Girding Your Waist with Truth: Developing Discernment

Good afternoon to everyone. It is good to see everyone here. As was mentioned, they were some great seminars last night. I hope you were there for them or we'll catch those at some point, but I'm excited about bringing another presentation on the armor of God this afternoon. I remember that day very, very well, even though it was many years ago. Our family was gathered in the side room of our funeral home. We were there as they would gather in that funeral home.

They had flown my sister's body back from Dallas, Texas, back to Buffalo, New York. We were there just to identify the body. The funeral director came in and he opened the casket, and our family gathered around to look at my sister. I'll never forget the feeling when I walked up to the casket and I looked inside. I literally did not recognize my sister.

The embalming fluids that they had used had changed her appearance so much. She was like a stranger to me. My sister, Denise, is one year older than me, so we're not strangers. I know her very, very well. I walked away from the casket. I was mad. I was afraid. I was confused. Our whole family was in that spot. We were in a fog of confusion, not knowing what to do. And then I saw my dad. My dad circled back, walked back up to the casket.

And my sister was laying, and she was wearing a dress that went just over her knees. My dad walked up, pulled back the dress, and there it was. We knew it was my sister. There was the birthmark on her right knee. My dad had not forgotten. In the sea of all that confusion, where things were disoriented, my dad remembered, and I thought later about that. I thought, boy, there must have been many times when my dad held my sister, when she sat on his lap and he read stories, or when he saw her plane, and he saw that birthmark, and he remembered.

See, my dad knew my sister, and he knew what to look for. He knew what to look for. Now, certain things in life, thankfully, are not as hard to decipher as what I just described. Some things are easier. After spending three days in the gym, I am 100% certain everyone here could point out the volleyball. 100% certain. All right? Easy one. Next one, a little more difficult. Several years ago, my wife and I had the opportunity to go to Thailand for the feast.

If anyone's been there, phenomenal. They're known for their marketplaces, where you can buy some, let's say, knockoff items. You can get a Rolex watch that might look pretty good. I don't know how long it's going to last, but it's going to look pretty good. So I went to the market by myself, pretty excited.

I got there. I found a Hugo Boss shirt. Unbelievable. $7. I was just thrilled. So I go back to the hotel room. My wife's there. I go back, quietly change it, come out, show her. I said, hi, check this out. Look at this Hugo Boss shirt. She looked at the shirt, looked at me blankly, and she says, it says, bass. So needless to say, that became my favorite fishing shirt. So again, fooled again on that one. Then the stakes get a little more interesting. Look on the screen now, and I'm going to ask you, can you tell me which one's the real $20 bill on this screen?

Now, you're going to recognize, I hope, the Monopoly money. So we can eliminate two of the choices. But now we're left with two. Two choices. It is difficult to figure out which one is the real $20 bill.

Now, I'm not expecting anyone here to know that. And quite honestly, if you think about it, it's not that big a deal. You got this far in life without figuring out what's a real $20 bill. We're probably okay. Right? But that's a harder one to figure out, which one is the $20 bill. But I would contend, and I would make this statement this afternoon, that one of the most challenging, one of the most important things that you will need to figure out in life is the difference between truth and counterfeit truth.

All right? We're going to leave the money to the side for a second. Understanding that difference, because there is one great counterfeiter who is out there. One who deals in a different currency. He's known as the father of lies, the deceiver, the enemy. And he wants very much for you to buy what he is offering. Now, I speak to the young people in particular, but I speak to everybody. He is offering something he wants desperately for you to accept. You know, we read. That's why in Ephesians 6, and it was covered last night, but in Ephesians 6 and verse 11, Paul makes the statement that we need to put on the full armor, the full armor, so that we can withstand the wiles of the devil.

As was mentioned last night, we don't use that term wiles very often. We don't say, Johnny's a good boy, but he's got a couple wiles to work on. Maybe you do. I don't know. You don't hear that, right? But what that means—it's a serious term—it means an intentional act, a strategy that's designed to trick and ensnare a person. And it's interesting, because it doesn't come at you like full force. It's done in a very manipulative, seductive, disarming way that's designed to go past our cognitive defenses. Often flattery is used, right? That plays to our ego or our pride. So that's the techniques that's used. And Paul says we need to put on the full armor.

The full armor. It reminds me, it's like one of those old-fashioned interviews where you had to go in and you got to wear the full suit and the tie, and the socks got to look great, and the shoes got to be shined. Right? Not like these Zoom interviews nowadays. Anyone done a Zoom interview? It's business on top, casual on the bottom, soon as the call is over, ties off, shirts off, throw a T-shirt on and you're ready for a run. No, no, no. Paul said we would need to be equipped head to toe with the armor of God, because this battle is real.

This battle is intense. I think it's interesting that companies spend thousands of dollars, thousands of dollars, bringing in a third-party consulting firm to help them with a mission statement. And this consulting firm will try to figure out the company, try to understand their culture, and then come back about three weeks later with a cleverly worded three-sentence mission statement that's used.

We don't need to understand or try to do that when we try to figure out what is Satan's mission statement. You know what Satan's mission statement is? The one who knows him, Jesus, the one who knows him very well knows his statement. He mentions it in John 10. He says he's the one that's come to what? Steal, kill, and destroy. We don't need three sentences. We don't need thousands of dollars. A very simple mission statement.

That's what Satan has come to do. To steal, to kill, and destroy is his objective. It's what he is trying to do. And that's why Paul goes on to say this is a battle that is raging, that the enemy wants us to buy in and buy into that truth. And this is why he talks about in the battle to win us over that we must put on the armor of God. I think it's interesting when you go to Ephesians 6 and verse 14, the very first thing that's talked about, the very first piece of armor is the belt of truth.

Paul says we need to gird up our loins with the belt of truth. The irony of that statement is I thought about this for months. Don't forget your belt. I'm speaking about the belt. I couldn't find my belt this morning. But luckily I found it at the last second. You can't make that stuff up. But anyways. So he talks about the belt of truth. Now, we talked about Roman soldiers last night.

A Roman soldier, the belt was a critical piece of the armor because what did it do? It held the sword and it held the breastplate firmly in place. When that belt was on, the soldier felt very secure, that their armor was in place. They could go to battle and they could be safe against the attacks from the enemy. The very important thing. There would be no soldier that would go without their belt on because it made them feel secure.

It gave them a sense of protection that all was right. When Paul talks about the belt of truth, it's the same for us. It's designed to protect us from the lies, the lies of the enemy. Designed to protect us and give us security in the truth. The truth that who God is, who you are, what your future is. Because that's the battle.

That's the battle that's raging. Those two, the truth and the counterfeit truth. In fact, it was so important that Paul spends big portions of the first three books in Ephesians. If you go back and read that, Paul is trying to establish that truth. He's trying to establish that truth. He's telling the people, I pray. It is my prayer that somehow, somehow you would start to comprehend the width, the length, the height, the depth of God's love. He's trying to establish that and hope that that becomes part of your core that makes you feel secure. When you're good at the core, when you're strong at the core and you feel secure, you feel things are right.

Paul talks about, I wish your eyes could see what your calling means. The glory of your inheritance.

Paul sets all these concepts up because he wants people to understand. He wants them to be wrapped up. He wants their waist girded with that truth because that's what the enemy wants to attack.

You know, I know for young people, identity is a big thing.

Trying to figure all that out, trying to understand that piece. But Paul talks about, you know what? The Father wants your identity to be in Christ. You are a son or a daughter of God.

If that's wrapped around our waist, that gives us security to go into the battle against the lies.

of the enemy. You know, anything worth counterfeiting has value. If you think about it, it's an interesting thought, right? Money, paintings, jewelry, Hugo Bass shirts, right? They all have value. The enemy realizes this, too. The enemy understands that. He understands how priceless our relationship is with God. He understands the worth of that relationship, and he's out to attack it. And I think it would be a shame, a shame, if we left here this weekend without understanding the value of our inheritance as much as the enemy does. If we did not understand that fully, he understands that. And that's why he's all about putting out his lies. He's all about the lies that he wants us to buy into. Some of these lies are big, and some are small.

But it's interesting.

I don't think—and I'm familiar with the slides—I don't think there are any warning messages on there, right? Satan, when he puts something out, young people remember, it's all good. It's all good. There's no downside. That's the hook. You know, it's not like those drug commercials you'll see when someone has an issue and they're advertising for a drug you can't pronounce, right? And they always show the picture of the grandfather pushing the granddaughter on the swing or the family eating a meal outside by the ocean. And it all looks good until you hear that warning in the background like, side effects may include, right? And they go into that whole thing. It could be dizziness, you know, liver damage, stroke, heart attack, possibly death. I'm thinking, maybe I'll just deal with what I have, right? That's pretty tough. That's a tough laundry. Well, you don't find that with what the enemy puts out. There is no fine print. Now, what is put out is a really compelling package, a really compelling ideology that when it's put together it looks pretty compelling. The whole package looks pretty good.

It looks good. It looks good. There's no warning, but you know what? Young people, all those side effects we talk about, they might show up a year, five, ten, twenty years later.

They might show up in the form of a failed marriage or a life emptied by a bottle.

Life emptied by a bottle. And so it's really hard because Satan is the best at what he does.

And we're just humans. We're humans. And the way we think and the way we process our behavior, it can be really hard. And sometimes with all these messages that are coming at us from every angle, it's easy for things to get distorted and things to become disorienting in life.

It's very easy for that to happen because, again, part of it is how we are as human beings and how we process information that things become a little out of kilter. And it's to the point we really can't trust ourselves to know what's really true. I want to give you three brief examples of that. Three quick things about how our human nature can trick us if we're acting apart from the belt of truth. First one is something called the illusory truth effect. It simply means that there's a tendency to believe false information to be correct if you hear it over and over and over and over again. You hear that, a lie told often enough becomes true. They've done tons of studies on that. You can hear just very neutral statements. You might not know if it's true or not, but if you hear it enough, you just go, you know what? I heard my neighbor say that's true.

Right? It becomes true. And it's interesting how it works. Has anyone ever heard the expression, breakfast is the best, most important meal of day? I grew up with that. I'm afraid to leave the house without eating breakfast. I'm not sure if I'm going to make it to noon. It's drilled into my head. I ate something this morning. Right? Is that true? Is that a true statement? Could be.

But the origins of that go back to 1917, with the founder of Kellogg's put out a marketing campaign to get people to eat more cereal. Don't stop eating breakfast, though. Okay? But it's interesting. But on a more serious note, how does this translate into something a little more serious? Have you heard the expression, you're the master of your own destiny?

Right? You control it all. Now, there's a lot of good things in life. I hope we good work, good habits, good causes, good effects. Right? A lot of that happens. But when we say we control it all, you're the master of your own destiny. Guess what? Where's God? Where's God's plan? Where's His purpose for you? It takes God out of the equation. Very subtle. Second one is something called cognitive dissonance. It simply means that what I believe and how I'm acting, they're not matching up. All right? There's a little bit of friction here. Internal warfare is going on. I'll give you a really easy example. If I believe, I believe exercise is very important.

I strongly believe in it. But I'm having a hard time getting off the couch and going to the gym.

One of two things are going to happen. I'm either going to adjust my behavior and go to the gym, to match my belief, or I'm going to adjust my behavior. Now, hypothetically, I could say, I'll just go down to the basement and play ping pong. That's exercise now. You get this whole thing worked up about how ping pong is the best exercise I could ever have. There's a lot of stretching, leaning, all this kind of stuff. That's how you sort of reconcile the two. You change your behavior. Again, on a more serious note, we have that disconnect in how we believe. Everybody would say, you know what? I believe in God. I know God is good. I know his word is good, but I just can't figure it all out. It's too confusing. He says this, he says that, she says this. It's so hard. You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to be the best person I can be. And that's how we resolve that difference. And we set our own standard now, apart from God's law. Last one I want to look at is something called confirmation bias. Tendencies only accept information that line up with what I believe. I told you in my bio, I'm a die-hard Bills fan, Buffalo Bills fan, right? Emphasis on die hard, right? I think Josh Allen was the best quarterback in the NFL. So I will look for information, people, stats that tell me that same thing. I will push things to the side that don't line up with that. And on a more serious note, if I feel like God is unfair, oh boy, I can find people, I can build cases, I can build a case against God that God is unfair. And I'm not going to hear anything else to the exclusion of who God really is and the fullness of God in all his glory. That I've excluded all that stuff. So now we have a dilemma. What do we do? What do we do? Satan is the best. We've got our human nature. How do we best put on this belt of truth to use it in a powerful way? How do we get there? Paul has a very interesting verse in Philippians. Philippians 1. Philippians 1 and verse 9. It says, I pray that your love may abound still more and more in all knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent. Discernment means all the stuff we're talking about. Test, examine, look at closely. Prove. Know what's true. So what? So that you can approve all the things that are excellent. All the things that are good. And you would know, know what? This is good. What is over here with the enemy? Yeah, it doesn't line up. That's not good. It even gets a little more nuanced than that. There's a quote I like from C.H. Spurgeon, who is a theologian and a minister who took discernment and gave it this definition. It's not knowing the difference between right and wrong.

It's knowing the difference between right and almost right. That's what we're talking about. So many things. We used to a world where we go, I got a 90% on the test. That was pretty good. Almost right. Right? We live in that world. But when we come to truth and discernment, almost right can be quite dangerous. Quite dangerous. I want to give you a comment. I want to put a comment up on the slide here. God is love. We all agree with this statement?

Well, good. I want to make sure I'm still the WFW, not the WWF. Okay. So we all agree with that. God is true. We don't say that. Right? But sometimes that statement can be used to define God in a way that he does not define himself. If you look at some of the comments that are thrown around, all of a sudden now we have a very different God. We have a God that sort of conforms to a God that I'm comfortable with. A God that condones my choices. So on the surface, we're all there, but then you start peeling it back. There's a messaging there. That's very right. At the start, God is love. But if God's defined in a way that's not God, right, we've created a God in our own image that we can live with. Almost right. Very dangerous. So how do we get there? I want to look at four examples for how the experts do things. This is from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Org Site, and it's just entitled, Four Easy Ways to Spot Counterfeit Money. Four easy ways.

The first one is what the experts do. They handle the money. They understand it by touch.

Touch. Now I got eyes up. We got dollar bills going now. The $20 bill is the most counterfeited. The most counterfeited... I'm giving up too much information. I don't want to start anything here. But it's the most counterfeited bill that's out there. But they handle it every day. It's part of their job. I just want to quote something here from one of the workers from the St. Louis operation. They says, we feel the currency every day. When you are handling it every day, you definitely know what it feels like. So when all of a sudden you get a piece of paper in your hand, and you're like, oh, that's different. They understand it doesn't feel right. Because why? They deal with it every day. Touch, touch, touch, touch. Second thing they do. They hold it up to the light. They hold it up to the light, and they look for... there's a thread or a banner that runs, and it shows different colors. They look for that. They also take this $20 bill, and they move it upside down to the side, back, because there's different ink all through here that'll change color from copper to green. All different colors. They look for that.

Then they get out a micro... a micro...

magnifying glass. There you go, thanks. A magnifying glass, and they look because there's micro printing embedded throughout a $20 bill that'll say United States of America, USA, USA, all the way through.

They look for those four things to know whether or not it's the real deal. And I thought about that and how it works for us. You know, they handle this every day. We need to be handling the word of truth every day. Multiple touch points. We need to know God. We need to experience God. I love that verse in Psalm 34. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. That we're in tune with that so much that we know what's real by touch. Not our touch. Remember I said we can get fooled. But we understand who God is and what he says. And then when something comes across, messages that come into that because we're thinking about God understanding God, oh, that feels different.

It's not right. When we hear, when we hear or see something, we need to hold it up to the light.

The light who said, I am the light, we need to hold it up. Hold it up to the light and say, does it align with what Jesus said? What he did. How he walked. Look for the light.

When we hear or see something, we need to look at it from multiple angles. Because at first blush, I use that example of God as love because I got into an after-hours discussion at the office place one day. There's a gentleman that very intimatedly threw that expression back to me. You don't like these people, this, this, this, or that? Don't you know God is love? Right? On the surface. But they look, when they're examining, they're holding it from different spots to make sure there's light all the way through. No dark spots. No dark spots that are counterfeit. The last thing they do, they look at it and say, does it have all that printing? Is it true all the way to the core? You know, sometimes with Satan's messaging, it's what's not said. It's what's not said. Because they say, if it's missing or it's messy or there's no micro-printing, it's counterfeit. Remember I said, there's really no side effects listed. You know, my dad, he knew my sister, so he knew what to look for.

The employees of the Federal Reserve Bank System, who deal with these all day long, they know what a real one looks like, what it feels like, so they know what to look for.

Satan is real. The enemy is real. The battle is real. But I think the most encouraging thing, and it was weird that I was studying on this topic, I thought about it. We're going into battle with the greatest counterfeiter that's out there. I want you to buy an alternate truth. But you know what we're going into battle with? Not something we've cobbled together.

And I thought about this and I just jumped over the top. We talked about the armor. It's the armor of God. God has given us everything we need to win. Everything. It's from God. It's not us. He just says, take that belt and put it on. Wrap it around yourselves. Young people, there's so much messaging.

It is extremely hard. I understand the difficulties. I understand what Satan is waging and the messaging he is putting forth to you. Wrap your core, your inner belief on who God is, how great he is, how much he loves you, that your identity is in him, that your purpose is with him. He has a future for you. Hang on to that. Hang on to that and put that, put that, and make that your belt of truth. Don't ever forget that. Have that with you so you never, you never accept the counterfeit lies of the enemy.