deception on Purity Of Heart

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.

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

Preaching Commentary Taking Off the Old Clothes and Putting on the New Our passage continues Paul’s teaching on “the putting off of the old self” (anthropos) (of sin, corruption, and death) vs.22 a...

While I am not one to see a demon behind every bush or spiritual warfare in every difficulty, the fact is that we are regularly engaged in the struggle against good and evil—whether we know it or not....

Taking Off the Old Clothes and Putting on the New Our passage continues Paul’s teaching on “the putting off of the old self” (anthropos) (of sin, corruption, and death) vs.22 and putting on the “new ...

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...

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath 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...

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...

There’s a somewhat naïve belief among some that, in general, most people are inherently good. While many Christians may not fully embrace John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (which I believe is ...

Evading self-acknowledgment of our faults enables us to avoid painful moral emotions: guilt and remorse for harming others; shame for betraying your own ideals; self-contempt for not meeting even our ...

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...

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

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

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...

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

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...

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...

Our race would not have gotten far, Had we not learned to bluff it out And look more certain than we are Of what our motion is about.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

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. …………………………...

In The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor’s character Tarwater works hard not to think about his lost faith. But ultimately, we can only lie to ourselves for so long before we acknowledge the tru...

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.

The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...

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...

The most insidious deception in human history is the lie that says, “God is against you.”

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...