(From Gary Petty in Part)

INTRODUCTION:   How many times have you heard the phrase, “Satan has deceived the whole world”?

As Christians we believe that God called us out of Satan’s deception to the reality of truth. 

BENEFIT STATEMENT: God is Creating His Family. This Shared eternity together requires Spirit driven Relationship with Him and His Creation. Is there anything in the way of that being accomplished?

SPS:  Today we’re going to look at why human beings are so easily trapped by Satan’s deceptions.  We are also going to look at a very difficult concept of how all of us are involved in a type of deception that has deceived us without us even knowing it.    Self-Deception Divides Creation

BODY: Let’s start at the beginning of when deception entered human experience

1. Self-deception (sin) Divides humans from each other and from God.  

Genesis 2:11-13: Noticed that the introduction of sin into human experience changed the inner person of Adam and Eve so much that they not only became separated from God and 3) separated from each other.     

A. There had been harmony between Adam and Eve before sin changed the inner person.  Now they show signs of anger, resentment towards each other and they begin shifting blame in order to justify their actions. 

B.  Let’s MAKE A LIST OF IMMEDIATE EFFECTS OF SIN ON ADAM AND EVE: 

• interpersonal problems, anxiety, fear, stress, guilt, irrational behavior
• separation from God
• separation from each other leading to anger, resentment and shifting blame in order to justify wrong actions

TRANSITION:  This list becomes the core elements of the corrupted human all of us share.

II. Why We Are So Easily Deceived [THE sin in Eden is deception, then Self-deception]

1.  Jeremiah 17:5-10:  Deceived by our own hearts. 

A. Verses 5-6: Jeremiah is inspired to describe a person “whose heart departs from the LORD.”

B. Verses 7-8:  Jeremiah then writes about a person who “trusts in the LORD.”

C. Verses 9-10:  The difference between these two persons is that the one who departs from the LORD has a heart that “is deceitful above all things.” 

Notice that the deception is self-deception.  

D. Since all human beings’ inner person, our thoughts, emotions and motivations, have been affected by Satan’s deception, all of us become deceivers.  The most dangerous deception we can face is when we deceive ourselves.  

TRANSITION:  You might be wondering, “How can I deceive myself?”

2.  Remember we read in Genesis 2 where the three aspects of natural human nature Satan appealed to in Eve were:

• “good for food”—appealing to the five senses
• “pleasant to the eyes”—appealing to the desire for new experiences
• “desirable to make on wise”—appealing to the desire to learn

A.  None of these motivations, experienced under God’s direction are wrong, but Satan deceived Eve by getting her to think that God was holding her back from something better.  Adam followed.

B. 1 John 2:15-17: John shows that these core aspects of human nature have been corrupted into (WRITE DOWN LIST OF DESIRES OF HUMAN NATURE CORRUPTED BY SIN):

• “lust of the flesh”—uses of the senses that are not what God designed us to experience
• “lust of the eyes”—pursuit of experiences that are against God’s design for humanity
• “pride of life”—the arrogance, stubbornness and self-will that drives human beings to rebel against God  

TRANSITION:  Here’s the difficult truth I mentioned a few minutes ago—all of us are regularly involved in self-deception because we are naturally driven by these three corrupted aspects of human nature.  We have three lists:

• Natural Human Desires
• Immediate Effects of Sin
• Desires of Human Nature Corrupted by Sin 

2. Self-Deception Leads to Division from each other and God’s Plan

Now let’s go back and look at the list of the Immediate Effects of Sin,

1.  Interpersonal problems, anxiety, fear, stress, guilt, irrational behavior    

SPQ:  We expect people who don’t know God to suffer with these issues, but why do we as Christians suffer with these problems? 

A.  James 1:12-16: 

a. Verses 12-13:  All human beings , because of corrupted human nature, naturally experience an attraction to sin.  God will test us to help us resist sin, but He does not tempt us or try to get us to sin. 

b. Verses 14-16:  Why do we sin? Because all of us have a corrupted human nature that is motivated by inner desires that are in direct opposition to how God designed us to live (review LIST DESIRES OF HUMAN NATURE CORRUPTED BY SIN :

• “lust of the flesh”—uses of the senses that are not what God designed us to experience
• “lust of the eyes”—pursuit of experiences that are against God’s design for humanity
• “pride of life”—the arrogance, stubbornness and self-will that drives human beings to rebel against God  

B.  None of us are going to really overcome and become more Christ like until we face the hard truth that at the core of our being we don’t think God knows what He is doing and we desire to live differently than what He prescribes for us.  

SPQ:  Think about it.  How many times do you compromise with something you know is right because you reason out that “God will understand?”   How many times do you go against an inner prompting by God by deceiving yourself because in reality it is not what you desire?  

TRANSITION:  We have just begun to scratch the surface of self-deception.  Let’s look at the second of the Immediate Results of Sin. 

2.  Separation from God 

A.  The second immediate effect of sin on Adam and Eve was they felt separated from God.

SPQ:  If you have a deep, meaningful relationship with someone you naturally want to spend time with them.  Right?  Then why is it so difficult at times to pray and study your Bible which is time spent with God?

B. 1 Corinthians 3:18-21:  The hard truth is that we deceive ourselves into believing that biblical answers are not the answers to our problems. 

• We look for answers in the latest pop-psychology that doesn’t lead us to love others but to concentrate on ourselves all the time.
• We try to find fulfillment in our careers at the cost of our families or obedience to God’s laws.
• We spending much of our time immersed in entertainment and spend little time visiting the sick or the widows or serving others. 

C.  We deceive ourselves into continuing to be separated from God and then wonder why God is not more involved in our lives.  The reality may be that God isn’t involved in your life because you aren’t involved in His life.   

3.  Separation from each other, anger, resentment and shifting blame in order to justify actions

A.  The immediate effect of sin is the separation of human beings from each other.  We then begin blame other human beings as the reason for all of our problems.

SPQ:  Have you ever been in a checkout line at a grocery store and resented the fact that so many people were in front of you?  But aren’t they human beings with the same right to buy food that you do?

B.  Let’s look at another example I read in a book titled Leadership and Self-Deception.  I’ve done this.  Have you ever been on a plane and you know the flight isn’t full so you get the seat you want, place something on the next seat and then pick up a magazine and start to read.  You hope no one will want to disturb you, but you are glancing over the magazine to try and sum up everyone coming onto the place hoping they don’t take the seat next to you.  Finally, someone asks to sit next to you.  At that moment you resent them. In reality, that person has the same right to a seat on that plane as you do.  But you resent them because somehow you deserved two seats. At that point, I deceived myself into not loving my neighbor but resenting my neighbor who had done no wrong.       

C.  When Adam and Eve sinned they did harm to each other. 

a. Eve harmed Adam by letting Satan deceive her and then by tempting her husband. 

b. Adam harmed Eve by refusing to go to God and instead gave into his wife’s wrong desire even though he knew it was wrong. 

c. But when they were confronted by God neither of them could see his or her culpability—they justified their wrong actions by blaming someone else.  

3. Self-Deception CAN be Overcome by GOD’S Spirit, Word, AND OUR Choices

When we see other people as the source of our problems we blame them.  Sometimes people are the source of a problem in our lives and we have to deal with that person’s actions.  But corrupted human nature, driven by the pride of life, tends to view other people as objects who exist to fulfill our desires. When they don’t fulfill our desires we blame them and justify our anger, resentment and wrong actions towards them. 

E.  We will never truly love anyone until we give up being driven by anger, resentment and shifting blame in order to justify our actions.

F.  This doesn’t mean we ignore other people’s wrong actions.  There is a time for confrontation.  It does mean that our motivation is to try and find a righteous solution instead of subjugating or hurting the other person.

G.  Sometimes a person will not stop their wrong actions.  You may then have to withdrawn from that person.  But we are to not be consumed by resentment, anger or revenge.   

H. Galatians 6:1-5:  Deception when we treat others as objects.

a. Verse 1:  Paul tells the Galatians that if a member of the congregation sins, and is removed from fellowship because of that sin, that when that person repents it is their responsibility to restore into a loving relationship.  But that isn’t what is natural.  The pride of life motivates us to need to feel superior to others.  We want to remember someone else’s sins.  We want to maintain a feeling of spiritual superiority.  Paul warns them that this self-deception will cause them to be tempted to sin.   

b. Verse 2:  To bear one another’s burdens is not a suggestion. We need to constantly ask ourselves how our Desire of Human Nature Corrupted by Sin keep us from doing this.

c. Verses 3-5:  The pride of life leads us to another form of self-deception.  We find a sense of religious value by comparing ourselves to other Christians and declaring ourselves to be better Christians.  This is a dangerous self-deception because by declaring our own righteousness we resist God’s prompting to love others.   

TRANSITION:  If you look closely at the three passages in James, 1 Corinthians and Galatians what we just covered deals with the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.  

CONCLUSION

1. The corrupted human heart and mind is deceitful.  All of us practice self-deceit every day.  We stop self-deception as we allow God to show us: Thus Eternal Unity WITH God and His Kingdom Family

• Sin Divides humans from each other and from God
• Self-Deception Leads to Division from each other and God’s Plan,
• Self-Deception CAN be Overcome by GOD’S Spirit, Word, AND OUR Choices

Ephesians 4:13-16 (NKJV) 13  till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; 14  that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, 15  but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head--Christ-- 16  from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.

CLOSE: Build the Relationship with God as we are Gifted with Seeing our disunifying Self Deception

Ephesians 3:14-21 (NKJV) 14  For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15  from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 16  that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17  that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18  may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height-- 19  to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 20  Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, 21  to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.