From His Heart

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Today on From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Shreve. We close out the year by telling you the truth and nothing but the truth.

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You know, it used to be some years ago you could turn on the news and it might be a little slanted to the left, but mostly of the time they're going to report the news.

But now news sources, news agencies, they don't report the news. They try and slant the news and they spin the news and they tell you things that just aren't true. And they try and take the facts and report them in such a way that you'll believe the opposite.

Hey, is the truth really that important in our world today? Because it seems like you can just make it up as you go.

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Every scar.

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So many churches today are bending over backwards to accommodate the culture and, in the process, compromising the truth so as to not offend. But is truth really that important in our world? The answer is absolutely yes.

This is From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Shreve, and Happy New Year's Eve! Thank you for joining us on this precipice of a new year to proclaim the truth of God's Word to a lost and hurting world. The truth is we live in a world full of lies, and it's critically important that we can tell the lies from the truth to be grounded in the truth of God's Word. His Word never wavers or compromises.

Today, Pastor Jeff shares three essential discoveries about truth and how, as Christians, you and I are able to speak the truth in love. It's a great way to end the old year and look forward to a brand new one.

Let's get started with today's lesson. Open your Bible to the book of Ephesians, chapter 4, as Pastor Jeff Shreve teaches us all about how to discern the truth in a world of lies.

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This is what God's word says, Ephesians 4, beginning in verse 11. And he God gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints, for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.

As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness and deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up into all aspects, into him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

Now, Jesus, when he was before Pontius Pilate, he said, all who are of the truth, listen to me. He said to him, I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. All who are of the truth, listen to me. And Pilate said in response, what is truth? Now, he wasn't asking, like, tell me, Jesus, what is truth? He probably said it sarcastically because he didn't want an answer, what is truth? I mean, come on. Truth. What is truth?

Well, the truth in a world of lies is so critically important. And I want to share with you three discoveries about the truth. We must be grounded in the truth because there is only one true North. Everything else is false. So, three discoveries about the truth.

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Number one.

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The truth is that which comes from God. That which comes from God. When the Lord met Moses on the mountain, you know, Moses said, "Lord, if I found favor in your sight, show me your glory." And he said, "I'll let you see the backside of my glory. No man can see my face and live." And so he caused all his goodness to pass before Moses. He hid him there in the cleft of the rock and covered him there with his hand. He passed by and proclaimed the name of the Lord. God's name and God's nature are inseparably linked.

What does God say about himself? The Lord, the Lord God. Yahweh. Yahweh. Elohim. Yahweh is God, the only God. The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth. Jesus came on the scene. John 1:14 states, "And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." Truth is that which comes from God. Now the Son of God is the truth. Because Jesus said of himself, "I am the way." John 14:6 continues, "I am the way and the truth and the life." He didn't say, "I am a way and a truth and a life." He said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. And no one comes to the Father except through me." He is the only way.

Jesus said, "Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many of those who find it, the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few there be that find it." The Son of God is the truth. We have lots of false Christs and false messiahs that have come and gone. People today will tell you, "Follow me, I know the truth and I'm going to take you to heaven." And they are false Christs and false messiahs. Muhammad, a false messiah, a false Christ, a false spiritual leader who has led billions astray. So the Son of God is the truth.

What does the Bible say about Jesus? He is God in human flesh. In him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. He is God in human flesh who died on the cross for your sins and mine and rose again, physically rose again from the dead three days later. But not only is the Son of God the truth, the Word of God is the truth. The Word of God is the truth. Jesus said in his great high priestly prayer, John 17:17, "Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth." Your Word is truth.

So if you want to know something about an issue that's going on in our culture today, in our world today, where do you find the truth? You have to find it in the Word, because the Word is truth. God gives us information about the things that we must know. The Bible doesn't tell you everything about everything. If it did that, it would be as John said, "Hey, if we just wrote everything about what Jesus said and did, the world couldn't even contain the books that would be written." So God gives us what we need to know, the essential things.

We need to know things that we don't know. I was talking to a lady the other day and I said, "You know, the things that we don't know, we like to dig. What does this mean? You know, there's only baptizing for the dead." And in 1 Corinthians 15, what in the world does that mean? You can come up, you can do the research and find there's 50 different ideas of what that means. And so it's like, well, what is it? Well, it's obviously not very important, otherwise God would have given us more information about it.

So, you know, we had, I just finished Christmas and we did the wise men following the star, and some people do all this research into the star. Where did it come from? What's going on in astrology? What were they seeing in the stars at that time? You go back in time and all this stuff and you say, "What, we don't have enough information?" Exactly. God didn't give us a lot of information about it. It's not extremely important other than to know that God put a star in the sky to alert those wise men from the east, and he led them right to where the child was through that star, and that's how he did it.

So you die, you get to heaven. "Lord, tell me about the star." "Yeah, I put a star in the sky so the guys could see it, and then I led them right to Bethlehem, just like it says." It's not anything more than that. "Oh, okay. Well, you know, I was all freaked out over it, trying to figure this out." I like what Alistair Begg says. He says, "You know, we need to focus in on the things God tells us that he gives us lots of information on and not just keep zeroing in on the things that he doesn't give us that much information on."

But the Word of God is truth. "Sanctify. Set them apart in the truth. Your word is truth." Now, if you want to know the truth about something, you see what the Bible says about it. You want to know the truth about sexuality, see what the Bible says about it. I like Ken Ham's ministry, Answers in Genesis. He says, "You can answer a lot of questions in our world today by going back to the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis."

Well, what do we learn about gender? There are two. God made them male and female. What do we learn about marriage? "For this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." Those are basic foundational things that we get from the Word of God. Now, for Christians, here's something so wonderful. See, when you become a Christian, God comes to live inside of you through the person of the Holy Spirit. Jesus called him the Spirit of truth who will guide us in all the truth.

So the Word of God is truth. And the one that wrote the word, Christ, through his Spirit, lives inside of us and he will guide us in the truth. And so we come to the Word to see what does God say about this? If you want to know just a down and dirty way to know what the truth is, look to see what the world says about a situation and know probably 99.9% of the time that's going to be a lie. That's going to be a lie because the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.

So the truth is that which comes from God.

**Second discovery.** The truth is that which is opposed by the devil. He is the enemy of the truth. There's one hero of the Bible, his name is Jesus. And there's one villain in the Bible, his name is Satan, who is the serpent of old, the devil and Satan. He's the enemy of the truth.

Now, in John chapter 8, when Jesus was having an argument with the Jewish religious leaders, they said, "We have Abraham for our father, we weren't born of fornication." They said to Jesus, it was a slam on him because they knew something was up with his birth. They didn't believe that he was born of a virgin, but they believed that he was born out of wedlock, conceived out of wedlock at any rate. And so they said, "We were not born of fornication. We have one father, even God." And Jesus said this: "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. But because I speak the truth and you do not believe me."

The devil is a liar and the father of lies. And the devil is the cleverest of liars. Now, the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God has made. Genesis 3:1 speaks of the devil. The cleverest lies that the devil tells are the ones that sound right. They sound right, real close to the truth. The devil doesn't normally come with something that's way out in left field because we would say, "Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right at all."

So, as you've heard me say before, what's more dangerous, a clock that's five hours wrong or a clock that's five minutes wrong? A clock that's five hours wrong? You would figure out pretty quickly that can't be right. That's gotta be wrong. This is way too much time is off here. But a clock that's five minutes wrong? You may miss a plane, you may miss an important appointment. You're just a little bit off.

You've heard me share before the aviation rule, the one in 60 rule. For every one degree a pilot is off his flight plan, every 60 miles, he's a mile away from where he was intending to go. So if you fly from LaGuardia to LAX and you're just one degree off flight plan, what's the difference between landing at the LAX Airport or landing in the Pacific Ocean? It's a big, big deal. And that's just one degree.

So how does the devil work with these subtle lies? Well, he uses lies to appeal to people's desires. You have desires, I have desires. And they can be manipulated. The enemy knows we have desires and he plays on those to pull us into sin. For example, with Eve, what does he say to her? You know, he gets her to question God's goodness and then he tells her just a flat-out lie: "You surely shall not die. For God knows in the day you eat of this fruit, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

Well, that was just music to her ears. Wow, look at this. This fruit, whatever it was, we don't know what it was. People say it was an apple. We don't know that. Some of the rabbis said it was a pomegranate. That'd be tough to eat. But anyway, they say pomegranate; it's hard to take a bite of that thing anyway, so we don't know what it was. But we do know this: when he said that you're not going to die, you'll be like God. See, there was a desire in her to be like God, which is not a bad thing. The Lord is going to make us like him.

1 John, chapter 3, states, "It has not appeared as yet what we shall be. We know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." God wants us to be like him. But this was to supplant God. This was to be like God so I don't need to depend upon God. He played upon that desire for her to be like God, to know good and evil. And she ate.

Now think about what he did with Jesus. When Jesus was in the desert being tempted of the devil, he said, "Jesus, look at all the kingdoms of this world." He showed him, took him to a high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of this world in a vision. He said, "All this has been given to me. I can give it to whomever I wish. And I'll give it to you if you'll just bow down and worship me."

Now here's the temptation: "Jesus, you don't have to go to the cross, you don't have to suffer." Because all the kingdoms belong to Jesus. The Lord, his Father, gave them to him. But it was after the cross. "Listen, you bow down and worship me. You can bypass all the suffering. You can bypass the cross." And Jesus said, "It is written, you shall worship God and serve him only."

But the devil tries to play on the desires people have. He tries to play on the fact that we don't want to suffer. What is the prosperity gospel? The prosperity gospel is a satanic gospel. It's a gospel that appeals to people in their desires. Who doesn't want health? Does anybody in here want sickness? Well, you know, my word for 2024 is sickness. I mean, that's not a good word, right? Debilitation, you know, nobody wants that one.

And we don't like, we like health, we like wealth. You sit down for a job application. "Well, we'd like to hire you. Would you like to make $50,000 a year or a hundred thousand dollars a year? You decide." "Oh, you got room to rent upstairs? Unfurnished." If you figure out and say, "Well, 50,000 just for me, I couldn't take a hundred." Yeah, I mean we all like health, we like wealth, and we like problem-free living.

What do you hear in the prosperity gospel? Do you ever hear messages on suffering? Of course not. That doesn't play in Peoria. That's not something that people want to hear. "Follow Jesus and you're going to have suffering in life." Well, don't tell me that. You know, when the apostle Paul, Saul of Tarsus, comes to the Lord in Acts chapter 9, God sends Ananias, "Go to a street called Straight and lay your hands on a man named Saul of Tarsus." He's blinded and let him regain his sight. He didn't want to go.

Ananias is like, "Lord, that guy, he doesn't like you. He breathes out threats and murders against the disciples of the Lord." He said, "Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine, for I will show him how much he must suffer for my name's sake." That was Saul's introduction to Christianity: you are going to suffer. And suffer he did. I believe the apostle Paul was the greatest Christian who ever lived. But he knew suffering.

Hey, the devil will take that out. He doesn't want you to know about any suffering. He uses lies to appeal to people's desires. You can always get a big crowd if you're going to talk to them about health, wealth, and prosperity. Because every lost person wants that. They don't want suffering, they don't want repentance. They don't want to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus. They don't want any of that. And that's not in the prosperity gospel, which makes it a false gospel.

But not only does he use lies to appeal to people's desires, he uses lies to make people believe that truth is subjective. You've heard that phrase, no doubt: subjective truth, relative truth. Well, it just kind of depends on the circumstance. There is subjective truth and there is objective truth. Say, what's the difference? Well, subjective truth is truth in the subject. Objective truth is truth in the object.

When you talk about two plus two equals four, that is objective truth. That's true for anyone, anywhere, regardless of where you live, regardless of the color of your skin, regardless of the fact that you're a multi-billionaire or you have 10 cents in your pocket. It's just true. It's objectively true. If you don't believe it, it doesn't change the reality of it one little bit. It's objective truth.

Now, one of the things that you'll find the devil will say when it comes to absolute truth, objective, absolute truth, a truth that never changes because God is the God who never changes. He sets up truth based on who he is. He's abounding in loving kindness, and God set up this world in accordance with who he is. That's why when the Bible tells you not to steal, it's because that goes against the nature of God. Don't covet, don't take something and want something that belongs to someone else. Why? Because that goes against the nature of God. Don't commit murder. That goes against the nature of God.

It's just not willy-nilly that God said, "Well, I'll throw out this command." No, it's all rooted in who God is. And the devil will say this: "Well, when it comes to absolute truth, there is one absolute truth, and that is that there is no absolute truth." That's a self-defeating statement because that's an absolute statement. But that's what he will say.

People will, even when they're in a Q and A or a back and forth with guys that come to college campuses, apologists that come to college campuses, they'll say that there is no such thing as absolutely absolute truth. And the guy will say, "Well, that's an absolute statement. That's a self-defeating statement. You're saying absolutely there is no such thing as absolute truth." But the devil will get people to believe that everything is subjective. Everything is based on a person's perspective or feelings or opinions. Absolute objective truth has nothing to do with your feelings.

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Well, how do you feel about that? Absolute truth is an objective reality. That remains constant regardless of personal beliefs, opinions, or emotions. God is undeniable. People will twist words and logic to deny God, but those are parlor tricks. Some fall for it; God is absolute, and His Word is also absolute. It can be verified through empirical observation, measurement, and logical reasoning.

But you know what? If we don't read His Word, we don't know a lie when we hear it. Are you regularly reading God's holy Word and incorporating its truths into your life? We surely hope so, and that's one of the reasons we hope that you'll take advantage of a special year-end gift we have for you. It's a brand new daily devotional book with 365 days of devotions, prayer, and scripture for your daily reflections each day. It'll get you thinking, learning, praying, and rejoicing at what you'll learn. The book is beautiful, and it's called *The Heart Is God's*.

A thank you gift for your support this month to From His Heart, of course. Today is the last day of the year and a vital one, as we have not reached our financial need goal this month and for the whole year. We're depending on a generous outpouring of God's people to help us end the year financially sound so that we can explode into the next year with great growth.

To give your gift today and receive the book *The Heart Is God's*, call 866-40-BIBLE (866-40-24253) or go online to fromhisheart.org. God bless you for joining us to share the good news next year.

Well, today you heard part one of the lesson "Truth in a World of Lies," and tomorrow we'll have part two. I'm Larry Nobles, inviting you to join us on New Year's Day to be encouraged as we move through the next year, which is likely to be filled with struggles, troubles, lies, and some rejoicing as well for our nation and our world. Be in prayer for both.

We'll see you New Year's Day when Pastor Jeff Shreve will open up God's Word and share real truth, real love, and real hope from God's heart here on From His Heart. There is treasure.

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There is blessed, There is hope that you always bring love. He can heal every scars of real truth, real love, real hope from his heart.

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From His Heart is the listener supported Broadcast Ministry of Dr. Jeff Shreve speaking the truth in love to a lost and a hurting world. Remember, no matter what, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Find out more@fromisheart.org.