Do Not Be Deceived; Ways To Protect Yourself [7 Ways to Find Truth in Our World]

[Music] it's good to be with you again we're continuing our study on how to avoid deception we can't avoid being in a world that's filled with deception that's our reality in fact we've almost made it a virtue you know in business if you're deceitful and you improve your outcome we call it good business in sports we call it hiding your game plan we've come up with a whole new vocabulary that enables us to to kind of sanctify deception but in the end it's not a good thing we want to be champions for the truth we want to be advocates for the truth we want to be people who learn to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth we don't have to be frightened jesus told us this was a characteristic of this season in human history so we've been forewarned and if jesus warned us he'll help us be prepared we're going to open our bibles and see if we can understand how to find stability and to find our pathway through a season when deception is the norm it's an exciting time you and i have to put our faith and trust in a living god and be ambassadors for jesus of nazareth to prepare for the return of the king and the expansion of his kingdom grab your bible get a notepad most of all open your heart i trust god has something for us today enjoy the lesson well hello church how did it hurt your feelings that were inside tonight no okay if it'd been snowing we'd be out there but we've done the rain thing we got that in our passport already marked so [Music] we thought we could socially distance our way into the building tonight so we're glad you're we're glad you're joining us online wherever you're watching from uh it is a privilege to be with god's people what an honor we have to worship the lord together you know there's been a heaviness well i talk to christians across the country on a pretty regular basis and there's been a heaviness almost a sense of despair and it is it's been pervasive and it's been a little bit unrelenting so i did a little research i've been trained on how to do research in your bible and i've got good news apparently we win huh but i got i got a follow-up jesus of nazareth is still on the throne he has the name that's above every name every knee is going to bow every tongue is going to confess that jesus christ is lord and i commend you you're early adopters it will go better with you that way so lift up your head and stand tall and push back on the darkness that you feel jesus i i checked and it i can tell you from scripture there is no panic in heaven tonight the angels are not pacing wringing their hands they're not looking for caves or dehydrated food it's all good [Applause] take a deep breath the king has got this now we have an assignment and there may be some components of that require a little lifting on our part but he'll help us hot dog i'm telling you we were guilty of getting our attention focused on some wrong things and god just keeps recalibrating have you felt like that i felt like since last march he said watch this no watch this no watch i'm like yes okay i got this it's hard to hold but god is good to us god is good to us all right offertory prayers we've got to thank god we have to thank god for his goodness to us he's our sustainer and our provider he's watching over us i was in the lobby for a little bit tonight and the teenagers were coming in it makes me smile dozens and dozens hundreds of those little rascals coming in here they're not little anymore they're looking me in the eye they're having pizza you know how much pizza a couple hundred teenagers can eat it tastes like a panel truck and if you get between them and the pizza you'll need to believe in healing i think we ought to pray for them why don't you stand with me the god would pour out his spirit on the young people in our nation amen that not be wonderful to see it make me smile to see college campuses with the spirit of god moving across him huh he can do that it starts in our hearts with the willingness to believe that god can i know you know the story but when i was a little boy my the doctors told my mom she had six months to live we went to church and we weren't christians but we went every week you know you can do that you can do that here if you choose and that she was on the way to a hospital for massive surgery she prayed a prayer that if there was a god before she died that she could know the truth or she could tell her boys i've got brothers and somet some hours later a doctor came in a room in the middle of the night and said ms jackson we can't find all those tumors and masses that are in the x-rays [Applause] and we didn't check any of the boxes we were pagans we weren't even christians we didn't know how to pray we didn't know what scripture was we didn't know how to believe there wasn't anybody standing with us god just intervened my mom's still here but my takeaway from that is that god can and you can fill in the blank it doesn't mean he answers every prayer or you know that doesn't mean that we don't go through hard places and i'm not suggesting that but i'm telling you god can and if we will open our hearts to him we will see god do things that you have not seen anywhere in your journey up to this point you won't have to fabricate god's stories you'll you will tell them cautiously because you'll be concerned people won't believe them that's what's in front of us i promise you you're not defeated but we're learning to trust the lord in new ways to open our hearts to him to yield our lives to him we know how to have church but we're learning how to follow the lord that is such a such a wonderful season in our lives it's it's the most remarkable invitation it's more valuable than any graduate course you could enroll in and god in his mercy has called us and put us in school yeah so we're going to pray for kids young people for an outpouring of the spirit of god do you know somebody that's under 20 if you don't i can hook you up with somebody with a name and a picture and a prayer hallelujah father thank you thank you that you love us and you care for us that you've kept us and watched over us we pray for those tonight that are sick lord i pray that they would heal supernaturally may they respond to any treatments that are being given lord cause their bodies to to recuperate and recover far ahead of anticipated schedules i thank you for it but i thank you for your great mercy in our lives we pause tonight lord to pray for our young people i thank you for them thank you for their great energy for the dreams they hold lord you know each and every one of them you created them you've known them before we have and we ask for a moving of your spirit amongst our young people what in our schools and our colleges and our universities in our churches lord may we see it move across our nation may we hear report after report after report but those who have opposed you stand in confusion and perplexity at the changes that are coming to their hearts and their value systems for the hopes and the dreams that they will begin to verbalize we thank you for it lord that you'll deliver them deliver them from the spirit of this world and awaken them to your eternal kingdom we cry out to you tonight on their behalf lord we thank you for them we praise you for them and we look expectantly forward to seeing what you will do for we ask it in jesus name amen hallelujah [Applause] you can have a seat if you can stand it i you better buckle up i'm telling you god is moving my bible says when the enemy comes in like a flood the lord will raise up a banner against him and we've seen some floods i mean we've been sheltered in place and all sorts of stuff but god is moving hallelujah that's not on my outline so don't that didn't come off my time we're not leaving to the kids of eating all the pizza about 10 minutes probably right it's like locust all right i want to continue a theme we began on oh when was that this past week on do not be deceived and i just like to pick up where i left that off so if you didn't have an opportunity to hear that particular talk it lives out there somewhere in the clouds and it's thank god for that we are able to we have friends that we share ministry and we are standing with quite literally around the world it's amazing how technology enable has enabled us to shrink the globe and even in the season we don't have the freedom to travel we have the freedom to stand together in prayer and it is a tremendous gift so i make a bit of light of that but so this is really an extension the continuation of that [Music] in the bible particularly in the new testament but consistently in scripture when it talks about the end of the age almost inevitably there's a warning against deception they go together and i am not a timeline person in the sense that i'm not telling you i think we're within three years of this or that but the bible says we can know the general season in which we live and without question from my perspective we are in that season that the bible describes as the end of the age and so the characteristics that go with that are as certain as the characteristics that will come with spring in a few weeks things will begin to turn green and the daffodils in tennessee will begin to bloom again and the dogwood trees and the red buds will begin to bloom and those of you that are sensitive to those events will stop breathing and because of all the covet awareness it'll cause anxiety those things are in our future they come with the next season between here and there it's going to be chilly and damp in tennessee and it will snow in ohio and we will close our schools as a show of support for our brethren but one of the characteristics biblically as we approach the end of the age is this notion of deception and it seems to me that you don't need a great deal of discernment to say deception is increasing in fact it's it's increasing at such a rate that it's really disorienting personally i feel like we're caught in a riptide you know if you've ever or in something if you've ever stood in the in the ocean and you felt the waves receding you just feel the pull and sometimes if it's stormy and you know that's much stronger and i have that sense that the deception that's crashing over us and washing around us it it tends to pull at your balance and leave you a little disoriented and it comes from every place it's not coming from a single source it's not about a political party or a particular media outlet or it's not even about just social things some is coming from religious fronts it it's from every ideological vantage point and it leaves us kind of disoriented and a little unstable and you get tired because it takes energy to maintain your stability and you if you don't guard your heart you find your heart thinking i just want to get through this time i want to get back to a stable place where i don't have to listen to the lord carefully where you know reading my bible doesn't feel essential it could move back into the kind of a nice category i don't know that we're going back to that place the resolution to seasons of deception is truth truth brings freedom and deception particularly further deception will bring rebellion so it's important the struggle to identify the truth and align yourself with truth is very much worth the effort and i just jotted down some examples of deception and i'm not you can take almost any arena you want we can take hard sciences and in science is being co-opted by politics then it means we get conflicting reports and much more so than in previous seasons it's happened at other times in human history but not in the magnitude and the scale and the frequency with which we watch today when there are social changes being pushed at us we are far enough into the to the post-enlightenment world we know we're a rational people so they start saying this has to be supported with science and and and they'll begin bringing us fractured science and it's disorienting we've watched it with covid colvin's real no question and if you're not praying for our frontline healthcare workers you need to be they stood if you think you're tired they've stood on the front line now for many months caring for people and and working under tremendous pressure and often at least initially with limited knowledge but the coveted rules have changed day to day week to week city to city state to state well that's not the normal response you would imagine if it was simply a matter of facts and testing a hypothesis we just finished an election season if anything feels like it's fraught with deception it's elections everybody promises something different at the next microphone forgetting that the videotape was running at the last one and they're not embarrassed they don't feel ashamed it doesn't seem anything awkward about it christian messaging is it much better about how to vote or for whom to vote or one candidate's wicked and another's evil i mean it is it is a it's unprecedented the kind of deception the media at one time was a trusted part of our society to provide for us something close to at least a neutral source of information and they've almost totally abandoned themselves to propaganda to an ideological viewpoint that they're determined to to to establish in the hearts and minds of our our culture censorship monitoring what we're allowed to listen to without apology telling us it's too dangerous to listen to folks we're the largest creator of pornography in the world and we've defended it based on free speech and now they're censoring our things we understand fundamentally there's something wrong with that we all understand our telephones have been used for just about every form of imaginable evil it never occurred to us somebody should tell us we can't talk on the phone because we used an unkind word in our last conversation there's so many predictive voices and they're at odds with one another some of them are christian voices and they speak with real authority and some of them will tag god's name in there and you're reluctant to to push back against that but it's not just within christendom and in economic and political circles there's no shortage of experts that seem to have inside knowledge and they're going to tell us what's about to happen and when it doesn't they they morph again into something else and nobody ever comes back and says well that was wrong in more subtle ways they're not subtle but in churches entire denominations mainline denominations are rejecting orthodoxy and the authority of the word of god it's deceptive it's disorienting we see leaders that we elect to powerful offices in our nation refuse to put our national interests first that's not limited to a single party but you watch that it's disorienting it's confusing when we see individuals that we we ask to lead us or invite to lead us and they put personal interest or personal power or the accumulation of resources ahead of the community's well-being you might be able to explain it in terms of a character flaw but it adds to this milieu of deception and on top of that we battle it ourselves we've made all sorts of allowances for it incrementally bit by bit we have expressions like you know let the buyer be where implying that if the person doing the selling can deceive you it's on your head not to suggest to you from a biblical perspective let the seller beware because if you practice deception eventually you're going to meet with our boss now i grew up in the horse business in tennessee and i promise you buyer be well right there is the rule of thumb in that world they say the last place a horse trader wants to look is in your eye if you've never traded for a horse you've got no idea what i'm talking about but it's all right you know i think fundamentally this comes back to a personal commitment to integrity i mean with the tenacity that we have let go of within the church see none of the things that i can list or see and i mean it's startling what we watch happen i listen to a presentation yesterday uh redefining policy in our nation's best best based upon equity not equality equity a complete repositioning of how we would imagine we would interact with one another without explanation without any debate just the delivery of a new policy we've heard in recent days and weeks and months increasing conversation about how our gender is fluid again you know i grew up in rural tennessee i filled out all sorts of registration certificates on animals puppies and horses and you know they have to be registered according to their breed and every one of those forms said male or female i didn't meet one flood critter and i don't say that to be angry at anyone i'm telling you all of this together leaves us a bit unsteady and i honestly think it's part of the agenda because when you're unsteady you're more easily moved you know the truth is in ephesians it's just having done everything to stand stand therefore and you're more stable this way but but you also can't make any progress if you're going to move if you're going to walk just in your person you have to break equilibrium you have to get a little bit off balance and then you've got all these internal things that start firing and making decisions so how do you get to a stable place before you fall and the only way to make progress forward is to be destabilized enough that all of those instincts will fire to help you move yourself forward and you accelerate it you run but once you get your momentum going forward you're much easier to redirect in whatever direction and i think what we're watching is a an unprecedented i've been saying for months now spiritual conflict a battle for the heart and soul of our nation and so we have to know what it is that gives us stability because jesus told us and many other of our friends in the new testament told us and the bible told us the deception is a part of this season first timothy 4 and verse 1 says the spirit clearly says that in latter times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and then proverbs 23 23 gives us the alternative says by the truth and don't sell it by the truth it's very clear it's it's so plain you could walk past it there's a price to be paid for the truth if you're going to know the truth it's going to require something of you well i don't like that okay pay the price anyway well i wish it were free okay pay the price well i don't think that's fair okay when you create your own world you can make your rules the counsel we're given by the creator is by the truth so i want to give you a handful of of i guess we can call them principles to help you stay free of deception now the best news i have is that jesus gave us the warning and if he gave us the warning then we don't have to succumb to deception if jesus said don't be afraid i know i can tell you one thing for sure you don't have to be afraid when he said do not worry i can tell you for certain you don't have to lead a life plagued by worry and when he said don't be deceived there's good news thundering through the heavens you don't have to be overcome by deception that's good but it's equally true that you know what it is to battle fear and you know what it is to wrestle with anxiety and worry and so it's highly probable that we're going to have a little wrestling match or some challenges with deception don't be frightened by it so these are simple this this is not rocket science this is the plain language this is my it's where i live the first is it's only by god's mercy that we can be faithful just settle it in your heart you're not going to out think evil you're not going to outwork evil at the end of the day it's only by god's mercy that you and i can remain faithful there's such freedom in that god i'm yours i trust you i don't mean that in a passive way in a resigned way i don't mean that an op an attitude of surrender in first corinthians chapter 7 and verse 25 it says i gave an opinion i give an opinion as one who by the mercy of the lord is trustworthy paul is writing to a church that he has helped birth and he said i'm giving you an opinion but it's only by god's mercy that i can stand and if you will establish that in your heart so one of the challenges that we religious folk have is self-righteousness and pride we belong to the right group we read the right bible you know we we believe the right things and i'm grateful for the struggle to know the truth and the efforts you invest in that but understand it's god's mercy that enables us to stand he called us out of darkness he redeemed us we did not save ourselves he called us long before we responded to him amen you know as a younger person i thought me joining god's team was probably a huge relief to him and from where i stand today i understand a little bit about the enormous liability they accepted when they allowed me in and it's only by the grace of god the second thing i would add to that is cultivate which means purposefully intentionally do anything you can to increase the harvest of humility and the fear of the lord psalm 25 says good and upright is the lord therefore he instructs sinners in his ways he guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way how do you enlist god to guide you by cultivating humility as i understand scripture you have two choices you can humble yourself or you can face humiliation i've been in both lines it's better if we humble ourselves humility is not something you can acquire directly you can't order it on amazon i'm sure that annoys them to no end but humility comes to you through engaging in other behaviors when you serve other people when you don't think of yourself more highly than you are when you submit yourself to the authority of scripture when you will allow god's priorities to become your priorities when you submit to the authority of biblical world views on issues of sexuality or how you handle your money or how you treat one another or your willingness to forgive every time you submit to the authority of god you increase your capacity for humility and every time you reject it and say i'll do it my way or i don't believe i have to do that or that doesn't apply to me or i can still go to heaven and ignore that portion you give root to pride that battle lives within every one of us consistently don't be offended by that there are certain routines for your physical hygiene that you need to practice regularly or you're not pleasant nor am i you know i i had a report from somebody that had been sick for a few days and they said it was the first time in in a week that they'd been strong enough to take a shower i was happy just to receive that report over the phone i was good with that it's all the information i needed personal experience was not required but in the same way that physically you understand that there are some things that you need to give attention to on a routine basis or you become increasingly less pleasant the same is true with your spiritual condition james says that we look into the the mirror of the word of god and we go away and immediately forget what we saw that we have to consistently repeatedly look back again into that mirror so don't be don't feel threatened or put off or annoyed by the fact that the tension between pride and humility persists in your life if an archangel satan could be so overcome with pride that it led him to rebellion against god i think we should understand we're vulnerable psalm 25 and verse 12 says who then is the man that fears the lord he'll instruct him in the way chosen for him he'll spend his days in prosperity and his descendants will inherit the land the lord confides in those who fear him he makes his covenant known to them there are there are very few things in scripture that have more promises attached to them than the fear of the lord and it's not cowering in dread or terror at the thought of god it's about respect reverence a sense of awe god's not like us we're created in his image but we're not we don't represent all that he is we have access to his kingdom and sometimes in our attempts to to bring god down to a relatable level i think we re we relinquish too much of the respect and reverence for the lord my personal opinion i hear people say i just want to go love on jesus and i think i understand the the attitude or the intent when that's said but i'm not really comfortable with that notion imagine you had a meeting with the governor and i said what are you doing oh i'm just going over to love on the governor well i think i'll put on a coat and tie and if i'm given the opportunity i'll shake his hand do you understand god deserves our worship not because his ego was so fragile that he loses perspective if we don't say hey you're really swell we need the discipline of worship to remind us he's the creator of all things and the sustainer of all things that he names the planets he let us name the animals there's a lot more planets and he calls them by name he names the stars and the heavens the respect for god you believe you're about you bet i do what about the parts i don't understand i'm learning i'm learning number three goes right along with that base everything on the scriptures if you want to be free from deception spend time putting the word of god in your heart first we have general revelation what you learned from studying the scripture about the character of god and how he interacts with his people and his perspective on human behavior and the boundaries he set around us and that when he said thou shalt not he meant that first we have general revelation then we can seek for personal revelation you know years ago somebody said to me well the bible doesn't say go to little rock and turn left and there's times we need direction and the bible doesn't give us the specificity with which we would like it but in my life experience in my ministry experience there is no personal revelation if you're not living within the general revelation of the truth of god's word why should god help you clarify the decision points before you if you're ignoring the clear truth that you know again the topic is how do we avoid deception and the real invitation as i understand this season church is god is asking us to be different i'm not concerned about the darkness i'm concerned about the hearts of god's people we've been a little smog we've we've been born again and we we've we've checked most of the boxes and we're not living in gross blatant sin so you know a little bit here and a little bit that's okay it's like god's going to grade on a curve none of us are perfect absolutely right we're not perfect but that's not an excuse for sloppiness we have no right to anticipate god's direction if we're not living in the revealed will of god so it's very helpful to have a consistent dialogue with the lord if it's not a matter of your weekly spiritual disciplines it should be lord if there's any place where the momentum of my life or the trajectory of my life is is taking me away from your best help me to see it if i'm watching anything if i'm if i'm meditating on anything if there any relationships in my life that are damaging that if i'm if i'm not help me lord i want to get this right gotta care as much about your your spiritual hygiene as you do your physical presentation again not a burden not a threat the outcomes are so amazing we need god's help god is not a burden is there any place in your life you've gotten to know the lord and he has diminished you he certainly hasn't me now at the time i was choosing the lord i thought oh i'm gonna have to give this up for the lord never felt like that well i guess i'm gonna have to turn loose to this relationship oh you look back on in six months like oh god thank you right but in the moment you're making the decision you think ah i mean that is the the that's the emotion of maturing and growing up and learning you see it in your little people base everything on the word of god number four is focus on jesus focus on jesus revelation 19 i fell at his feet to worship him but he said to me don't do it i'm a fellow servant with you it's an angel that's showing john this revelation i'm a fellow servant with you and with your brothers who hold to the testimony of jesus worship god for the testimony of jesus is the spirit of prophecy every true prophecy points us towards and exalts jesus there's going to be more prophecy more prophets more false prophets and don't just think of prophets in terms of religious characters biblical prophecy is god's perspective on where we are false prophets are speak people that try to define truth for you and it's not really true they may be religious characters and they may use scriptures and they may they may say thus saith the lord they may be totally secular characters but they're trying to define truth for you if it doesn't line up with the scripture if it doesn't create in you the fear of the lord if it doesn't bring you back to the dependence upon the redemptive work of jesus it's not true focus on jesus john 16 jesus is speaking verse 13 when he the spirit of truth comes he'll guide you into all truth and he'll not speak on his own he'll speak only to what he hears and he'll tell you what is yet to come he'll bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you the supreme purpose of the holy spirit is not to let us run the isles i'm okay with that but that's not the goal the purpose of the holy spirit is to glorify jesus and if you desire a greater presence of the spirit of god in your life i can tell you the short course begin to honor jesus with your words and your attitudes or the conversations you have with how you interact with people you will attract the presence of the spirit of god he comes where jesus is being lifted up you watch sometime when we're together with the community of faith and we begin to talk about the person of jesus and celebrate who he is and what he's done for us and the magnificence of his sacrifice and his great love for his people and what he revealed to us about god the father is we start through that whether it's his names or the titles attributed to him or we start to read the verses of scripture you you pay attention to the spirit that fills the room and we do that you can do that same thing at home you start to thank him for who he is and what he's done for you the spirit of god will meet you number five leave the initiative with god and again these are practical this is don't worry god for revelation now it says in deuteronomy that the secret things belong to the lord but the revealed things belong to us and there's some things god didn't intend for us to know again i'm an advocate for study i like the fine print i've given a lot of time and energy to it i think language studies are helpful in some ways i'm not diminishing that but folks there's things god hasn't told us what do you think happened before genesis 1. i don't know he didn't tell us don't you want to know no i'm good well you're not very inquisitive that's because i can't keep up with the truth of god loving my neighbor as myself is just about a full-time job and i've moved a few times because i thought it had to be the neighbors i had [Laughter] but you know after a handful of moves you realize it's not them [Music] psalm psalm 131 because my heart is not proud o lord my eyes are not haughty i don't concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me but i have stilled and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother like a weaned child is my soul within me now i have participated in thousands of worship services and healthy babies make noise okay don't pinch them because the sermon is dull and you want to leave that's not good but there comes a point in their life when they're weaned and their routine and their development grows and that there's a different level of demeanor that comes with them and that's when i read that passage that's the image it brings to me he said i have stilled and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother it says my heart is not proud lord i'm not haughty i i don't concern myself with matters that are too wonderful for me and again i'm not coaching you towards passivity i'm telling you you can leave the initiative with god be faithful in the place he has put you with the diligence that you would want somebody to be have if you had given them an assignment number six beware of fantasy or maybe said a different way limit your exposure to fantasy there seems to me to be a spirit of fantasy that has just multiplied over us there are so many that don't even recognize the difference any longer between what they're absorbing whether it's real or fantasy now some of our digital tools have contributed to that so the amount of programming that is available contributes to that our affluence and abundance contributes to that the connectivity of our world contributes to that we used to lead much more isolated lives and we didn't have exposure to so much now we we see so many things and that fantasy makes you dissatisfied and discontent and it will lead you to places that are destructive makes you more easily deceived more easily dissatisfied more easily many things don't give your thoughts or your focused attention to things that aren't grounded by the boundaries of scripture fascinate comes the root of it is a latin word that means to be bewitched and too much fantasy will bewitch you again our objective here is what can we do what are the practices that we can build into our lives that will help us stay free of deception in a season when deception is going to be increasing number seven and my last one on this little list is just keep it simple and plain don't be so spiritual i've told the story before years ago i had as a young man and i was asked to take a visiting minister to the airport and on the way we were supposed to stop and and he was going to pray for somebody and i had an address this was before google or before gps we used to do this quaint thing somebody would hand you an address and we had these paper things that unfolded and so i had a street name and his number and i couldn't find the house and i was embarrassed and we had a flight to catch and i i wanted to be a good host and i finally said well i guess the devil didn't want us to pray for that person and this guy was a retired army he had this huge deep voice he said devil nothing you just had lousy direction son sir yes sir and sometimes in our shortcomings we over spiritualize things and keep it simple and plain cory ten boom do you know her if you've never read the hiding place i recommend it to you it's not a new book but it's worth the read she's a hero in my life but i don't think she originated but i heard her use it the kiss principle just keep it simple stupid works for me first second corinthians 3 i'm sorry he says therefore having such a hope we use great boldness in our speech we're not like moses he used to put a veil over his face so that the sons of israel wouldn't look intently at the end of what was fading away in the old testament the presentation is veiled to a degree we see god through types and signs and patterns but in the new testament there's great plainness of speech and that's what paul is saying i have a hope for great boldness in our speech it's not hidden any longer it's been made plain and god isn't hiding i'm always a bit intrigued at the way we title sermons you know the the seven hidden keys to and the twelve great secrets and the four mysteries i'm like no it seems to me like god said it about as plainly as he knows how no man comes to the father except through me i mean it's a very plain presentation the simplest amongst us can understand it so let me i'll recapitulate just real quickly it's only by god's mercy that we can be faithful number two cultivate humility in the fear of the lord three base everything on the scriptures four focus on jesus he's more important than the label of the church where we serve or the translation of our bible or the style of worship music we prefer number five leave the initiative with god don't pester god for greater revelation focus on the truth he's given you number six beware of fantasy and seven keep it simple and plain there are guard rails to help you stay out of places that make you more vulnerable to deception there's some things you do that make you susceptible to deception i'll give you four and i'm done i'll touch them real quickly those who rely on this on just a subjective impression i've spent a lot of time in in christian circles and people say well it felt so good i know it was from god subjective impressions are not the best guidelines for your life they were cute they had to love jesus number two those who accept supernatural signs is a guarantee of truth one of the most supernatural individuals that will ever stand on the face of planet earth will be the antichrist and the false prophet miracles are not an attestation of character i'm not opposed to miracles in the supernatural but don't allow them to be your your signposts for what is true number three it's the fruit of the spirit right that's another lesson we'll do it another time number three those who are willing to face the who are those who are unwilling to face the possibility of suffering or persecution are more vulnerable to deception jesus said in this world you'll have trouble be of good cheer i've overcome the world none of our heroes got through the journey without some adversity so don't cultivate a a faith or a theological plan or a view of the world that says you're not going to have to walk through anything doesn't mean you failed or you missed god and that's not a negative confession or being something less than positive christ suffered in the flesh and god honored him anyone who promises you only good is a false prophet and then number four you're susceptible if you have no awareness of scripture or limited awareness of scripture you're vulnerable to what anyone would say we have the bible available to us invest a little effort you will not regret it if you're not doing the daily bible reading with us come on somebody said that i'm not being straightforward 15 minutes a day is not enough i can read my passage in about 15 minutes a day if you need 20 it's still worth the effort okay i want to be straightforward i want to close with a proclamation putting god's word in our mouths is one of the most powerful tools that we have if you're not in the habit of memorizing scripture it's a great habit to cultivate say well that's hard for me okay do it anyway well i'm not as good at it as i used to be okay start where you are well i forget okay put the scripture in your heart it will help you it will help you and there's you're going to need the help you're going to need the help okay so it's from psalm 31 i think they're going to put it on the screens we can read it together why don't you stand with me this is our conclusion you should smile okay psalm 31 we're going to read the first five verses this is the declaration over our lives of what god says about us not how i feel not how i think maybe not even what my circumstances look like tonight but this is god's declaration over my life i trust him all right psalm 31 1-5 in you o lord i have taken refuge let me never be put to shame deliver me in your righteousness turn your ear to me come quickly to my rescue be my rock of refuge a strong fortress to save me since you are my rock and my fortress for the sake of your name lead and guide me free me from the trap that is set for me for you are my refuge into your hands i commit my spirit redeem me o lord the god of truth amen hallelujah god bless you we are triumphant in jesus name [Music] hallelujah hey this is pastor allen thank you for watching this video if you enjoyed it like it and most importantly share it with your friends if you want to be notified when there's new content we post new material if you'll just subscribe to my channel and hit the bell you'll get the notification most of all i pray god blesses you as you continue on your spiritual journey and open your heart to the lord god bless you

Channel: Allen Jackson Ministries

Views: 11,906

Rating: 4.9132528 out of 5

Keywords: Pastor Allen Jackson, allen jackson ministries, world outreach church, alan jackson, sermons, preachers, how to be saved, Finding Jesus, pastor allen jackson sermons, Do Not Be Deceived, ways to find truth, what is truth, 7 ways to find truth in our world, deception, discernment, ways to protects yourself, protection, prevention

Id: P1hoxlT6Y9A

Length: 50min 40sec (3040 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021