repent and don't sin. Unless we're convicted to understand the process, how do we know how not to do that? Which Aaron brought out in the sermonette. Nathan had to get David into a dead-end corner. And in that dead-end, he had to decide, I have to change. I can't do what I'm doing. But David did not say the devil made me do it. So let's look at that today. Very simple thing. We're going to do some very foundational basic scriptures. No great new meaning today. But we have to go back and understand this. If we're really going to overcome at the level that God wants us to, and we have to seek his help to do this, we have to understand why we do sometimes what we do. So let's go to Genesis 3. Genesis chapter 3. We know the story. Adam and Eve. Human beings that had never experienced sin, had never experienced any internal conflict, had never had conflict with God, who never had experienced conflict with each other.

From a human viewpoint, they were experiencing the perfect life. Everything they wanted physically was given to them, and there was no stress, no anxiety, no guilt, but nothing like that. There was just happiness. And God allowed Satan to come in. Now remember, Satan didn't sneak in. This is real. This is what happened. Satan didn't sneak in. God let him come in. But there's a reason for that. I don't want to go through that today, because that's a whole complicated answer to that. I mean, why would God allow that? God knows how weak they were. How could they mentally, emotionally, spiritually battle this archangel that was pure evil? He'd become pure evil. He allowed him to come in. After he instructed them, after he gave them love, after he gave them what they needed, but they failed.

I have come to believe over the years, and I've mentioned this before, that the reason God allowed him in there was for us, and ordered for us not just to be a higher form of animals, to be in the image of God. We have to learn the difference between good and evil, and we have to choose the good. It is the only way you can ever love, because love requires self-sacrifice, a conscious self-sacrifice, a conscious self-sacrifice.

Animals will sacrifice themselves. I watched the other day where in one of our bushes there's a cardinal sitting on a nest, and some mockingbird jumped into the bush. Now, I didn't know it was there until I saw the male cardinal come out of a tree 40 feet away like a torpedo. I mean, it was just shocking. It was a blur. See, and he went into that bush, and the mockingbird come flying out, even though he's quite bigger. He was leaving that place, right? He's coming in to sacrifice himself for the female sitting on the eggs. But that's not a conscious decision. That is a urge and impulse he has in him, because he's designed that way. You and I have to decide these things, and that means love that sacrifice requires decision. And that means we have to know how to choose what is good in order to do it. And the only way you can choose good is either you're programmed and you're just an animal, a higher form of animal, or you literally consciously choose. And then we learn to be more like God. So he did this so they would choose. You and I have been fighting that battle of choice every generation ever since. You and I, every day, that cosmic existential war between good and evil happens inside of us every day as we choose. We make our decisions. Adam and Eve failed in theirs, but I want to look at that. Why was Satan able to deceive them? Because that's important for us to understand today. So verse 1, now the serpent, of course he was Satan here, was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, has God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? It's a statement of truth. There's a subtlety here that, once again, is a whole other subject and the way that Satan thinks. And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it lest you die. Now, death at this point is a philosophical concept. What I mean is they had never seen anything die before. Okay, it's a truth. It's a reality. God said it. Exactly what is it? He would have described it to them. But until you've, you know, you could know at six or seven years old that things die, but until your grandfather dies or your fish dies or you still, until you actually experience it, you really don't know. So they have a limited understanding of death at this point. They just know it's not something they want. Then the servant said to the woman, you will not die.

There's a lie here. There's, this is deception. All deception is a lie to get you to disbelieve the truth. For God knows that in the day that you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. This is a remarkably simple deception. And it was, it's so easy for her to fall into it. It was so easy for her to fall into it. And she went to Adam and convinced Adam. Even though Adam knew what was wrong, she convinced him it's worth trying. And our first parents started down a road that humanity's been on ever since. And the whole Bible is about God fixing that. The whole message of the Bible is from this three chapters, to the ending three chapters of Revelation is, here how he's, this is how he's going to fix it. So humanity, we choose, we learn, we grow, we suffer. And eventually Christ comes back on earth. There's two different resurrections. This is all this plan of fixing what's happened right here. And you and I live in this. And that existential battle goes on inside of you and me every day. We have to realize and step back once you were called by God, before you were deceived, and you just participated. Even though people without God struggle with good and evil, don't they? I mean, we were designed to actually do good. We were designed to be good. We were made in the image of God. So that part of every human being still struggles, although human beings give in more and more all the time. You know, their whole lives are spent struggling and losing that battle more often than not. And some people come absolutely evil in that struggle. Other people you can meet, and they, you know, you think, well, that's a good person. They don't know everything what God wants, but that's a good person. You can see it. But remember, as I've said before, God's purpose is not to take bad people and make them good. God's purpose is to take corrupted, lost, dying human beings and make them His children forever. That's a totally different purpose.

So a person can be, have a lot of goodness in them, and doesn't mean that God is completing what He wants in them. So we have to see that difference and understand. If you truly have a calling, your calling's not just, oh, I'm a bad person, I get to learn to be good. It's way beyond that. I just said, I learned to be nice. No, it's way beyond that.

I've met pagans, I mean Hindus. They were nice people, but they don't live in what the Scripture says, but they were nice and they were kind. And I liked them. God's purpose is to make us into His children. So, verse 6. Here is what Eve saw, and let's not condemn her too quick here. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food that was pleasant to the eyes, and the tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave it to her husband with her, and he ate. Now, the reason I say don't condemn her too quickly, first of all, she's been confronted by Satan. Now, I've actually had people say, well, if I was there, I wouldn't have made that decision. Don't run to that too quick.

But you think about this. It's appealing to the eyes. In other words, it was appealing to her senses. That of itself is not evil. God gave us senses. Because he wants us to experience very good things in this life. There's also reasons why, you know, you're changing a baby's diaper and you don't feel a need to eat it, right? They don't mean to be gross, but you know what? The woman goes, yeah, that's right. Why? The smell tells us not to eat this, right? That's why you ever eat, how many have eaten that? It's from the Philippines, the stinky fruit. Have you eaten that? Why? I've never, I would try it, but somehow you get past the smell, right? Yeah. Does it taste good? No. Okay.

You know, and everybody I've talked to is like, oh, it just stinks so bad. And most people tell me I never could even taste it because I couldn't get it past that. I've actually had a few people say, actually, I liked it. They liked the flavor. Maybe you don't, maybe you hold your breath. I don't know what you do. But somehow I think that's not supposed to be eaten. I don't know why. But we have these senses, and these senses are so that we can enjoy what God has given us in life. You know, people that have very good smell, smelling capability. I've often, you know, I've often, you know, admired like my wife. I can look at a rose, I think that's pretty. She can smell it and say, wow, it smells so good. And I smell it and think, I guess so. It smells a little like a flower to me, I'm not sure. But to her, right, she has a more acute sense of smell than I do. But we see with she, her senses were that looks good. She probably went up and sniffed it, right? Whatever it was. It wasn't stinky fruit because she wouldn't have eaten it. It looked good. It smelled good. This is something that appealed to her senses. That itself is not sin.

Remember, it's how we use the senses that become sin. It was pleasant to the eyes. She wanted a new experience. All of us want new experiences. We're, you know, watch a child. It's sort of sad if you get older and older and older and give up new experiences because the child loves new experiences. This woman is a full-grown woman, but in her experience, she's two years old. In her experience, all she's experiences is goodness from God. It's a new experience. Desirable to make one wise. We all want to learn. We're driven to learn. And especially you look at every newborn baby in those first few years is driven to learn new things. That's why they hurt themselves so much. They're just driven to learn. This is Eve, and that purity of who she was at that time, she looked at it and said, wow, that's got to taste good. Look at all the other fruit that God's given us. That's got to taste good. She looked at it and said, what a new experience. And I'll know things I don't know. I'll learn. These are natural. And the reason I bring that out is Satan attacks us in areas where God made us a certain way.

And so there's a certain natural interest that's already there. But he means that he designed us for that natural interest to produce good. So realize sometimes we're being pulled towards evil because he's taking a natural part of our nature and pulling it in a different way. And as he pulls it, at that moment, it seems right. It seemed right to her. And all he was doing was playing with her natural tendencies with an uncorrupted human nature. And he was playing with that. This is how he deceives people. Let's go to verse 7. Let's go to verse 7. Of course, this is what happened. Now, by the way, if you take notes, write this down because you're going to have three little lists when we're done here. Okay? The first one is good for food, pleasant to the eyes, number two. Number three, desirable to make one wise. Put a little definition beside that. It was good for food. It had to taste good. Probably smelled good. It was pleasant to the eyes. What a new experience. And how get the learn. Desirable to make one wise. She'll know the difference. She'll know good and evil. It didn't say you'll know the difference. You'll just know both of them. Of course, the moment she took it, she now experienced evil, and she became a mixture. Of good and evil. She didn't learn it. She became it. She became both. What was the result of that? Does she now know entirely good and evil? That's the problem with deception. It starts with what is a little piece of truth, and behind it is nothing but a lie. That both of the eyes of them were opened, were seven, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. And they heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God said to Adam, or cried to him, and said, Where are you? And so he said, I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. Something had changed deep inside who they were as human beings. Something they did not understand. They had committed sin. Okay, this is the first thing now they experience. After they decide, I am going to determine good and evil for myself. Without even understanding what that entirely meant, God says, Evil is bad. Don't do it. But what is it? Don't do it. How many of you as a kid, especially, or did something your parents didn't told you not to do just because you wanted to see what would happen, right?

I bet you they're keeping us from something fun, right?

Okay. So where does this deception come from? So the first thing they experience are sexual problems between husband and wife, anxiety, fear, stress, guilt, and participate in irrational behavior. We'll hide behind this bush, and God can't find us. I mean, God just pops up in and out of the place, right? He's not... He's there all the time. They just don't see Him. I mean, it's not like God's walked away. God was there the whole time. And their mind, if we hide behind... It's almost like two... You ever little kids hide behind a couch and say, daddy... I'm like, kids did this all the time. Daddy, daddy, can you find me? Well, you're out in the open, kid. I mean, I can see, okay, you do the little act, you look around, you play for them, then you act so surprised. There you are! And they laugh, and you know... And He said, well, that's because they're children. These are people who were morally children, and they were deceived. And immediately everything in their life changed. They now had experienced good, and they experienced evil, and they had no way to sort that out. They had no way to choose between it. You know, the lie was, you'll know, no, you'll experience. You won't know the difference. You'll just suffer the consequences. They were, secondly, after all these things that are happening to them, they were separated from God. They weren't in the same relationship with God they had had before. They knew God lived. They knew God was real. They were created by God. They had seen God. They had talked to God. It's not like they had any lack of belief in God. They did not know how to relate to God, because they weren't the same. They weren't what He had created. They didn't know how anything worked. And then, when you go through the rest of the story, in verses 11 through 13, when God said, what happened, they blamed each other. And then they blamed Satan. So, first of all, you have sexual problems, anxiety, fear, stress, guilt, absolutely irrational behavior. You're se... they're separated from God. That relationship has been broken, and they experience a separation from each other. You think about that. Well, it was His fault. It was her fault. No, it was Satan's fault. Think of what's happening in them now. Anger. They never had anger before. Resentment. Probably Adam's thinking, why did you do this? Why did I listen to you? And I thought when God made you with the most incredible thing, and my companion, and now I'm thinking why did He even create you? I mean, you can think of all the things that's going through their brains. Where's that coming from? Because God never made them to think that way. Something had to change inside of them. So, now they have a separation from each other, which leads to anger and resentment and shifting blame. No one really takes responsibility for what they do. It's always somebody else's fault. So, they're victims. They're already victims for their own decisions. This is what happens when Satan deceives us. When Satan deceives us, we begin to have all kinds of physical problems, not just sexual problems, problems with alcohol, problems with drugs, problems with addictions to television. All human sin is addictive, by the way. I'm going to do a sermon on that sometime soon. All sin is addictive. We act like there are certain addictions. Everything. Covetousness is an addiction. All sin is addictive. It becomes part of our makeup. It's not just an event. We have to stop thinking about sin only as the behavior. The behavior springs from something else, and that's sort of what we're going to be talking about today. What does the behavior come from? Why do we fight this existential battle? And why do we lose sometimes? And sometimes it seems like we're losing a lot. Why?

Because problems with our senses started—that's what they experienced, that's what we experienced. Anxiety, fear, stress, guilt, and irrational behavior became part of who we are.

Separation from God became part of who we are. And separation from each other as human beings became part of who we are. So it's never really our fault. We're the victim. Other people, it's their fault.

Welcome to thousands of years of human history.

This is it! This is the motivation for human history. And it's all because something shifted inside who they were. And when they were kicked out of Eden and Satan became what Paul calls the God of this world, every one of us somewhere, probably—it may even be before birth—but at birth, it shifts. Somewhere in there, Satan influences us, and we shift. And something inside us changes.

And here we are.

So maybe we should be able to say the devil made me do it. Well, because in all honesty, he's influenced the development of human nature in every human being. But God doesn't let us have that excuse once He reveals Himself to us. Because He says, okay, He corrupted you, but I can change this. I can fix this. Let's go to Jeremiah 17. There's a couple verses here that we read all the time, and we hear quoted all the time. But I want to read this in the greater context. Jeremiah 17.

Verse 5, Thus says the Lord, Cursed is the man who trusts in man, and makes flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the Lord. For he shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see you when good comes, but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, and assault land which is not inhabited. He said, this is what the life of a person who rejects God is. It's like living in the desert with no water on salt flats. With the sun beating down, and no hope.

Verse 7, Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and whose hope is in the Lord. So there's faith and there's hope in what God does and in God's involvement. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and shall not fear when he comes, but its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit. He said, so people who trust in God aren't going to have the same level of anxiety and fear. Oh, we all have anxiety and fear, but it's going to be different because we find hope. We receive something that we don't have, and it comes from God. We might be hiding behind the bush, and God says, child, come out here. I know you're there anyways, right? No, you're hiding from me. Come here. And because of that, we receive something we cannot have ourselves. That's the context of verse 9, because this has to do with why you choose these two different ways. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart. I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings. He says here, the greatest problem we have is we deceive ourselves.

Satan has already changed our nature. God calls us to have our nature changed.

When Satan influences us, which he does every human being, it's not like he doesn't have much to work with. He's already applying pressure to the areas in your life where he's already deceived you, where your weaknesses are. And the greatest problem we have, because God has called us to trust in him, isn't him, isn't Satan. It's we deceive ourselves. We go back to our old human nature. We go back to that pattern.

Self-deception is something we don't think about.

But self-deception is when God has showed us the truth and we deceive ourselves, not to follow the truth. Like I said, it doesn't take Satan much to pull us, whatever your weakness is. I mean, if your weakness is just covetousness, it doesn't take much for you to deceive yourself. He doesn't have to do much. He does a little bit. It's not like he's making us do it. He doesn't have to do much. And we just follow it because it's part of who we are. That's why it's so easy to look at somebody else's sins and say, what's their problem? I have no problem with abusing alcohol. Yeah. But you don't have the weakness they have. Or you look at somebody else and say, what's their problem? I have no problem. All they do is judge people and gossip about people. I don't have that problem. True. But they do. And Satan isn't going to hit them with alcohol and he's not going to hit you with gossip. Why should he? You can't deceive yourself and he can't deceive you with that, right? He plays on our weaknesses and he knows them. And we participate in self-deception. 1 John.

Remember, good for food pleasant to the eyes, desirable to make one wise, is not sin in itself. Sometimes people will make sexual sins the absolute worst sins you can commit. And the truth is, human sexuality was made by God for good. It gets twisted. It gets twisted and becomes something that's not good.

And so for food pleasant to the eyes, desirable to make one wise, human sexuality is in that natural state not sinful, which is in a proper relationship between a husband, a wife, a man, and a woman in marriage. It's not bad or evil. It gets twisted. And because of that physical part of us that's driven to do that, we will deceive ourselves in all kinds of directions.

I mean, mainstream Christianity has gone through a major shift and that now a majority of Catholics and Protestants believe that homosexuality is biblically acceptable. And it is not. What would lead them to that? Because most of them aren't practicing homosexuality. It's a little twist in there. God wants us to love each other. God doesn't want us to judge each other. And if this is how people choose to love each other, it's good. And that little twist, and it gets lodged into their brains and it turns something wrong, evil, into something good. See, this is what he does. I think, how could people do this? He doesn't take much on his part. It takes God opening our mind and helping us to see that. Someday when Christ comes back, everybody will see it. But he's not calling the world, no. First John chapter 2 verse 15. John says, do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. So he's saying the world here. He's just saying the natural world around us, which Satan is the God of. We live in it. We get a lot of good from it. A lot of positive things in our lives. But he says, don't love this. It is fatally flawed inside everything in human experience. You'll find Satan's fingerprints somewhere. There's always a little twist, always a twist, always a twist. He can't come out and make all of us absolutely evil, but he make all of us some evil. And that's enough. Because with a corrupted human nature, you can't live forever. You can't. You would just be another Satan. So it doesn't take much. A little twist here, a little twist there. And this evil becomes part of every one of us, just in different ways, just in different ways. And so that cosmic battle is happening inside of us because you've been called by God. I've actually had people say to me, it would have been easier if God wouldn't have called me because I could have just been doing what I was doing. I said, in a way, it would have been easier. The destruction of your life would be impossible at this point. You would probably killed yourself. I mean, knowing the person. I said, could you have lived that way? Well, no. Yeah, but you think it somehow had been better. So how many times would you have been divorced? How deep would you have been into drug abuse? Would you be out on the street some place, not even know your name? Could that have happened? Yeah. So that's what it is not to fight. You just go down these directions, wherever they are. We fight this inside of us. And this here's where John says, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. It's not of the Father, but it's of the world. And here's the point he makes, but the world is passing away and the lust of it. But he who does the will of the Father, abides forever. You and I have been called to be changed, radically changed, into a totally different kind of being, an eternal child of God, which he says your life will be more fulfilling, more happy, more meaningful than even what you can understand today. That's what God says he's going to give us. But we have to go through the process of deciding. Do we give in to not only Satan's deception, our own deception, or do we give in to God?

Because it comes down to really a choice between the two.

How do we deal with self-deception? Sometimes it's easier to see Satan's deception, right? It's easier to see Satan's deception. Sometimes it's so blunt. Sometimes it's so crude. Sometimes it's so obvious that you just say that, you know, you just reject it. But all there has to be is one little thing in this world, whatever it is, whatever everyone, all of us have different weaknesses, all of us have some of the same weaknesses, but all it takes is one thing. And in that one thing, we say yes. And we find a reason within ourselves to accept the yes. We make up a reason inside ourselves, just like she did, just like Eve did, just like Adam did. Adam seems to have been, I'm not going to lose my woman over this. And what he did was lose his place because God had made them to govern the world. At that little point, he was the king of the world.

He lost his kingship over the world. That's all. Yeah, I can tell you 15, 20, 30 years later in his life, he realized what he'd lost. It became really apparent when his son killed his other son, right? You know what death is when your son beats another one to death. And now you know what you lost. There was no way he could understand at that moment what he was losing, but he did know. He did know what he lost.

As he watched his own children, his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and some of them were not very good people. And he remembered his days with God.

So let's look at these symptoms once again that happened. Look, just think about a little bit. How do we deceive ourselves? The first thing I talked about in terms of what happens to us is we have sexual problems, anxiety, fear, stress, guilt, irrational behavior. Now you can put every sin under irrational behavior. We sell ourselves to make lots of money so that when we die, what? We get to die in a nicer hospital bed? Why did we really accomplish this if that's all it is? Stuff.

So we sell ourselves to all these irrational behaviors. Let's go to James 1, because James pinpoints this into a New Testament Christian viewpoint. Ammonieux did not have God's Spirit.

Now they had the presence of God there with them, so they had this remarkable experience of actually having met God. But still God wasn't in them. If you have been repented and you have faith and you have been baptized and you've received God's Spirit, the power of God is in you. By the way, the power of God in you will create conflict, enormous conflict, against your own human nature. We all have inner conflict because we're now in this battle.

You know, some people have no real conscience. They don't have a battle with good and evil. They just do what they want. Some people have come to me and said, I should have never been baptized. I didn't know I had so many sins. Or I didn't, I should have never been baptized. I now feel so sensitive about things. I feel guilty about things I just never thought about before. And I said, oh good, that means you have God's Spirit. It's not that you don't have God's Spirit, you do have God's Spirit. You're now involved in this existential war that has fought inside of us with the power of God and Satan outside of us trying to pull us his way because Satan isn't allowed in you. So it's always deception. It's always pulling us. And God is in us showing us how to say no.

James says in verse 12 of chapter one, bless is the man who endures temptation. Okay, we're tempted and we see something and we say, boy, I would like that, or I'd like to do that, or I'd like to think that, or I'd like to crush my enemy. I'd like, you know, all the things that we could do. And he says, we endure it. We deal with the temptation. Temptation itself creates a conflict within us.

Unless you reach the point where certain, you know, I mean, if you've never, I know people who can't even stand the taste of alcohol, so they've never been tempted to get drunk. So, okay, that's never a temptation to you. If you're a person who used to drink too much and you're having a bad night, that becomes a temptation sometimes. You can look at that bottle and say, oh man, I just need a drink.

Well, of course, you know, when you say that, you mean you need eight drinks, right? So the temptation is there. The battle begins. So you endure it. You don't give into it. For when he has been approved, he will see the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love him.

If we love God, we'll fight this fight. That doesn't mean, by the way, that we don't lose sometimes. Every one of us loses sometimes in one way, form or another. And your neighbor might look at you and say, how in the world did you do that?

What do you mean you punched the person in the face? Why did you do that? Well, okay, you have a problem with anger, problem with violence. That person does not. And maybe you failed. Okay. God now expects us to keep dealing with these things. This battle goes on. You know, sometimes we'll, we'll, we'll sin and say, oh, well, God doesn't, you know, he's so mad at me now, and mine's, we'll sin five times.

Right? And then God says, no, no, no, that's not how this works. The battle goes on. The struggle goes on because I am saving you. God says, I'm changing you. I'm going to give you a better life. And you know what? If you, if you learn now, your life now will be better. Your life now is better whenever you resist sin.

At the moment, we don't believe that. So we deceive ourselves. I am better if I sin. It's better for me. And he says, no, it's not. I guarantee you it's not. He's yelling at us. It's not. But we struggle because we still have corrupted human nature. He says, let no one say, verse 13, when he has tempted, I am tempted by God.

For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. God never puts in front of you something because he wants you to fail. There's an important point here. God, for one thing, can't be tempted. You know, the Bible says, well, God got angry. You say, oh, will God ever get so angry? He'll just kill me?

Understand something. Anger with God has to do with justice. It doesn't have to do with, you made me bad, mad, and hurt my feelings. That's not what it is. It has to, I'm angry because this is not just. This is wrong. This hurts creation. It hurts me. It hurts humanity. It hurts another person that I hate, he says.

And there's things he says he hates, and it always has to do with the abuse of another person or absolute rebellion against him. He hates it because of its results. God never loses his anger because we hurt his feelings. And praise God that he's that powerful. Because I can guarantee you we hurt him all the time. We hurt him all the time. And he loves us enough that, so when he gets angry, it's because there's damage done, and he wants things fixed.

He wants the damage repaired. But each one, verse 14, this is important, you can't say I was tempted by God. Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Now does that mean God sometimes will let temptation enter your life? You bet he will. He let Eve face it. He let Adam face it. You and I are going to face it. He doesn't cause it. He doesn't cause your desire to steal.

He didn't put in us a desire to steal. But when you have this opportunity to steal and get away with it, and you're drawn towards it, maybe cheat on your taxes, or cheat somehow in your business dealings. And I mean, I could make some money here. If I just did something, I know it's not right, but I can make some money. God isn't, he's allowing the temptation. God isn't drawing you towards the sin. You understand that? He doesn't do that. That's the point here. Who's deceiving you? You? Satan puts it in front of you. God allows it, and we're drawn towards it. We have to recognize, no, that's inside of me, and that is wrong. That is not of God. Because God's inside of me too. Because God's in there. God's in our minds. He always gives us a way out of temptation. He always does. It's just we blow right by it, most of the time. Or we raise the way around it. We either just go right by it, never see it, or we reason a way around it.

It's like the, you know, you hear this all the time. Yeah, we were making it out in the back of the car, but we didn't know it would go this far.

You mean when the policeman came up and knocked on the window and said, hey you two, get out of here. And when he drove off, you stayed there? God gave you a way out.

Stop this. This isn't right. This won't end well. And now you're pregnant.

God always, but we just, we go by it or we convince ourselves, no, no, no, I can handle this. I can handle this.

Alcoholics, no, you can't handle it. You can't go to the bar and sitting around with all the guys and just drink ginger ale. You can't do it. You can play that you can.

You can pretend that you can. And you might for a while. But I've dealt with that one a lot, too. Eventually, what happens?

He goes on and he says, But each one is tempted when he's drawn away by his own desires and enticed. And when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin when it's fully grown brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.

It's interesting. God says, okay, you have the desire, but you haven't sinned yet. Well, I want to sin. I feel like sinning, he says, but you haven't done it yet. You still have a choice. God's looking at the choice. God's saying, okay, I know how you feel because you've been corrupted. You shouldn't feel this way, but you do. And Satan's come along and caused all this temptation. So step back. What if Eve would have just stepped back? What if Adam would have just stepped back? Right? But they didn't. But we have God's Spirit. Crying at it in our mind, he can give us the power to step back. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying he will give us, because he can give us the power to step back.

The second thing that happened was separation from God. 1 Corinthians 3 18. 1 Corinthians 3, 18.

I usually try not to go over 55 minutes. I'm going to walk over here. I'm going to walk over here. I'm going to walk over here. I'm going to walk over here. I usually try not to go over 55 minutes. I'm going to go over just a little today. If you wish to leave, be tempted to do so.

1 Corinthians 3, 18.

Let no one deceive himself, if anyone among you seems to be wise in this age. Let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, for it is written, he catches the wise in their own craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise that they are futile.

We have to be careful. There are a lot of things that seem to go for wisdom in our world around us. Definitions of morality, psychology, sociology, philosophy, that are passed off as wisdom. They're actually, as he says, as foolishness before God. And they will consider what you believe to be foolishness. Well, one's right, one's wrong. They both can't be right. Now, I'm not saying there's not good things in those different kinds of sociology.

There's not much good in philosophy. Not too much. It's just human attempt to tell why and how and everything. You know, and it's terribly flawed. But sprinkled in everything is Satan's temptation, his fingerprints. So even on a good thing, there's something about him that's touching everything. And we have to recognize it. We have to sort through it. That don't mean we have to be paranoid. There's a lot of good in the world. There's a lot of good things and good people that are, they don't, even if they don't know God, they're trying, right? What I'm saying is we have to understand that God has opened our mind to look around and say, everything here has to be fixed eventually. Nothing in this world. The U.S. government will fail. All religions will fail. All economic systems will fail. All education systems will fail. Why? Because Jesus Christ isn't running it. That's why. And when he returns, those things can work. And the good things will be brought out of it and the bad things removed. But we have to understand that we really have stepped back out of this world. And we're going to see that much of it just doesn't work.

So we deceive ourselves sometimes because of a foolishness that seems wise to us. And then the last thing I mentioned was separation from each other through anger, resentment, and shifting blame. This is so much part of us. I won't ask for a show of hands. How many of you have been at a checkout line in some store and you're really frustrated because there's four people in front of you. And one of them is taking a while to take their stuff out of the cart. Like they don't have the right to be there. They're holding you up from your life.

Why? Because if there's four people behind you, they probably feel the same way about you. Or we feel this way in driving all the time. Get out of the way! It's my road. I paid the taxes for it and you 200 cars in front of me get off because I'm coming through, right? What's the problem here? It's like, wait a minute. Why is it ours? Or that plane beside or that seat beside you on an airplane? And you're hoping so much no one takes that seat. Especially if you're in the middle. Now, everybody paid for the same ticket. Everybody got a seat and you're in the middle. And then a guy comes in and he sits by the window. And you'd think, it should have been my seat.

And then someone comes and sits beside you on the aisle and they don't smell like they've taken a shower for about four days.

Why am I being oppressed?

None of this really has anything to do with you except to make you uncomfortable. But you understand, in the scheme, in God's plan of the universe, the guy getting to that seat and the guy smelling next to you has nothing to do with you. But you know, there's been times I've been, oh, I hope nobody's just beside me. I hope nobody's just beside me. You know, because I want to be able to stretch out and sleep on this flight.

That's all.

Like, this person has no life and has no rights. That's that self-centeredness we have. And that is a real issue we have. Galatians 6 will be our last scripture. Galatians 6, verse 1.

Because this separation between us, each other, it gets easy for us to judge someone else's sin. Now, understand, if someone's committed a sin, we are to acknowledge it's a sin. We are to speak to them about it if we know about it. I mean, that's what I do a lot of times. I'm sitting down dealing with people's sins, right? Working them through their sins. We can't justify or ignore sin. If we love each other, we can't. But at the same time, we can't look at each other and say, thank you, God, that I'm not a sinner like this person, or I'm not as bad as that person. There's a parable in the Bible about that, you know.

We can't look at our lives and, you know, we can look at the world. We're supposed to judge the world. That's sin. That's wrong. That's against God. There's certain activities. We're not to participate in this church at all. Or this, I'm sorry, this church, this world at all. Yeah, you are the church, but not in the world. There's certain places we shouldn't go. I'm just going to tell you right now, this is the command. This is just my observation from doing it once. Do not go downtown Nashville on Saturday night.

It took me a long time to... What is that smell?

I know what that is.

And there's only so many drunk people I want to see. Are people just trying to pick strangers up? Say, I don't want to be here. Right? Why would we want to be in that environment?

Actually, Sunday afternoon can be sort of fun. When the ice cream shops are open and everything, but don't go down on Saturday night.

Brother, and if a man is overtaken in any trespass, your spirit, you who are spiritual, restore him such as one in the spirit of gentleness, considering yourselves lest you also be tempted. So he says, okay, we have people sometimes that are suspended from church in order because of some sin. And when they work through that and they come back, we are to accept them back. Why? Lest we not be tempted.

Paul says, be real careful here. Your temptation may not be the same, but it may be something else. And your sin may not be found out, but God knows. Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one examine his own work, and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load. We will rejoice in what God is doing with us. And all of us have had an experience where we've watched a loved one absolutely destroy themselves in sin, until you can't even reach them.

And it's just so painful. But you can't make that decision for them. You can only keep helping until there's no one. There is a point where they won't take your help. They have been totally self-deceived, and usually they hate God, they hate his way, or they found a new religion that lets them do what they wanted to do anyways. They can just do what they wanted to do anyways.

Satan is out there. We talk about Satan a lot. We know he is the God of this world. We know he influences us. But the great deception is from inside of us. That's why there's a battle.

Because God is changing us and healing us from the spiritual sickness that we have been suffering from. He promises us that if we stay in his battle, he will win. He doesn't promise you will win. He promises he will win. He will change us.

And when that final change comes, we'll be totally different. He promises that to us. Just let me do my work and stay in the conflict. And there's times when you receive great joy because you know what you're doing is right. There's times you make the right decision and you know God is pleased. And he says, just stay in the conflict. Just stay there. Let me work with you and I will give you joy. I will give you help. That's why the last sermon I gave here was about this holy convocation and why it is so important to keep God's Sabbath and why it's so important to be here.

Because that's part of the healing process, by the way. Part of the healing he does is the Sabbath and a holy convocation with other people that are amidst of an existential conflict within themselves. So we all should understand each other a little bit.

And here's the last of the three little lists.

Combating this struggle we have.

Fill your mind with the Word of God. You have to have this Word being put in your mind all the time.

Pray for God's guidance, but pray that He will prompt you with His Spirit. Pray that God, when you're about to deceive yourself, pray that God will intervene.

That God will come along and say, don't go that way. He'll use a person. He'll do it just through a sense of guilt. Sometimes He'll change the situation. Sometimes He lets you face it, but He just does it by putting a Scripture in your mind over and over and over and over again. Now you can ignore it. We all ignore God. We all ignore Him sometimes. And of course we end up in trouble. But pray that He gives you the ways out. Pray that He helps you understand, I'm deceiving myself. And have Him let you know you're deceiving yourself. And sometimes He'll do it through another person. Another person will come up and say, look man, I can't stand this anymore. You're destroying yourself and you're wrong. And you don't want to say, well, how dare you say that to me? And then say, well, wait a minute. I asked for you to send somebody or something. And sometimes He'll send a person. And then immediately follow that prompt. Don't go down the road, a convention yourself. No, no, no, I don't like that prompt.

Immediately follow it. Immediately say no to your own deception. You know what happens when you say no to your own deception? Satan flees from you. He can't make you do it. And if he can't get you to deceive yourself, he's got to go find somebody else. Oh, he'll be back, but... He likes easy battles. He doesn't like hard ones. God has given you a spirit of love, power, and a sound mind. One of the greatest fights we have is that we have to be careful that we don't resist that love, power, and sound mind because we deceive ourselves.