Turning Point

Guest (Male): When the world believes that each person creates their own truth, where does that leave Christians who believe in one truth? God's truth. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah tackles this question with tools and encouragement for standing strong. From the series The World of the End, here's David to introduce the conclusion of his message, In a World of Deception, BE HONEST.

Dr. David Jeremiah: Well, it's one thing for us to cry out against the fraud and deception that's around us in the world, but here's the challenge. While all that's going on, we need to ask God to help us really be honest, be truthful, and don't stray from the honest, absolute truth. As Solzhenitsyn said, as I reported to you yesterday, don't live your life by lies. Live your life based on the truth. We'll have more of that in just a moment as we open our Bibles together to Matthew chapter 24.

We're going to Alaska in July and I'd like to encourage you to come along with us. We're going on a brand new ship that we've not cruised on before. It's a beautiful Celebrity ship and we're leaving July 12th and returning the 19th. We'll be stopping in places like Icy Strait Point, Hubbard Glacier, Juneau, Ketchikan, and Victoria. We will have a wonderful time together.

If you've never done Alaska, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. If you go there, you'll want to go back. I've been going back now for many years, well over 30 times to Alaska in my lifetime, and usually with a bunch of people. I hope you'll let us introduce you to this beautiful place this July. Once again, the dates are the 12th through the 19th. You can find out all about this by going to davidjeremiah.org. There you will find a button you can push that will give you the details. We hope you'll take it seriously, get registered to go with us, and plan on a wonderful, wonderful week of fellowship and beauty. You will never, ever regret it.

Well, today we finish up what we started yesterday on this Friday edition. So let's get started with part two of In a World of Deception, BE HONEST.

The strategy Satan implemented in the Garden of Eden is the exact same strategy he tried to use on Jesus Christ in the wilderness in Matthew chapter 4. And it's the same strategy he uses on you and me today, and it's the same strategy he will use in the end times. Satan's only got one plan. He's only got one game plan, one strategy. He uses it over and over and over again. And if you want to know what it is, you can find it out and then you can be a little more prepared not to let it happen to you. So I'm going to show you how he works.

The first thing Satan did when he tempted Adam and Eve was to dispute God's word. Satan immediately tried to water down what God had said, to change it just a little. He suggested to Eve that she may not have heard God correctly. Satan told Eve that God didn't really mean what he said. Then Satan denies God's word. It is important to note the sequence here. Doubt opens the door to denial. If Adam and Eve had not listened to Satan in the beginning, they would not have been victimized in the end.

Satan disputes God's word, and then he denies God's word, and then he displaces God's word. That is the master strategy of Satan. He first disputes, he then denies, and then he displaces the word of God. One of the easiest places to see Satan at work in the world today is to observe how our culture treats sin. How innocent it seems to shift aside the pure truth of scripture when doing it suits our purpose.

For instance, lying doesn't seem bad if we're trying to spare another person's feelings. Adultery doesn't feel as wrong when we describe it through doublespeak as an improper relationship. Gluttony and addiction aren't the result of personal choices but genetic disorders or chemical imbalances. When we allow Satan to sow doubt in our minds that some sins are really not sins after all, we have opened our hearts to his deception. Quickly then, right and wrong get turned upside down and God's word is replaced with our own wisdom.

If you just look, you see it everywhere in our culture today. This is like the message and the world we live in is like the illustration. He disputes God's word, he denies God's word, he displaces God's word, and then he discounts God's goodness. This is really subtle, but please notice. Genesis 2:16 and 17, "And the Lord God commanded the man saying, 'Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in that day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.'"

Notice how generous God is. An abundance of goodness was offered freely, just one restriction. Yet look at how Eve reframed God's original command when she spoke with Satan in Genesis chapter 3. "And the woman said to the serpent, 'We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden.'" Do you see what's missing? Eve omitted God's gracious provision that she and Adam could freely eat of every tree in the garden. In other words, her comprehension of God's provision was not merely as magnanimous as God intended it to be.

Satan had gotten to her with his evil implication about God. Listen carefully. When you start to question the grace and goodness of God, you are on the road to deception. Don't allow Satan to push you into thinking God has abandoned you or that he has not been good to you. It's when you open the door to those kinds of thoughts that you'll find Satan has sown his seeds of deception in your heart. Let me ask you a question. Is God good? Has he been good to you? Have you had a good week? You've probably had some problems like I have, but it's been a great week.

And God is good and life is good when you walk with the Lord. But Satan doesn't want you to believe that. He wants you to believe God is a stingy, compromising person. The Bible tells us that Satan disputes God's word, he denies God's word, he displaces God's word, then he discounts God's goodness, and he dramatizes God's restrictions. How many times I've heard young people talk about this. Adam and Eve not only discounted God's goodness, they dramatized God's restrictions.

Perhaps I should say they overdramatized God's restrictions. They added to them. Nowhere do we find that God told the first humans not to touch the forbidden tree. But Eve said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, 'You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.'" Again, God never said that. He made no mention of touching.

What difference does that make, you say? Isn't that kind of nitpicking? Isn't that kind of silly? No, it's a good question and I think the answer is that when you give Satan an inroad into your life, you will soon be thinking less of the grace of God and more of the law of God. You'll be focused on what you can't do rather than what you've been enabled to do. And the next thing you know, you begin to think God doesn't really care about you and maybe he isn't interested in your welfare at all.

So what difference does it make? I should just do whatever I want to do. That is how deception gets into your lives. Almost every week of my life as a pastor, I've seen that demonic process play out. It happens to young people. It happens to older people. It happens to new Christians and individuals who have been in the church for years, to the rich and to the poor, to the highly educated and to the high school dropout. Whenever we overemphasize the boundaries in our lives, we allow ourselves to be deceived.

And then this is the last one. Satan diminishes God's penalty. Adam and Eve discounted God's goodness, they dramatized God's restriction, and finally, they diminished God's penalty. Eve said, "lest you die." Now that's not what God said. God didn't say lest you die. God said you will surely die. Verse 17 says, "But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in that day that you eat of it, you shall surely die."

Eve left out the "surely die" part and changed it to a simple "lest you die." And the latter sounds like death is something that might happen. It could happen. It's a possibility. The former makes it clear that death is inevitably connected with sin. The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The wages of sin is death. It's easy for modern Christians to start reading the word of God and see "maybe" when the text says "definitely" or to hear "consider" when the scripture says "obey."

When you do that, you leave yourself wide open to the deception of Satan. Listen to me, friends. The devil doesn't want to help you. He wants to destroy you. He doesn't want to build you up. He wants to tear you down. He doesn't want to set you free. He wants to enslave you. That's what the scripture says. And Jesus said this about the devil. "He does not come except to steal and to kill and to destroy. I have come that they may have life and that they may have it more abundantly."

So there you have the status of deception in our world today, the source of it and the strategy of it. Here's the solution to it. What is the solution to our world being driven deeper and deeper into deception? What is the answer to Satan's strategy of deceit? You know what the answer is? Simply, it's the truth. The way you deal with deceit is with the truth. That is the answer we need and that is the answer Jesus provides.

We know that because he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Jesus doesn't just tell the truth. He's just not about the truth. He is the truth. That means Jesus is utterly dependable and trustworthy. You can take him at his word. When you meet him, you move from false to true, from deception to reality, from relative confusion to absolute knowledge. Let's think practically though. What can we do in our everyday life that will help lift up the value of truth to a world drowning in deception? Three things.

First of all, tell the truth. Let's be frank. Many people feel comfortable with little lies. They call them white lies, minor misdirections. "Yes, the check is in the mail." "No, officer, I wasn't aware I was driving that fast." "I had no idea I wasn't supposed to use my friend's account for that streaming service." As a culture, we have convinced ourselves that dishonesty is only dangerous if it actively harms another person. We are fooling ourselves because the scripture says lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.

Not lying lips that hurt other people, not lying lips that get you in trouble, just plain simple lying lips are an abomination. The Lord does not want us to lie, and all deceit is deadly. This is an especially deadly and dangerous trap for Christians. We see our culture becoming more and more saturated with major incidents of deception. And when we see that, we become more comfortable with what we believe to be minor lies. We think it's just a little bit dishonest, not anywhere close to the way my coworkers lie all the time.

Yet because of who we are, because of our identity as children of God and ambassadors of the kingdom, even a little deception can cause massive damage to our lives, to our loved ones, to our testimonies. For that reason, let us speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the words of Paul, "Do not lie to one another since you have put off the old man with his deeds and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of him who created him." Tell the truth.

You know, it's so interesting. I've been in the church all my life. My daddy was a preacher, so I tell everybody I had a drug problem. I was drugged to church since I was a little tiny baby and I've been going ever since. So I know the church. I've lived in the church and I know what it's like. When I first became a pastor back in the 70s, one of the things that was true was that there was a lot of competition between churches.

And when you have a pastors' meeting, you couldn't pray before you told everybody how many you had in Sunday school the day before. And the rumor was that pastors weren't always honest about their numbers. That was a rumor. I heard of one discussion that went like this. "If I lie about my statistics and you know that I'm lying about my statistics and I know that you know that I'm lying about my statistics, isn't that like telling the truth?" No, it's not like telling the truth.

We're supposed to tell the truth, the unvarnished truth. I want you to think about that because we get in these little habits of fudging, not quite being truthful. Ask God to help you be totally truthful, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. So tell the truth. Then secondly, test the truth. There's an interesting moment in the book of Acts that is helpful when we think about truth and deception, specifically in terms of the danger that false teachers and false prophets present within the church.

Here's the passage. Acts 17:10 and 11, "Then the brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica in that they received the word with all readiness and searched the scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so." Do we do that? Do we search the scriptures daily?

You say, "Oh man, I come to your church, Dr. Jeremiah, and you teach from the Bible." You have my permission to go home and check about what I say. If it's not right, if it's not in the Bible, if I'm not being true, you should make an appointment. The Bereans did not reject Paul simply because he presented something new. They did not accept what he said simply because he was passionate and knowledgeable. The Bereans invested their time and their energy into determining what was true by studying the scriptures daily.

And the Bible tells us that if you go to the scripture and you ask God ahead of time to help you understand it, he will do it. He will help you understand it and you will know whether it's true or not. Have you ever been around somebody who's espousing some new thing? And in your heart, as you listen to it, you're trying to be respectful, but you just feel like in your heart, there's something wrong with that, man. That doesn't sound right.

Well, if it doesn't sound right, don't do anything until you can get it to sound right because it'll get you into trouble. Often times the Holy Spirit who lives within us helps us to recognize error that we can't even explain to ourselves. We just know in our heart that is not actual, that is not true. And what you don't want to do is to let untruth into your life. So don't just tell the truth, test the truth. First John 4:1 says, "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world."

Tell the truth and test the truth. And then teach the truth. One way for us to stand against deception is to tell the truth at every opportunity. Another is to test what the world and even the church tells us is true. But finally, we can lift up truth in a world of deception by teaching the truth. Teach it to those who need to hear it. The Bible tells us in the book of Colossians that as believers, we're to teach one another. Teaching one another, it says.

Always understanding that we live in a world as Christians that is above the world that does not know Christ. We are called to a higher standard. We're to teach the truth in such a way that we lift people up, help them understand we have been called by Almighty God to be a part of his forever family. A 67-year-old woman was caught shoplifting in the city of Stockholm, Sweden. Her method was to place grocery items in a woven bag, a Christmas ham, meatballs, sausages, cheese, and more.

And then she attempted to leave the store while covering those items with another bag and the clerk noticed what the woman was doing and confronted her. Now here's the really strange part. The woman in question was one of the justices on Sweden's Supreme Court. On the one hand, this woman's crime was relatively minor. So this woman had not transgressed the law in a major way. But listen carefully.

Because of her status, because of who she was, because of her identity as a representative of the law in her nation's highest court, she was forced to resign and was prosecuted for her theft. My challenge to us all is this. We cannot change the world. I don't know when it was, but sometime probably in the last 10 years or so, I gave up on that. I can change the world one soul at a time. Can't change the world politically. You can't change the world by any other means.

The world is changed one person at a time when people receive Christ. I feel badly for so many people who spent all of their time as Christians trying to change the world. I dare you to find one passage in the New Testament where the Christians were trying to change the Roman world. They lived in that world. And so here's what I want you to understand clearly. Jesus' message to his four disciples on the Mount of Olives, telling them what was going to happen in the future, was not given to make them smarter about what would happen, but to help them understand what would happen so they could be the people God wanted them to be in the midst of that situation.

That is the whole force behind this series of messages. I don't want you to be smarter about the future, although there's nothing wrong with that. I want you, I want me, I want to be the person God wants me to be so that no matter what happens, I can be his person and be a difference maker in the world in which I live. To the vast majority of moderns, there is no such thing as objective truth. We create our own truth, they say. You have your truth, I have my truth, and your truth is no truer than mine.

Satan has effectively inserted this false definition of truth into our culture. It's in our schools and it's even in some of our churches. But you cannot be a genuine Christ-follower if you embrace this idea. Listen to me. Every true Christian should know and love the truth. Scripture says one of the key characteristics of those who perish, people who do not go to heaven, is that they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved.

And the clear implication is that a genuine love for the truth is built into saving faith. It is therefore one of the distinguishing qualities of every true believer in Jesus' words, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." So what I want to say to all of us today, I say to myself first and before I say it to you and those who are listening on the internet or wherever this is heard, don't spend your life trying to undo the deception of the world.

You are not strong enough, big enough, or influential enough. But what you can do is you can follow Solomon's advice. It's never been more timely. Here's what he said. "Buy the truth and do not sell it." Isn't that a great verse? I love that verse. Solomon said, "Buy the truth and don't sell it." Let's not only buy the truth, let's be the truth. Let's tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.

Let's stand against the things that are false by standing up for the things that are true. Let's stop posturing and actually be the people we want people to think we are. This is what I know as we ease into the days that Jesus is telling us about in Matthew 24. The world is watching and it is time for us to be the truth. Third John 3 and 4, John wrote to this little congregation to whom he was writing. 14 verses in that chapter and six times the word truth is found in that book.

Here's what he said. "I rejoiced greatly when brethren came and testified of the truth that is in you, just as you walk in the truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in the truth." I have no greater joy as a pastor than to know that people are walking in the truth. Let's be people of the truth. When we catch ourselves starting to move away from that, let's catch ourselves up short and say no. In this deceptive world, I will be the truth.

If I never say anything to anybody, if I never get in a conflict with anybody about what's happening, when they think about me, they will know I stand for the truth. I am a representative of the truth. People of the truth. Here's our marching orders. Be the truth. You be the truth. Jeremiah, you be the truth. Let's go into this world of deception and lies and falsehood and let's by the grace of God, let's be the truth.

And the Bible says when you are true, when you go after the truth, something really happens. You will find it. If you really want to know the truth, you can know the truth and the truth, the Bible says, will set you free. Well, we're going to take a break for the weekend. When we come back our Monday and Tuesday editions next week will be, In a World of War, BE CALM. I wrote this before there was a war, so it's interesting to see what it says about war as we are in a war right now. We'll talk about that on Monday and Tuesday.

And by the way, don't forget on the weekend, I like to remind you of the importance of going to church. One of the best things you can do in your battle for the soul is to be in church on the Lord's Day. Don't let anything get in the way of your going to church. It is there where God does some of his best work. Many of us will point back to a service we went to when God spoke to us and it changed our lives. Put yourself in the way so that God can do his work in your life. And we'll see you on Monday. Have a great weekend, friends.

Guest (Male): Our message today originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and senior pastor Dr. David Jeremiah. Turning Point is also on radio and TV this weekend. To learn where you can find it, visit our website, davidjeremiah.org/radio. That's davidjeremiah.org/radio or call 800-947-1993.

Ask for your copy of David's informative book, The World of the End, with the special Be the Answer bookmark. Yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard, New International, and New King James versions, complete with notes and articles from Dr. Jeremiah's decades of study. If you're encouraged by this ministry, let us know by writing to Turning Point, PO Box 3838, San Diego, California, 92163. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us Monday as we continue the series The World of the End on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.