christian living on Deception

It’s important, then, to have our eyes open to this deception. How is it that so many modern promises sound true but in the end lead to our deception, or even our destruction? A long, long time ago, t...

Our propensity to deceive ourselves about our place and purpose makes it so very difficult to see the truth of our lives, to understand the meaning of our moment in history and our responsibility to i...

To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.

Where there is hypocrisy in our life, please name it. Where we practice deception, please bring truth. In your goodness, meet us and heal us that we might be pure in heart and see you.

St. Martin of Tours was a Frankish soldier in the Roman army who abandoned his military post to follow Jesus at a time when Christianity had only begun to take root in France. He later became the bish...

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Our goodness is our biggest self-delusion, and all of us seem to be living with it.

Holy and merciful God, we need Your grace and love today. We deliberately lie and speak falsehoods. We mislead and deceive with half-truths. We omit facts that make us look bad. We take pleasure in go...

We may find it hard to believe Jeremiah’s words that the heart is “deceitful above all things.” We would rather look outward and think, Yes, others may be quite foolish and misguided. But I have a ...

All: O Lord, you declare that the forgiven person is blessed, that the person who has no deceit is blessed. We confess that we have had deceitful hearts, deceitful tongues, deceitful thoughts, and dec...

Pastor: The serpent deceitfully says to the woman, “Did God actually say” what you think He said? All: O God, we have heard the deceiver’s words, and we have distrusted your word. We have not deligh...

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But n...

We will often stop at nothing to avoid cognitive dissonance. We will twist logic, bend reason, conveniently forget facts, invent new stories, even destroy relationships—all in the name of preserving o...

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." In ...

Why would the apostles lie?....Liars always lie for selfish reasons. If they lied, what was their motive, what did they get out of it? What they got out of it was misunderstanding, rejection, persecut...

My friend Joi told me that when she was growing up, her parents invented a ploy to keep her from talking all of the time. They told her that people are allowed only so many words in one lifetime, and ...

One of the most dangerous driving situations is when it is raining at night. Not only are the streets slippery and visibility obscured by water on the windshield, but wet streets can reflect light fro...

Martin of Tours was a 4th century Frankish soldier who, after a personal encounter with Jesus, left the Roman army and became a hermetic monk and later a bishop. Dozens of stories of his life have cir...

Father, we speak the truth about who we are apart from you. Paul summarizes our condition in Romans 3 using the truth found in the sacred writings of the Psalter and Prophets, There is no one righteo...

Pastor: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” “Their throat is an open...

Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door. …………………………...

Researchers at the University of London concluded that “a substantial majority of individuals believe themselves to be morally superior to the average person” and that this illusion of ours is “unique...

Many deceptions only appeal to us because there is something inside us that "wants" to believe them. They are seductive because of darkness and wrong motives in our own lives. We must search...

All those who do not at all times trust God and do not in all their works or sufferings, life and death, trust in His favor, grace and good-will, but seek His favor in other things or in themselves, d...

We pastors don't drive fancy cars or rake in the dough (most of us, anyway). But there is still a temptation to a skewed version of "holy success" that we need to watch out for, the idea...

Self-deception is a major part of what defeats spiritual formation in Christ. In self-deception the individual or group refuses to acknowledge factors in their life of which they are dimly conscious. ...

Before God can deliver us we must undeceive ourselves.

Satan’s two most effective ploys are (1) to get people to underestimate him so that he can lure us into a hidden snare, or (2) to overestimate him that we may be so intimidated by him that we are para...

The devil’s cleverest ruse is to make men believe that he does not exist. Or to give us the false impression that he is a silly old character in a red suit with little horns and a forked tail. Or to c...