Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 173
TRANSCRIPT
Have you ever bought something online and when it arrived it was nothing like it appeared in the online ad? I bought a t-shirt recently and ordered a men’s 3X since I am a robust guy. When the shirt arrived, I could not even get it over my chest, let alone my ample belly. I was deceived by their slick advertising. I think we, the body of Christ, need to guard ourselves from being deceived in this day and age. Deception is more rampant and even more blatant than ever before. In this podcast I am going to talk about the power of deception.
I’m Lee Whitman with Restoring the Foundations and I welcome you into this Hope Healing and Freedom podcast. Being deceived is something that is as old as the Garden of Eden. In fact, the first temptation was done with deception. You know the story found in Genesis but let me point out some of the important facts. Genesis 2:14-16 says “Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and tend it. 16 The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.” This is what God said to Adam before the creation of Eve. Then in verse 18 of Genesis 2, God created the woman.
In chapter 3 the deception begins. The serpent approached the woman, and some would say that the man was with her, but he must have been distracted by something. So, the serpent says in Genesis 3:1, “Did God say.” He begins this interaction with deception, trying to get Eve to doubt what she had been told. God told Adam not to eat of the tree, and it was Adam’s job to relay this prohibition to Eve. Adam obviously did not share this information correctly because Eve heard something different. In Genesis 3:2, Eve says to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; 3 but from the fruit of the tree, which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” Adam did not do a very good job of sharing with Eve because she added that if they even touch the fruit, they will die. That was not what God had said to Adam. Adam must have been like many of us men, he is not a good communicator.
But notice the deception. The serpent did not come at these new humans with a blatant lie. Instead, he deceived them by planting doubt in their minds. “Did God say.” To this day the serpent uses doubt to deceive us. “Is God going to…….” Things like is God going to heal you like He does other people. Or will God provide for your needs? Or even Have you done enough to earn God’s acceptance and approval? He is trying to deceive believers through doubt. He has been doing this ever since the Garden of Eden because it works. James 1:22-25 says “But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not just hearers who deceive themselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his [a]natural face in a mirror; 24 for once he has looked at himself and gone away, [b]he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. 25 But one who has looked intently at the perfect law, the law of freedom, and has continued in it, not having become a forgetful hearer but [c]an active doer, this person will be blessed in [d]what he does.” One of the strongest deceptions is that going to church is enough. Or simply reading your bible and having a five-minute prayer in the morning before heading into your day is enough. Our relationship with God is an active lifestyle. I heard a pastor say recently that we look at salvation as a one-time event. Many people can tell you the exact date they accepted Jesus and feel like that one-time event is all they need. The act of salvation is not all there is. That event is just the beginning of a relationship with God. Some will do the same thing with the baptism in the Holy Spirit. They look back at the day they received the Holy Spirit and believe that event was all they needed. It is a deception to believe that. That event is just the beginning of many fillings with the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. We can easily get deceived into believing that those one-time events are all we need, when in fact we need the ongoing relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit every day.
I want to look more closely at Galatians 3:1. It says, “You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?” The word “bewitched” is a very interesting word. It means to feign or to mislead, to charm, or to fascinate. Part of the definition was the word Prate, which is a word I had never heard before, so I looked it up. This is where the definition gets interesting. Prate means to talk excessively and pointlessly to babble. It is to engage in the emptiness of foolish talk. Here is what jumped out at me in this definition of bewitched. Where do we find people who talk excessively and pointlessly? Where do we find the emptiness of foolish talk? My answer would be on social media. People like to hear the sound of their own voice, so they get on social media and engage in foolish talk, talking excessively and pointlessly. The bible says this kind of talk can bewitch people. Think about the number of famous believers have you heard of lately who no longer believe the Gospel? Several, right? Why have they fallen away? I believe they are listening to the large volume of foolish talk, and they have been bewitched. Just like in the Garden of Eden, this excessive and pointless speech h caused them to doubt what they previously knew about God. They were deceived and bewitched by this talk.
It goes on in Galatians 5:7 to say, “You were running well; who hindered you from obeying the truth?” We know who it is that hindered them; it was our enemy, Satan, who used people to bewitch them from obeying the truth. Colossians 2:4 reinforces this line of thought when it says, “I say this so that no one will deceive you with persuasive arguments.”
How do we guard ourselves from being deceived? By doing what it says in 2 Corinthians 10:5-6, and I am quoting from The Passion Translation. “We can demolish every deceptive fantasy that opposes God and break through every arrogant attitude that is raised up in defiance of the true knowledge of God. We capture, like prisoners of war, every thought and insist that it bow in obedience to the Anointed One.” Two thoughts come together here in these verses. First is to take every thought captive and ask Jesus about it. Second is to be immersed in the Word of God so that you can evaluate thoughts and ideas against the truth found in God’s Word. I believe some of these famous Christians were easily picked off by the deception of the enemy because they did not take thoughts captive, and because they were not deep in God’s Word.
I want to take a story from the bible to show how deception can get into a family line and cause destruction for generations. You may be familiar with the story of Jacob and Esau found in Genesis. The story actually begins further back in the life of Jacob and Esau’s mother Rebekah and her brother, Leban. Rebekah and her husband Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob was the favorite of his mother, and Esau was the oldest and more favored by his father. Isaac told Esau to go out and hunt for some games and prepare one of Isaac’s favorite meals, because in Isaac’s own words, he could eat the meal and die. Isaac was also going to give his blessing to Esau after the meal. Rebekah overheard this conversation and told Jacob to bring her some of the livestock, and she would cook Isaac’s favorite meal so that Jacob would get his father’s blessing, not his brother Esau. When Jacob heard what his mother had planned, he said, “Perhaps my father will feel me, and I shall seem to be a deceiver to him, and I shall bring a curse on myself and not a blessing. But his mother said to him, ‘Let your curse be on me.” Rebekah was so steeped in deception from her family line that she was willing to take this curse on herself. Jacob knew better than to deceive his father, but his mother said she would take the curse on herself. And she did. The curse of deception was in her bloodline and eventually came back to bite Jacob. Jacob deceived his father by putting animal skins on his arms and hands in order to get the blessing from his father. When Esau heard what Jacob had done, he became very angry, and Jacob had to leave town for fear of his life. He went to live with his mother’s brother Leban.
When Jacob met Lebans youngest daughter, he fell in love with her. During his time living with Leban, Jacob proved himself very wise and successful. He asked Leban if he could have Rachel as his wife. Leban agreed that he could marry his daughter with the condition that Jacob would work for Leban for seven years before he would give Rachael to Jacob to be his Wife. Jacob gladly worked for Leban for seven years in order to marry Rachel. On his wedding night, Leban deceived Jacob and substituted his oldest daughter, Leah in place of Rachael, and she she became Jacob’s wife. Jacob’s sin of deception came back upon him in a big way. Leban then agreed to allow Jacob to work seven more years in order to be allowed to marry Rachel.
You can see how this curse of deception was in the family line of Rebeckah and Leban, and how Jacob also walked in the curse by deceiving his father, and later in his life, the curse came back upon him. One of the problems with the sin of deception, is that when you are deceived, you don’t know it. So dealing with deception on your own can be difficult. Let me give you a few recommendations on how to safeguard yourself from deception.
You may easily guess my first recommendation to help you avoid deception is by going through RTF ministry. The more freedom you experience personally, the clearer your discernment will be. When we personally are struggling with the generational curse of deception, like our friend Jacob, then it is easier for the enemy to trap us with deception. The more freedom you experience and walk in, the sharper your discernment will be so you can spot deception that is coming at you.
The second thing I would recommend is for you to be in a good church where you can develop community. This community will hopefully be with people you can trust who will be able to speak into your life. Often the presence of a community of believers can help you spot when deception is attempting to cause you struggle.
The third thing i would recommend it to be in a place where you are being discipled by those further down the road than you are. The Christian life is best experienced when the older in the faith help the younger along their path. Discipleship is something that is missing in many of our churches due to the lack of some kind of ongoing Christian education. In the old days, churches had Sunday school for all age groups which provided a steady diet in the Word of God. Today, the number of churches that have this education are becoming fewer and fewer. If your church does not have such a program, be brave enough to go to older and wiser people in your church and ask them if they would provide that for you on a one-on-one basis.
The last encouragement I would give to help protect yourself from being deceived in this world full of many voices that talk excessively and pointlessly is to develop intimacy with the Holy Spirit. The more intimate you are with the Holy Spirit, the more you will hear His voice of warning.
PRAYER
Father God, we need Your help in fighting deception. We live in a world full of emptiness of foolish talk. Please help us find a community of believers who can walk with us through these days. Please help us get rooted in Your Word through our own personal study of Your Word, or through meeting with other believers who are seeking to know You better. Would you also give us more and more discernment to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit to keep us from being deceived. You say if anyone lacks wisdom let him ask. I am asking that you empower us to walk in Your wisdom in these days of foolish talk.