Some of you all have been tricked into defending something that you did not agree with. (Enemy of my enemy is my friend, or such.)
Now you are trapped by your pride, and you try to rationalize your position. (S1)
If you have been tricked into contradicting God and His Word, come clean.
Run to Jesus Christ to be forgiven and made whole. (S2)
Without hesitation, without rationalized delay, take what does need to be made right, and get it fixed.
All our roadblocks of worry and alternative routes around repentance can come later...never.
Then testify before men of the change. Put the fear of the Lord above the fear of men. (S3)
If you are on the Lord’s side, who should you fear? If you are against God, you have everything to fear.
But in repentance you will find rest, and peace where others find fear. (S4)
Illustration
Pride is the Stockholm Syndrome of Satan's Lies
It is the irrational glue that keeps us captive to Satan's lies, then turns us to be his agents of compromise and corruption.
Scriptures
S1 - CONCEIT
Rationalizing your position can result in you becoming wise in your own conceits. How do you respond to correction?
Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. - Proverbs 26:5 KJV
Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? [there is] more hope of a fool than of him. - Proverbs 26:12 KJV
[Be] of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits. - Romans 12:16 KJV
S2 - FIND FORGIVENESS
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us [our] sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. - 1 John 1:9 KJV
S3 - DON'T DENY, TESTIFY
32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. 33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. - Matthew 10:32-33 KJV
S4 - PEACE, NOT FEAR
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. - John 14:27 KJV
EPISODE
Transcript
Have you ever been tricked into lying for someone? That is next-level devilry. Not only are they lying to you, but they are lying to others through you. And it is a mess.
How do you recover? Not by 'saving face.'
You can end up being trapped by your pride, and you try to rationalize your position, and pretty soon you're making a mighty good disciple of a mighty poor individual.
Depends what situation you're in... But if you've been tricked into contradicting God and His Word, you need to come clean, and come clean quickly. Go to Jesus, first of all, and ask for forgiveness and to be free of that.
And, dealing with other people, there are many different situations, many different ways that people accept or don't accept an apology. Or yeah, they may or may not forgive you.
But with God, it's simple, it's direct. You go to Him in repentance and find rest and peace. Now, you can do that before God, but what about before men? Because, when we are contradicting God and His Word, who are we doing that before?
Before men, right?
And yeah, that's actually the tougher one, because God is perfect and holy and gracious and so on. And so coming to Him should be the easy part. We know that He forgives, and He does not lie when He tells us that He forgives, and yet people are fickle. But we do need to testify before men of the change.
Like, what is our change in position? What lie are we not supporting or advocating now?
If you're on the Lord's side, who should you fear? But if you're continuing to work against the Lord because your pride gets in the way, you have legitimate reason to be fearful of pretty much everyone:
God, first of all, because He is the perfect and holy Supreme Judge of the universe;
but secondly, because you're not serving God, and you're serving man or yourself, or whatever cause or excuse, then you're afraid that you might let them down.
And pretty soon, you've got the whole, ball of yarn all over the place.
So if you're against God, you frankly have everything to fear.
But in repentance, coming to God, first of all, the Judge, the Creator, you repent, you come to Him, you will find rest, and it's such a blessing.
And in that, you will find peace where others continue to walk in fear.
You may not get this reference, but there is an illustration regarding the pride that gets in the way. And, I've put it this way:
"Pride is the Stockholm Syndrome of Satan's lies."
Now, 'Stockholm Syndrome' is basically when someone gets captured by somebody else, and they get so used to being in that bad situation that then they're convinced that they love their captor.
And, yeah, in kind of an espionage genre or frame of reference, one of the ways I've expanded on that is,
"Pride is the irrational glue that keeps us captive to Satan's lies, then turns us to be his agents of compromise, and corruption."
So, I don't know if that helps. But yeah, pride...
If you're not standing up for that which is true and, just, reality, what do you have to be proud of? And then once you realize, well, reality is, I'm not the king of the universe, God is.
What do you have to be proud of there either?
It's, I can't really describe it, but it is amazing when you are reading Scripture and you think you have something figured out, and Scripture says, "Not quite, you missed something." And then you're like, "Okay, yeah God, you're right."
And you know what? When you agree with God, "Wait a minute. I was wrong, but now I'm right, and that feels good. It's just amazing what repentance does. Um... You agree with God and suddenly, "Where was the problem?" Just that, that humble coming before God and learning from Him.
And, uh... How's the verse go? "Learn of me for I'm meek and lowly of heart." Like, this is a Creator of the universe talking and He's like, "Yeah, come on over. There's all kinds of stuff I can teach you." And, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of Scriptures that go along with this, regarding rationalizing your position. That can result in you becoming, as Scripture would put it, "wise in your own conceits." You come up with reasons to support a conclusion that you've already settled in your mind. And if you don't allow Scripture to change your conclusions, you're just attempting to wrap Scripture around your finger, and, point it in whichever direction you please,
yeah, that, that's no good. We need to be humble, to be corrected by Scripture.
And, how do we respond to the correction of God? First of all, Proverbs 26:5 gives instruction to the wise. It says, and this is part of a pair of verses; there's one that says, "Don't answer a fool according to his folly." And that's, in other words, 'don't act like a fool,' but this verse is the other half of that equation.
It says that you do, "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." So, you don't act like him. What are the natural outcomes? What are the conclusions? What's the fruit gonna be of his folly? How do we respond when God corrects us in our folly? And, yeah, it starts getting all kinds of confusing whenever we're dealing with people who may or may not be right in their critique of us...in which case, we need to go to God's Word.
And, a little bit of a sobering thought here... ...a couple verses later in the same chapter in Proverbs 26:12. "Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? "There is more hope of a fool than of him." In a previous verse, it said a fool can become wise in his own conceits, if nobody ever pushes back, if he doesn't ever face any reproof or rebuke. And yeah, if we don't receive pushback, if we never listen to the absolute truth of God's Word...
It's more dangerous than simply making mistakes repeatedly... It's that we are justifying ourselves in them, and it's a lot harder to come to a place of repentance. We build up a lot of pride in the way that we excuse ourselves and accuse others.
And the next verse is out of Romans 12, it's verse 16. And some of these verses have a lot of just excellent context around them, and I would suggest that with Romans 12. Proverbs is: Proverbs here, Proverbs there... Proverbs 26:5 through 26:12 isn't necessarily a continuum of thought in the same way as the epistles in the New Testament are. But yes, Romans 12:16,
"Be of the same mind one toward another. "Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits."
And there it has to do with, yeah, just this humility and willingness to learn. And again, check everything against Scripture. I do get fairly wary of humans who say, "Hey, if you don't hear what I have to say, then you're a bad learner." And it's like, your word is not the final authority; I will check this with God's Word. And so yeah...
Rationalizing our own position can result in us becoming "wise in our own conceits."
How do we respond to correction?
And ultimately, when we find that God's Word is true...
"Yea, let God be true and every man a liar," and that includes me and you......we do need to find forgiveness. And we do have this promise in 1st John 1, again another passage that just has excellent context,
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
Alright, all clean now, all forgiven, right? Back again to the idea of, what are we gonna do, what are we gonna say to mankind? Are we like, "Oh yeah, I fixed it with God in quiet, and, and now I don't need to tell anybody anything... "I'll just be nicer to everybody, and they'll figure it out eventually, that I got back on the straight and narrow, "but I don't want to ruffle any feathers with those who might still disagree with me or so on."
No good. No good. And I would term this,
"Don't Deny, Testify."
And I understand the context of this verse that I'm about to read out of Matthew 10,
...but there is a general truth at play here, and just read verses 32 to 33 here.
"Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven." - Matthew 10:32-33.
So, that has to do with salvation. But, what about lies being told about God? And what about when we have faced and accepted His correction, shall we not pass that on?
Or do we just say, "Oh, hey, I still want to get along with those who live in error, therefore, I won't say anything"? Friendship with the world, that kind of friendship with the world, is enmity with God.
We are denying that God has made any change, that God would dare contradict their narrative. And we have gone along with their narrative, but now we're going to just be quiet.
If we're going to deny that God has made a change in our life, whether it's salvation or whether it's, "Hey guys, we were wrong," how's God going to honor that? He's not.
Lots of fear here. And how are we going to go about this? There are so many situations that are, they're different and whatever.
And sometimes people excuse their lack of action as, "Well, it's a gray area. "I don't really have to say anything. "I just know better now."
People excuse their inaction because,
"If everybody doesn't do the right thing, then there's still going to be negative consequences."
Well, if nobody does the right thing, then you are assured of that outcome.
"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." - John 14:27.
And there's another set of verses that come to mind regarding, I think it's in [1 Peter 2:20]. It says, you know, 'if you do wrong and you suffer for it, you deserved it. 'Good on you for taking the punishment that was due you.'
But he says, 'if you do well and suffer for it, this is acceptable with God.'
And there's a lot of times in these situations where we don't want to say something.
We would rather that someone continue in their lie than that we would face pushback for getting the truth out there. It's less comfortable, as if comfort were our standard, and then we just let the lies keep running.
And it's better to "suffer for well doing," and if well doing means telling the truth, so be it.
Spend a lot of time in prayer as to how God wants you to do that, because there are certainly wrong ways, carnal ways, of going about bringing the truth out. And sometimes people try to weaponize the truth as a carnal weapon to get back at those who have hurt them or to "hit them harder before they can hit me."
You know, "I don't want the liars to lie about me. So I'm going to hit him so hard, he won't know what hit him, and then..."
Carnal motives with spiritual things, it's not good. So...find out humbly how you can approach this. And of course, Matthew 18 comes in there with... 'Bring that correction to the person who needs to hear it most of all, first. 'And if he won't hear you, talk to more people, talk to more people.'
And one other thing...
There are a lot of people out there who will say,
"Oh, you have a persecution complex; persecution isn't real."
I agree and disagree. Ahem. Because there are multiple things that are meant by that, therefore I agree with some of them and I disagree with other ones of them.
I agree in the sense that what is often complained about as 'persecution'
is nowhere near the level, particularly physically, as what Christians face elsewhere, but I disagree because, "Does it have to get physical before you recognize Satan's pushback as being Satan's pushback?"
There are a lot of people in this persecution denial camp... And/or simultaneously in the "everybody hates me" camp. It's ironic. But basically they're like, "You don't know what persecution is," and we don't...
But some of the same people who deny that persecution exists, are people who... It doesn't even require any physical pain in order for them to turn tail and run. Satan doesn't have to go on a whole major physical offensive in order to turn them into walking lockstep with whatever his agenda is.
No, it's not persecution; it's peer pressure.
But, yeah. We need to have courage so that whether it has physical consequences or not, that we are honoring God, and standing up for what He has said... and countering what Satan or other liars... who Scripture would say are of their father, the Devil...
When we lie or commit other sins, are we obeying God in heaven, or are we obeying Satan? It cuts both ways.
We need to be aware of who we are serving. And, but yeah, when we face pushback, particularly when we're on a repentance "trajectory," sounds like a bad term.
You're either repenting or you're not.
But if you are minded to, "Okay, God, I'm going to get this right." And you pursue it, step by step, however many steps:
one step, "Sorry God,"
or two steps, "Sorry God, sorry brother John," you know.
If you are on... If you are living in repentance, for whatever lie you got caught up in or whatever, rest in God's promises, that He will see you through. He will help you. And pray, pray, pray.
Prayer is not something where you always get instant answers. Many times when we do get instant answers, we don't like them. We don't obey them. And sometimes, the time invested is what it takes for us to take God's answer seriously. Seek His face, see how quick He answers, and, He'll see how quick you are to obey.
And turn from lies.
Don't let a liar unite you, and him, and however many other people under a banner of lies...simply because everybody's too proud to admit that they were duped. That's a lot of the way that that happens so many times. People become, quote, "true believers" of a lie because they're too proud to admit that they were duped to begin with.
Don't go there.
Have you been tricked into lying? Don't double down. Find out what God has said.
Find out where they are echoing the question that Satan posed, "Yea hath God said?" And find out what God has said as a foundation for countering that,
for bringing the truth first to the individual who tricked you, and then to others as needed.
And certainly, if it has been a public lie, Scripture would also point out that those who, what was it?
'Those who sin publicly rebuke before all, that others also may fear.' [1 Timothy 5]
But you also have the whole thing of "rebuke not an elder." [1 Timothy 5]
And this is so much discussion fodder for another time, but talk to the offender first.
And if you need someone with you to do that, so be it, but start small and see what is necessary. But don't go the carnal route and try to get a mob behind you.
Exercise patience and grace with that person. As God has forgiven you for lying, extend that grace so that God might forgive that other person for lying,
and not be chased off in your zeal to be right or to be vindicated, or what have you.
There's a lot of people who are wrong, who, when someone comes to them personally in meekness, and they're not doing this whole backstabbing gossip régime...
There's a lot of people who, when they are met one on one, sincerely and graciously, they will turn. And, yeah, that's a really nice way for lies to die.
When people start gossiping and so on, to try to make sure that they are heard in a situation, that only serves the proliferation of lies. So if you've been tricked into lying, if you've been deceived by somebody, and you are going down the whole gossip trail, you need to be aware of your own responsibility to not cause others to lie.
Even if you're telling the truth, things get so garbled when so many hands are handling the message, at the very least.
So again, use God's Word as the antidote to the lies to which you have been exposed, to the lies that you maybe have passed on, and to the lies that the other individual or individuals have passed on.
Go to them graciously and prayerfully and see what God will do.
You're not guaranteed results that you will like, but prophets in the Old Testament didn't have that guarantee either.
Don't go there as a matter of self defense. Go there as a matter of, this is God's Truth. I'm coming to God's defense. If they do not hear you, that is God's to take over. You have spoken what God needed you to say to correct the error.
If it is not accepted, make sure that God is the most important person in that, not yourself. That's a fancy way of saying, "Don't take it personal," but certainly, we do have personal responsibility to the truth.
And we just need to make sure that we are not setting ourselves up as the arbiter of what is true. We're not taking it up as if we were being sinned against when people lie against God, because against God ultimately is where sin is committed.
So, forgive and be forgiven, and extend that grace to others as God has extended it to you.
There is a lot more that could be said if I knew this situation and that situation, the other situation... Talk to God, talk to somebody you can trust, talk to somebody that knows their Bible, and find out how you can best address whatever situation you may find yourself in.
You've heard a lie somewhere? "Yea, hath God said?"
Hmm, [I dunno]... Check it out.
"Yea, God has said."
~ Eric Druist
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