These comments are addressed to fellow-believers.
Can't blame the devil for everything.
Your own heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, says Jeremiah the prophet (17:9).
The unredeemed unsaved heart is the center for evil on the earth.
Satan would be powerless without it.
The heart and mind have been corrupted since those first wonderful days in Eden.
There we were free and happy and innocent.
When we toyed with and then grabbed disobedience a pattern began to form.
Now we lie to ourselves about everything.
In my own family there is a history of neurosis, or something akin to it.
One family member fears thunderstorms, another cannot drive over bridges.
In my life I have noticed over the past few years a growing nervousness in enclosed spaces, especially if those spaces are 40,000 feet in the air.
I had flown all my adult life, nearly 30 years.
But one night something went wrong.
I had had too much caffeine, I was sitting in the back, it was night, etc.
I panicked.
Only in reading Scripture and offering inner praise to God was I able to come out of it.
The lie had set in.
"You are in trouble.
You are going to die.
You will have a heart attack on this plane.
You must get off NOW.
" I bought it.
And for over two years I have dreaded the air, even though a missions call has been growing stronger.
Yes, it is "sick" when people believe lies like that.
Thinking things are bad when they are good.
But there is a lie that potentially is worse.
Thinking things are important when they aren't.
Consider the Super Bowl.
Yep I'm one of the "lucky" guys living in one of the team's cities.
I have the privilege of watching grown adults around me totally stressed out about whether a bag of air will make it down a 100 yard field, safely in the possession of a man with a blue and orange uniform, BEFORE a man with another color grabs it and goes the other way.
Churches are having Super Bowl parties.
One church had even decided to show the game via a live feed in the sanctuary on a screen that comes down right next to the crucifix...
The NFL decided not to power the image to that connection.
They could not mix the religious symbolism with the secular.
Strange that the church seemed to have no trouble with it.
Our minds and our hearts just keep lying to us.
Remember this song sung by Evangeline Carmichael? The heart is a rebel, and cannot be trusted,It always is seeking its own will to do.
It has no allegiance, so desperate and wicked, The heart is a rebel, it's true.
Its love is brief as springtime, quickly growing old; Its hate is like the winter, desolate and cold.
But some day the rebel will bow and surrender, Then God's love will make his heart new.
Amen.
Let's give our hearts to Jesus fully while we can.