Worldly Standards for Success - Self Deception Series 16 – Purity 1105

To see today's photos, go to mt4christ.org or follow me, M.t. Clark, on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning. Today's photo of a dark forest pathway featuring some foreboding trees and a light beyond them comes to us today from Nick Harang, who shared this scene from his recent family vacation to Redwood Country in Northern California or Oregon on social media. On Monday. Well, it's Thursday, and if you have been following the blog for a while, you know that I don't just share Nick's pathway photo because it's spooky cool, although it is. I share photos of pathways on Thursdays because that was the night that I originally went into recovery back in 2015, and because I want to encourage others and remind myself that life is a journey, is best traveled by following the Lord's lead into freedom, joy, and peace. Although it might be a little scary to contemplate, I invite you to walk with me as I follow Christ by stepping beyond being a believer and making the continuous decision to live by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit each and every day. I don't call the podcast M.t. for Christ 24/7 for nothing. It is a subtle way of suggesting that we empty ourselves of our old ways of thinking and living and to agree with, uh, living according to who we are in Christ by not just believing what God's word says, but by applying it to how we think and live every day. You can call it walking in the Spirit, following Jesus, or walking on the path of Christian discipleship, but but what it comes down to is forming a constant conversational relationship with the Lord and obeying his directions and will for your life. God doesn't want us walking in darkness, and he doesn't want us condemning ourselves. He wants us to become the people he created us to be, people of hope and purpose, and who continually proclaim and demonstrate the truth of who Jesus is and what he can do in our lives when when we follow him. Of course, part of this journey is seeing the world according to how God sees it and recognizing that God's word reflects the truth of how things really are, and that knowing and living according to God's truth will set you free. As Christ said to the Jews who believed in him in John 8:31-32, if you abide in my word, you are my disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. So we want to be disciples, students, and followers of Jesus. Abide in God's word, live by it, and renounce the lies that have kept us in chains to be finally and forever free. And that brings us to our current series on self-deception, where we have decided to investigate some of the ways we deceive ourselves by walking through step 2, deception versus truth, of the Steps to Freedom in Christ to see what ways we may, we may have been deceived by the world and ourselves, and in what ways we have wrongly defended ourselves. So we present the 15th and last way you can be deceived by the world, although I'm sure there's plenty more, but that's all there are in the steps, 15. And the 15 one, the 15th one is believing that I must live up to worldly standards in order to feel good about myself. The scripture reference for this point is a long one. It's 1 Peter 2:1-12, and the Apostle Peter tells us, the Word of God tells us, so get rid of all evil behavior. Be done with all deceit, hypocrisy, jealousy, and all unkind speech. Like newborn babies, you must crave pure spiritual milk so that you will grow into a full experience of salvation. Cry out for this nourishment now that you have had a taste of the Lord's kindness. You are coming to Christ, who is the living cornerstone of God's temple. He was rejected by people, but he was chosen by God for great honor. And you are living stones that God is building into spiritual— into his spiritual temple. What's more, you are his holy priest through the Through the mediation of Jesus Christ, you offer spiritual sacrifices that please God. As the Scriptures say, I am placing a cornerstone in Jerusalem, chosen for great honor, and anyone who trusts in him will never be disgraced. Yes, you who trust him recognize the honor God has given him. But for those who reject him, the stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone. And he is the stone that makes people stumble, the rock that makes them fall. They stumble because they do not obey God's word, and so they meet the fate that was planned for them. But you are not like that, for you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God's very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light. Once you have— once you have had— once you had no identity as a people, now you are God's people. Once you received no mercy, now you have received God's mercy. Dear friends, I warn you as temporary residents and foreigners to keep away from worldly desires that wage war against your very souls. Be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors. That even if they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior, and they will give honor to God when he judges the world. The Apostle Peter makes a point of telling us the truth about who we are in Christ here, uh, that we have been made God's people, and the expectation is that we live like it by keeping away from worldly desires. And that includes a thorough examination of what the world says about the good life and seeing the lies behind what could be seen as good things. The American Dream usually is portrayed as having material and personal success. Some minimum standards of success would include a house, cars, money in the bank, a high position or title, a spouse, children, and vacations to all the right places. The American Dream promises that if you work hard enough and/or know the right people, you can have all the things in life that will make you happy. The problem with the dream is that it's a lie. Money can't buy you love or enduring happiness, and positions, titles, and relationships were never meant to be the means to fulfillment. All the things in the American dream can be seen as good. If we place our hopes on them alone, we will one day be disappointed because they don't satisfy us. And if we don't have peace with God through faith in Jesus, We will discover how empty and meaningless the promises of the American dream are when we realize we wasted our lives chasing after their pleasures and security that did nothing to secure our place in eternity. Meeting worldly standards will not make you happy because they— there is always more stuff to possess or consume, and in the end, those things will be taken away from you, and the only thing that will matter is your relationship with the Lord and how much of your time you invested in serving his kingdom rather than your own. Today's Bible verses come to us from the Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling by John G. Cruis. The— this morning's meditation verses come from the section on Affliction, Discipline, Chastisement, and Trials. And the, and the verses today are James 1:2-4 from the NASB. Uh, the word of God says, consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. Today's verses falls under the fourth point of our Counseling Reference Guides resource section on Affliction, Discipline, Chastisement, and Trials. That fourth point is God at times sends us trials to develop patience in us. Today's verses teach us that our trials in our lives have a purpose. They produce opportunities to test and practice your faith, to demonstrate that you really live according to God's ways and will not "curse God and die," no matter what circumstances you may face in life. Experience teaches us that some calamities can be avoided or minimized with proper planning and preparation. But trials are those situations in life that you can't escape. We can't go over, under, or around trials. The only way to get through trials is to endure them. But James assures us that because we have God with us, we can count it all joy. Because if we walk with the Lord, our trials will assist us in drawing closer to him and to develop endurance that we couldn't get any other way. Trust me, as someone who has suffered a fair, a fair share of losses and had some real trials in life, it is better to go through them with God than to try to do it on your own. And even though those trials were very painful, I had peace in them because the Lord was guiding me and strengthening me as I went through them. I now can remember them and rejoice over how the Lord led me through those dark valleys to emerge into a new, uh, glorious new life of light, love, joy, and peace. So keep walking and talking with God. He will show you the way throughout all of your life. And when a trial comes, he will empower you to persevere and to endure, so you too will one day count those dark episodes as times of victory and a reason to rejoice. As always, I invite all to go to mtforchrist.org, where I always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk. Today we continue sharing from A.W. Pink's The Holy Spirit, and today we're sharing from chapter 16, just the beginning of it, um, which is on the Spirit working faith. So if you want to see what the little introduction to that 16th chapter of The Holy Spirit Says. Go to mtforchrist.org and you'll see it at the end of today's blog post. Also at the end of today's blog post, you'll see, um, an encouragement to join our Victory Over the Darkness, The Bondage Breaker, and Freedom in Christ series of discipleship classes via the M.t. for Christ 24/7 podcast. It's on the podcast and it's also on our YouTube channel. So Those, those teachings are all based on the word of God and the work of Dr. Neil Anderson of Freedom in Christ Ministries, and they're life-transforming, or at least they are if you believe them and apply what they teach to your life. Um, it worked for me, so that's why I taught them at my local church in 2021 and decided to podcast them and share them. And even though it was a small class You know, some of these lessons have had, you know, over 1,000 views, which is shocking, but we offer them because they teach you all about who you are in Christ and how to be set free from your personal spiritual conflicts through the Steps to Freedom in Christ. So we recommend those, and as always, we recommend a life of authentic Christian faith. A life of spiritual, uh, you know, a spiritual journey of Christian discipleship. And that— and we suggest that, you know, a daily spiritual practice, uh, that would include, you know, Bible study and prayer among other things, um, like good works and solitude and silence, spiritual disciplines. Um, so we, we recommend that, and we encourage Bible study, obviously, because we, we share our weekly Bible study that we do with Arthur and Susanna Sincotti, and those are available on the blog as well. We invite— well, on the podcast and the YouTube channel as well. We invite you to check those out. If you need a Bible study, you can join ours by searching for Bible Study with the Sincottis. Well, it's Thursday. It's Thursday. Yeah, I knew that. Um, so it's just 2 days away from vacation, so So I'm looking forward to getting through the work day and through tomorrow, but, uh, we're going to take it one step at a time. And before we do any of that, we're going to pray. Lord God, Heavenly Father, thank you for another day in your kingdom. Lord, we thank you so much for all that you do for us. We thank you for setting us free, for showing us the truth and leading us through all those trials in life. And Lord, we just pray for you to go before us today, and we just We pray for you to also bless anyone who's listening or reading today's message. We pray for you to come alongside them and their prayer request and their walk of faith, because Lord, we all need your help and we're asking for it. We need you to show us the things you want us to see and lead us into the things you would have us to do, because all we want to do now is represent you and your kingdom and to do what— to do what you would have us do. So, Lord, we just, um, we thank you, we praise you, we love you, and we pray all these things in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.