Deception: It Can Happen to You Don't bury your head in the sand: it is frighteningly easy to fall into deception.
Even more devastating is that anyone deluded is completely unaware of it.
Those in the greatest danger are the ones who think it couldn't happen to them.
Those who murdered their Messiah were appalled that their ancestors had killed God's prophets.
They were certain they would never do such a thing.
The great apostle Paul wrote: 1 Corinthians 4:4 My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent.
It is the Lord who judges me.
Let these Scriptures chill your spine: Proverbs 16:2 All a man's ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the LORD.
Proverbs 16:25 There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
Who can understand it? Matthew 24:24 For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect - if that were possible.
Matthew 25:44,46 They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?' .
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Then they will go away to eternal punishment James 1:22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves.
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James 1:26 If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself .
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Avoid Presumptions About God's Will If we are to truly hear from God, it is essential that we avoid the trap of blindly assuming that if it is contrary to our longings it must be God's will.
It is equally critical that we not go the other way and automatically assume that if it seems certain to make us happy, it must be God's will for us.
Few Christians - maybe none - have walked with God for long without sometimes mishearing him because what the Lord was seeking to tell them was contrary to their expectations.
Scripture insists that as the sky soars way beyond our reach, so are God's ways far beyond our own (Isaiah 55:8).
Yet still we unconsciously develop presumptions about God's ways that seriously distort what he is seeking to tell us.
No matter how sincere, our preconceptions blind us to possibilities, without us realizing it.
They have horrifying potential to send us spinning into delusion.
Mindsets, whether positive or negative, can dangerously cloud our perception of reality and of what people are really saying.
For example, there are people whose tragic pasts have convinced them that they are unlovable.
Some of them end up married to adoring partners and yet their mindset so blinds them that they continue to be convinced that they are not loved, no matter what extremes their partners go to in trying to prove love in word and action.
In fact, many such people are so blinded to all the evidence that they deliberately act obnoxiously in an attempt to drive their loved one away because that seems less painful than what they consider the inevitable shame of being dumped.
They can even be doted on by the most loving and most important person in the entire universe - Almighty God - and they still can't accept it and, despite everything, they continue to feel utterly unloved.
A positive mindset can be just as dangerously blinding.
With tragic consequences, young people can feel so invincible that they are certain that no warnings of danger apply to them.
So let's briefly explore how mindsets can hinder us from hearing God's voice and discovering his will for us.
Many of us fall into the rut of always expecting God's will to be challenging, scary, painful.
The Bible is dripping with evidence for this expectation.
We are to love God more than any other person or thing.
This can be divinely tested, as it clearly was for Abraham when he was asked to sacrifice his precious son.
Jesus was continually asking people to give up everything to follow him.
An entire book of the Bible is devoted to Job's horrific test.
We know God's will for Jesus was terrifyingly painful.
Jesus and the rest of the New Testament warn us to expect severe persecution.
Scripture tells us to rejoice when trials hit, because they build character.
As if hundreds of Bible verses were not enough to make us expect the worst, many of us have the additional pressure of being prone to feelings of guilt, depression, inferiority, or pessimism.
A friend of mine shares his experience, which is an extreme example of how preconceptions distort our ability to hear from God.
I had an abusive father who only sent me to church to get a free baby sitter.
I often looked at God as similar to my father.
I stopped attending church when I was 13.
I tried to be a good Christian for a while, but before long I plunged from being a good kid to being a mean spirited, hateful person.
I tried numerous times to get back to God but each time I hit a wall of fear that was so unbearable that I felt compelled to turn away from God.
I often told myself that this fear was God's punishment for my gross sins and that it proved I was beyond forgiveness.
I had a lot of bad thoughts about God that I had no control over.
As a result, I often slipped into depression.
I would then get on medication and return to my sinful lifestyle.
It seemed the only way I could function was to eliminate God from my life.
I did fine for a while.
I got married and had a son.
I got off drugs and alcohol.
I even started a business.
For the first time in my life I was finally happy.
I thought I had completely erased my past.
Then I began to think that all these good things were from God.
I told myself, "It can't be! There is no God!" "Why do so many people love God?" I puzzled, "He wants only to send everyone to hell.
" Wondering if I had overlooked something, I explored a number of websites and learned a lot about God.
I asked myself, "Why do I despise God so much?" Within a couple of days I was once again overwhelmed by fear.
I told myself, "This fear is surely God again; I remember this from years ago.
" I immediately cried and began repenting.
I vowed that I would face my fear of God.
I turned my back on everything evil in my life.
I started reading the Bible but I was afraid that it would only confirm that I'm condemned.
Before long, it felt like everything in the Bible somehow condemned me.
My mother worried about my spiritual state and visited me a lot.
I would often tell her, "Look, this verse right here proves I'm going to hell!" We would then go over it and discover its meaning was totally different.
I couldn't figure out why I could read something and get such a condemning message from it.
I would often stop reading the Bible because oppressive fear would come over me.
I bought a book about spiritual warfare.
All was fine for a while, then even that book seemed to be condemning me and in despair I put it down.
Eventually, I forced myself to open the book again.
I re-read the condemning sentence I had underlined.
To my surprise, I couldn't find anything in it that could lead me to feel condemned.
I began to notice that as I read, fear would sweep over me, causing me to throw the book down without finishing the sentence.
I eventually learned that the fear and condemnation were not from God, as I had always thought, but were from the enemy.
This discovery changed everything.
I looked back on all the things in my life that I had considered were from God and realized that they were not from him at all.
My friend's experience might be far more extreme than yours but any preconception you have about God and his will is just as capable of distorting what God wants to tell you, and, like my friend, wherever you look in the Bible and Christian messages you'll find much to confirm your presumption - whether it is really there or not.
Most Christians who don't habitually expect God's will to be unpleasant, fall into the opposite trap.
Again there is much scriptural encouragement for this view.
Abraham was renowned for his wealth; Isaac and Jacob enjoyed great material success; Job was very rich, Solomon was mind-bogglingly wealthy and many of the Bible heroes were kings.
A study of the Old Testament use of the word blessing is astounding.
The way experts ascertain the precise meaning of a word is to find as many different occurrences of the word as they can and examine each context.
Do this and you will discover that almost every time, the word blessing refers not to spiritual blessings but to material prosperity - many children, overflowing harvests, livestock breeding like there was Viagra in their hay (Scriptutes).
The Bible is filled with promises of joy, God's love for us, answered prayer, miracles, healings and victory.
John 16:24.
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Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.
Psalms 37:4 Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Not only will God give you what your heart desires, he will (as stated in Philippians 2:13) give you desires that are from him so that the more you grow in your love for God, the more the deep desires bubbling within you will have been put there by God himself.
The obvious truth is that both sides of the coin - all the tests and pain and trials, and all the blessings - are in the Bible.
We can rob ourselves if we are not expecting earthly blessings.
When Jesus walked this planet, many got their miracle from him solely because their faith that God will bless them fired them to keep pushing through all the obstacles.
On the other hand, there are dangers in expecting continual ease.
Jesus warned us to count the cost.
We find Barnabas and Paul "strengthening the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to the faith.
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" I've stopped mid-verse.
So far there seems nothing different here from normal prosperity doctrine.
But let's read the entire verse to discover how they strengthened and encouraged them: Acts 14:22 strengthening the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to the faith.
"We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God," they said.
To embrace the full teaching of Scripture we must avoid both the mindset of always expecting God's will to be scary and the mindset of always expecting God's will to be deliriously easy and filled with more thrills than Santa Claus' magic cave.
God's will is always the best we could possibly experience and to settle for anything else is as smart as shaving with a chainsaw.
But our long-term happiness and our short-term pleasure and ease are usually oceans apart.
Our wonderful Lord wants our permanent happiness, not some sweet fizz that turns sour.
We are so often like children wanting to sentence ourselves to a lifetime of gorging ourselves on no other food but chocolate and ice cream; having no idea that their conception of heaven would slowly turn to hell.
As God's ability to see the future soars high above our own, so his knowledge of what will make us eternally happy is far above our guesses.
Consequently, we need to look to God to guide us, and avoid presumptions.
Whether positive or negative, presumptions are dangerous because they can close our minds to things God wants to tell us and they can also cause us to seize what we suppose to be God's will when it isn't at all.
To use marriage as an example, there are those who think to themselves, "I long to marry, so it's probably God's will for me never to marry," or "There's a degree of attraction between us but I wouldn't want us to marry, so God probably wants us to marry.
" Then there are others who tell themselves, "I love this person and feel I couldn't live without him/her, so marriage must be God's will.
" In either case, one needs further confirmation of God's guidance.
We must confuse neither wishful thinking, nor fear or pessimism with God's leading.
How to Avoid Misinterpreting the Bible Every Christian leader worth his salt - or to put it even better, everyone who is salt - stresses the vital role of the Bible in divine guidance.
The necessity of verifying that any supposed word from God is thoroughly consistent with the written Word of God is so obvious that telling that to most of us is as superfluous as telling us to breathe.
You'll find this webpage crammed with Scriptures.
What is seldom explained, however, is that unless our heart is right, a thorough Bible knowledge and deep reverence for the Bible will let us down - badly.
The devil used the holy Word of God to tempt Jesus.
It was central to his plot to lure the Son of God from his divine mission.
Scripture convinced devout Bible scholars that Jesus was a demon-possessed madman they should kill for the good of the nation.
No doubt, it was also his knowledge of Scripture that played a role in firing up Saul to eradicate every trace of Christianity from the planet.
Bible knowledge is spiritual wealth.
Give someone a million dollars and the vast possibilities range from using it to achieve enormous good, right through to destroying himself with it.
Wealth - be it spiritual or material - tests a person's character.
In a webpage for Christians agonizing over the morality of divorce, I briefly mentioned various Scriptural interpretations on the subject by sincere scholars.
Rather than being enlightening, it was frustratingly confusing.
Amazingly, however, it turns out that feeling confused and incapable of correctly interpreting God's Word is a vital leg of one's journey to hearing from God.
Those who suppose they have all the answers are the ones least likely to hear from God.
Ponder the implication of Jesus' prayer: Matthew 11:25 "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.
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" Those who are wise in their own eyes are in grave danger of spiritual blindness and deception.
1 Corinthians 3:18-20 Do not deceive yourselves.
If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a "fool" so that he may become wise.
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight.
As it is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness"; and again, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.
" On the other hand, wondrous possibilities emerge for those with the humility to realize their "foolishness" - the natural human blindness to spiritual things - and their need of divine help in understanding biblical truth: Psalm 25:9 He guides the humble .
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and teaches them his way.
Even someone so spiritual and knowledgeable that he actually wrote part of the Bible, recognized his own need to pray for understanding of God's Word: Psalms 119:18 Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.
The Lord intentionally makes his Word difficult to understand to shake us out of complacency and inspire us to passionately seek his understanding of his Word, like Jesus' disciples who couldn't understand his parables and so came to him for understanding.
An intellectual approach to the Bible, no matter how studious and informed, is never enough.
1 Corinthians 2:14 The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
Discerning biblical truth either takes us to the height of spiritual intimacy or we will drift into delusion, no matter how much, like the devout scholars in Jesus' day, we think ourselves the epitome of orthodoxy.
Paul commented on how Jews could study the Old Testament with great thoroughness and still never realize that Jesus is the Messiah it prophesies.
He put it this way: 2 Corinthians 3:15-16 Even to this day when [the books of] Moses [the first five books of the Bible] is read, a veil covers their hearts.
But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.
(Emphasis and explanatory text, mine.
) To know the will of God, it is not enough merely to know the words of Scripture, you must know the Author, being on the most intimate terms with him.
To do the will of God, it is not enough merely to know the answer, you must be in spiritual union with the Answer.
Countless thousands of sincere, Bible-loving Jews longing for their Messiah rejected Jesus as their Savior because he did not match their Bible-based - yes, Bible-based - preconceptions.
Much of their misunderstanding was due to confusing the Messiah's second coming with his first coming, and much of that was probably because their longing to be delivered from hardship was greater than their longing to be delivered from their sin.
God made it so difficult to recognize Jesus' true identity that when Peter made this discovery, Jesus exclaimed, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.
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Here's my poem.
I hope it's not too long for you: Spiritual concerns are spiritually discerned.
(Well, it almost rhymes.
) For proof of this great truth, we need go no further than this: evil spirits were far better at knowing who Jesus was, than were all the priests, spiritual leaders and Bible scholars combined.
Demons knew in an instant what the best theological minds could not figure out about Jesus.
So a critical step towards finding the mind of God on any issue is to recognize that insights into spiritual matters will not be attained merely by the intellectual process of studying the relevant Scriptures and reaching one's own conclusion as to what they mean.
There must be a humble recognition of one's dependence upon divine illumination of God's Word.
This naturally leads to fervent, faith-filled prayer for divine revelation but, as we will discover, there are additional heart attitudes to be mastered.
Go to part 2 of 3