10/21/07 Lies I Have Believed

Sandee and I have been on vacation for the past few weeks.

When we left Alaska the trees were not quite at their peak in fall colors

and we returned to bare trees,

a yard full of brown leaves,

and a few remaining signs of the first snowfall of the season.

Vacations are an interesting time for me mentally.

I spend so much of my normal work schedule during the year

dealing with ideas and trying to figure out

how to most effectively share with you

some of the things I’m learning.

But when Sandee and I go on vacation

I give myself permission not to think.

In fact, before we leave

I always make sure I have completed the notes I’ll need

for the Sunday after I get back.

But so often on our vacations

I’ve noticed that when I don’t have to think

it seems to free up my mind for a whole different kind of thinking.

Some of you may remember that, several years ago,

I came back from one of our vacations with a list of what I called “My Life’s Greatest Surprises”.

Well, this vacation I found my mind wandering into a different area.

This past week I started thinking about some of the biggest lies I have believed in my life.

It started with just one lie that came to mind,

but then another occurred to me,

and then another and another.

Sandee and I were in a gift shop at the time,

and the thoughts fascinated me so much

that I finally found a rack of credit card applications

and used one of the applications to jot down my list.

When I finished with it and looked it over

I decided that at lest some of them were significant enough

for me to take this morning to share them with you.

Lies are fascinating things.

Not the kind of lies we intentionally tell to one another,

those lies when we know the truth

and then, for whatever reason, try to deceive another person.

The lies I’m talking about

are the lies we believe ourselves,

lies that we accept as truth

and then, because we accept them as truth,

we build our lives upon them.

No sane, rational person every intentionally believes a lie.

And yet everyone of us here this morning

have a whole range of lies we are believing -

lies about God,

lies about ourselves,

lies about the things that will make our lives good.

When we were studying the 8^th chapter of John

there was a statement in there that, at the time we didn’t spend much time with,

but one that has profound implications for our lives.

It was a comment made by our Lord to those who were warring against Him.

He said,

JOH 8:44 "You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

I mention this passage again this morning

because it helps us to better understand

the foundation of so many of Satan’s attacks against us.

In fact, in this same conversation

Jesus began first by telling His audience the positive side of this truth.

Just a few verses earlier He said,

JOH 8:31-32 "If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."

What He was saying was that when we come to Him,

from that point on the truth is always on our side,

and to the degree we understand the truth

and believe it,

to that degree we will know the kind of life, and freedom, and fulfillment our spirits hunger for.

And maybe I can explain that a little better

by sharing with you

just a few examples of the truth He’s talking about.

Are you a Christian?

Have you placed your life into His hands

and trusted the death of Christ as payment for your sins?

Then right now and forever you have absolute peace with God.

Nothing can ever again separate you from His love

or remove you from His hand.

His Spirit now lives within you,

and is daily, hourly, moment-by-moment

equipping you for the unique purpose and work He has for you.

He delights in your presence with Him,

and He takes tremendous pleasure from living with you,

going through life with you step-by-step.

Nothing and no one can ever touch you apart from His permission,

and no good thing will He withhold from you.

He has already made you adequate for the life He has called you to live,

and there is no pain, no attack, no suffering, no form of evil

that can ever destroy you or separate you from His love.

Your Lord Jesus Christ will never leave you,

never forsake you,

never reject you,

never abandon you,

and never allow you to face anything that is beyond His ability to bring you through.

And that’s just a tiny tip of the truth.

And Satan knows that if we ever began to accept and believe

even a tiny bit of that truth

it will transform our lives profoundly.

But he also knows that when we come to Christ

our minds and emotions are already filled with lies,

and all he has to do

is to keep reinforcing those lies in our lives

and he can keep us in the same bondage and defeat

that characterized our lives prior to our union with the King.

Many of the most destructive lies

are the ones that are rooted in our childhood,

lies that attack our concept of ourselves.

Sometimes huge, hideous lies are imbedded into our lives

through physical or sexual abuse,

lies that etch into the core of our personalities

the belief that we have no value, no significance except to be used by another person

or dominated or controlled by them.

Sometimes the lies come at us in more subtle but just as destructive forms

through one or both of our parents failing to delight in us,

or through their simply ignoring us,

or through their favoring one child over another,

telling us in the process that we are in some way less valuable, less significant than others.

Apart from the redemptive work of God within our hearts

we all live out the scripts written for us in childhood,

and if those scripts told us we have no real value, no purpose,

we live out petty, self-destructive lives that simply confirm what we’ve been told.

Sometimes the lies we battle come from very different types of messages

given to us by well-meaning but misguided parents

who protect us from the natural consequences of our wrong actions,

telling us in the process that we are neither responsible nor accountable for what we do.

The result is often an arrogance and resistance against submission to any authority

and a belief that we have the absolute right to live anyway we choose to

with little or no consequences for our actions.

And of course there is an almost endless spectrum of other lies we can bring with us from our childhood into our adult years as well,

lies given to us by the society in which we live

or by other significant voices in our lives,

but my point here is that when we come to Christ

those lies collide with those truths He wants to tell us.

But the kind of lies we’re talking about

are never easily dislodged from our lives

and our natural response is to continue to believe them

because we’ve believed them our whole life.

And all Satan has to do

is to continue feeding us evidences that seem to support the lies we have believed

and we stay trapped in the same destructive patterns

that dominated our lives prior to our union with Christ.

All Satan has to work with are lies,

but because we have a lifetime history of believing those lies as truth

all he needs to do is to trigger those beliefs within us and we get pulled right back in.

And it has been my observation

that Satan has two major points of attack

in the lies he brings against us.

The first is to attack God’s integrity,

to attack His trustworthiness, His love in what He’s said to us,

and the second is to attack our own sense of worth or value or significance

as unique, treasured creations of God.

If he can succeed on either front

he has effectively paralyzed us

from any real growth or movement toward freedom in our lives.

One of his most effective attacks against God’s integrity

comes at us in the form of blaming God

for the consequences of evil brought into the world by our own choices of rebellion against Him.

“If God is really good

He would never allow me to go through this kind of pain.”

“If God is really good

He would never allow this or that to happen.”

What we want, of course,

is a God who gives us total free will to run our own lives,

but who then intervenes and fixes things

whenever those choices cause us or someone else pain.

Of course we want a world in which children never suffer,

where they are never born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrom,

or raised in a family without a parent because the parent’s drug addiction put them in jail,

a world in which emotional or physical or sexual abuse never scars a child deeply for a lifetime.

But neither to we want a world in which the hand of God

instantly crushes a pregnant woman when she reaches for a drink,

or hammers a father into submission the instant he neglects or abuses his child.

But we simply can’t have it both ways.

We cannot have both true free will

and a world without pain and suffering and evil and corruption.

That isn’t to say there is no choice we can make in this whole thing,

because there certainly is.

We can choose to shake our little fists in the face of God

and pretend we are saying some great and profound thing

when we point out the depth of corruption in the world

and then blame Him for it

or deny His existence because of it,

or we can take the only life over which we will ever have control,

our own life,

with all of our own evil and corruption,

and all of the consequences of other people’s evil against us,

and we can place that life into His hands

and allow Him to hold us,

and love us,

and carefully recreate that evil into good in our lives.

We can allow Him to bring His redemption into our pain and corruption.

But those are the only two options

and remarkably the second one is nearly always rejected

because it involves a submission and repentance and trust

that few people are willing to enter into.

More often we opt for a smeared-on religious facade

that still allows us to remain in control.

But my point here is that attacking God’s integrity is the first of Satan’s two great targets with his lies.

That’s what He did with Adam and Eve.

He told them that God was cheating them,

He was depriving them of something that would make their lives so much better

when He told them not to eat from the tree.

And the second great target Satan has

is that of attacking our own personal sense of value or significance or worth in the sight of God.

He will fling our own moral failures in our face,

or he will have a parent walk out on us in childhood,

or have him or her abuse or neglect or shame us,

or he will convince us through our social systems

that our true value as human beings comes from IQ,

or from popularity,

or from athletic ability,

or from physical appearance,

or from how much education we have - how much knowledge we’ve accumulated,

or from wealth and social status,

and then he show us how far down the list of truly important people we are.

And then he’ll bring that same value system into our relationship with God

and he’ll ask us why in the world we would think

that God would care about us.

What have we ever done or what could we ever do

to merit His even noticing us, much less His loving us?

And to the degree that this lie exists within us,

to that degree we will simply not be able to hear His voice

when our God says to us, JER 31:3 ... "I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.”

And since I’m obviously wandering all over the place this morning,

let me just add one more thought here

before I share with you a few of the lies I have believed in my own life.

Do you know what God’s most common

and most powerful weapon is

in His efforts to defeat this second major lie in our lives?

Do you know what He uses to help open us up to the truth

about our own true value to Him?

Do you know what most frequently serves as the doorway

through which we can begin to receive the truth about His love for us?

JOH 13:34 "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”

Nothing has the power to communicate a true sense of worth,

and significance,

and value

like being loved by another human being.

Telling another person with words that they have tremendous worth and value and significance

as a special and unique creation of God

has almost no power whatsoever

to actually communicate that truth in a way that changes their lives.

But loving another person

and then finding ways of communicating that love

so that they can hear it and believe it

has the ability to communicate a sense of worth and value

as nothing else in human experience can do.

Love has the power to heal the human spirit

and gives us the courage

to face the lies we have believed our entire lives.

When we choose to love another person

we communicate to them truth about their worth in the sight of God

that they are frequently utterly incapable of telling themselves.

Love is such an amazing thing

because it raises within us the question,

“Why would this person care? Why would they love me?”

And if it’s the real thing,

if it’s not just lust or physical attraction or passion,

but if it’s one human being really caring about another human being,

that act of love communicates a sense of worth and value

that can provide a powerful doorway into our discovery of God’s love as well.

Why does God love you?

Why?

Because you are.

Because you are you,

and God delights in your existence and your uniqueness

to the point that He was willing to die in your place in order to demonstrate His love for you.

So, whenever you come across anything

that attacks the integrity of God or His love for you,

or anything that attacks your own worth or importance or significance or value to Him,

know with certainty that you are being attacked by the father of lies.

And with all of that as background,

let me just quickly share with you some of the lies I have believed in my life.

The first lie that came to mind

is the belief that submission and dependance are signs of weakness.

I don’t know,

but this may be a lie to which males are especially vulnerable.

We were at an amusement park at the time,

and I think what brought this to mind to me

was watching the fathers as they herded their families around the grounds.

Some were obviously excited about making the day as good as possible for their children,

while others were clearly on some kind of dominant control thing

that turned even vacation into a power struggle.

We were in line at the ticket gate behind a father and his son

who was probably 12 or 13 years old.

For most of the time they stood there together

there was no conversation at all between them,

but when the father finally did speak

he turned to his son and said in a stern, very parental voice,

“We are NOT going to run!”

When I heard that

I thought to myself, “Why not?”

I pictured them walking together in silence throughout the day

and thought what a loss to both of them

of what could have been such a great shared experience.

But as I watched some of those fathers throughout the day

I realized how much the adult human race clings to the absurd belief

that submission and dependance are signs of weakness.

The first and most significant fact of our existence

is that we are created beings.

And as such

the only logical, natural position for us to assume in life

is one of submissive dependance upon our Creator.

Far from being a sign of weakness,

it is the only reasonable approach to life for a created being.

And yet we fear it and run from it with all of our might,

so certain that if we ever allowed our God entrance into our lives AS GOD

He would destroy everything we value the most.

And so we churn our way through our lives,

desperately trying to hold all of the pieces together,

terrified to admit to ourselves that we have neither the wisdom nor the ability to make it work,

and never discovering the most basic truth of life -

that as created beings

the only way our lives will ever work correctly

is when we live them in a dependant, submissive relationship with our Creator.

I’m certain that 60 years of life makes this easier for me,

partly because I’ve tried it the other way myself,

and partly because I see the results of the same approach in so many other lives

and what I see doesn’t impress me at all,

but one of the great benefits of this time in life for me

is waking up each morning

so keenly aware of how desperately I need my Lord

if I am ever going to make it through the next 24 hours.

Does that sound like weakness to you?

Does it sound like defeat?

Well, if so then it simply means that you are still immersed

in one of the most basic and most destructive lies of the human race.

Well, that’s just one of the lies on my list

and my time is gone for the morning.

I’ll look over my list during the next few days

and decided whether it’s of value for me to share any of the others with you.

If so, we’ll come back to this again next week,

and if not we’ll return to our study of the Gospel of John.