Full Disclosure vs. Being Vulnerable in a Healthy Way–
Self-Deception Series 33 - Purity 1122
Purity 1122 08/16/2023 Purity 1122 Pocast
Purity 1122 on YouTube:
Good morning,
Today’s photo of a mammoth “hump” of rock and sand looming
over a dry desert like landscape under blue skies comes to us from Jodi Mussmacher-Osuch
who shared this scene from her trip to Palisade Colorado yesterday on social
media. But don’t let the dry-looking
grass fool you, Palisade is part of the Grand Junction Metropolitan Statistical
area and is known for its wine vineyards and peach orchards and its 182-day
growing season and average of 78 percent sunshine help make Palisade the Peach
Capital of Colorado. It may be dry in Palisade,
but the farmers apparently know how to utilize their situation to prosper and unlike
its Rocky Mountain high neighbors Palisades, only sees 14 inches of snow per
year. From someone in upstate New York, who can sometimes expect to see 14 inches
fall from the sky in one snowstorm, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal at
all.
Well, It’s Wednesday and I share today’s photo as a
visual reminder that we have arrived at “hump day” once again and today I am
looking forward to sharing a little bit of my story where the Lord looked at my
broken condition and bondages and decided that He could make the best of my bad
situation and turn things around to see the fruit of the Spirit grow in my
life. But God is patient, and He wasn’t
just going to drag me kicking and screaming into His kingdom and the abundant
life He wanted for me. When the time was
right and when I was ready, He showed me the truth of the gospel of Jesus
Christ that saved my soul, and later showed me that He had even more joy for me
to experience by going into recovery and repentance on the path of Chrisitan
discipleship.
So the Celebrate Freedom Growth Group at Starpoint
Church meets again tonight and after my 2 week vacation, I am looking forward
to seeing some familiar faces and a few new ones as I joyfully received the
reports that some newcomers joined our group while I was away. God is doing something with our group. He is
showing others what He has shown me. I’m not sure what the others are seeing of
course but I know that when I went into recovery I was shown that my Christianity
meant something. It meant I was part of God’s
kingdom and as a member of His royal family it meant I was one of “His people”
and I was called to live and act like it.
I was called to follow Jesus and be conformed to His image – to leave my
former darkness behind and walk in the Light as He is the Light of the
world. Perhaps most importantly God
showed me that my hopes to be like Jesus wasn’t some vain aspiration, my
freedom and victory was actually possible.
While I could never have done it on my own, I learned a little bit about
what it meant when Jesus said, “All things are possible with God”. I never
thought I could give up drugs and alcohol, and frankly I didn’t want to because
I thought it was impossible, but God showed me that when I trusted in Him to
help me He would be faithful to give me the strength and guidance to overcome
and when I decided to walk with Him He showed me that He would never leave me
or forsake me.
So I took that step of faith into Christian recovery
back in 2015 and I have been walking and talking with God into progressive
freedom ever since and so I have made it my life’s purpose to tell others to
put their faith in Jesus and to follow Him with the way they live their
lives. It has been an amazing adventure
so far and I look forward to seeing how God will move in the lives of the
people who come and keep coming to the Celebrate Freedom Growth Group at Starpoint
Church.
But I’m not going to lie to you. The path to freedom
in Christ was never promised to be an easy one and it must be freely chosen and
pursued. You have to love the Lord to follow Him and that is something that may
not be clear to most Christians and so we try to encourage and instruct them to
understand that they must “believe it to receive it” – our victory comes down
to faith in God to help us – and that our relationship with God is a love relationship
– we do His will because we love Him and don’t want any thing to get in way of
the harmony of our relationship with Him.
In the final analysis, we choose God over the world, the flesh, and the
devil. If I had to give one final instruction to encourage people in their
faith walk, I might echo the words of Jesus in
Matthew
6:33 (NKJV) where He said:
33 But
seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall
be added to you.
Speaking of final instructions, 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 Vs. Truth,
of the Steps to Freedom in Christ to see what ways we may have been deceived by
“the world” and ourselves and in what ways we have wrongly defended
ourselves.
While we have reached the end of this series on
Self-Deception by going through all 31 points of the ways we can be deceived by the
world, ourselves, and the ways we have wrongly defended ourselves. I have decided to conclude the series by
sharing the closing instructions that immediately follow those three sections
on the ways we can be deceived,
After we have confessed all the ways we have been deceived
and prayed to receive God’s forgiveness, Neil Anderson writes:
“The wrong ways we have employed to shield ourselves
from pain and rejection are often deeply ingrained in our lives. You may need
additional discipling/counseling To learn how to allow Jesus to be your rock,
fortress, deliverer, and refuge (see Psalm 18:1-2).”
Psalm 18:1-2 (NKJV) which says:
1 I will love You, O LORD, my strength.
2 The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; My God, my
strength, in whom I will trust; My shield and the horn of my salvation, my
stronghold.
Anderson continues by writing:
“The more you learn how loving, powerful, and
protective God is, the more you'll be likely to trust Him.
The more you realize how much God unconditionally
loves and accepts you, the more you'll be released to be open, honest, and
vulnerable (in a healthy way) before God and others.”
I love how Anderson stresses our relationship with
the Lord and how our faith comes down to trusting God and being open, honest,
and vulnerable before Him and others.
Anderson instructs us to be open, honest, and
vulnerable with others in a healthy way, mind you. While God knows everything about us and
accepts us completely knowing our whole story, others may not be able to handle
the truth and while we are to be open, honest, and vulnerable before the Lord,
we should be wise and discerning with what we share with others.
Some people are not trustworthy, and it would be
unwise and unnecessary to tell absolutely everything about us to absolutely
everyone.
Even though I pride myself on providing “full
disclosure” by speaking the truth in love and being as transparent as I can be,
I understand that there are details about my past and present life that are
nobody’s business but my own and while God knows about them I will only share
the details of my life that I feel will be helpful to others, not cause others
undue harm, pain, or embarrassment, and will be received with reverence and
respect.
Of course, I know that when I trust people with the
details of my life I run the risk of someone wittingly or unwittingly divulging
the things I have said in confidence, but if that happens, I’ll own it and do my
best to explain how the things I did before coming to Christ and before I went
into recovery were done by a person who no longer exists or who was woefully
ignorant of the ways of living according to the word of God, and that while I
do my best to follow Jesus, I am still a work in progress. But I don’t take sin lightly, don’t believe
in the need to relapse, and am progressively learning to fully surrender and
conform my thoughts and lifestyle to that of a disciple of Jesus Christ.
So as far as it concerns me, I try to be wise and
vulnerable, in a healthy way, with the things I share about my life. Jesus called us to be wise as serpents and
innocent of doves and had his own inner circle of disciples (John, Peter, and
James) that were afforded special access to the details of His life because of
His trust in them, and we should be wise in the way we grant access to the
details of our lives through our relationships.
Some people won’t be walking with us for long. Some
are tares among the wheat. Some are false converts, and the enemy would love to
use them to cause strife and division in the body of Christ by openly telling
sensitive things told in confidence. So
be wise and discerning in what you tell to whom. You don’t have to share all the dirty details
of your story to tell others how the Lord set you free and even though we want
to be open, honest, and vulnerable before others we have to consider others too
when we want to be transparent in a healthy way.
I wrote more than I expected with my comments on
Anderson’s final instructions of Step 2 of the Steps to Freedom in Christ. Can you blame me? The man’s instructions are based on the word
of God and are “gold”. So rather than pressing
ahead and sharing the rest of these final instructions here today, we will
share them tomorrow. So our current
series on self-deception will “continue to be concluded” tomorrow featuring
Anderson’s comments on the twisting of the concept of faith and truth itself.
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For
those who want more evidence for Christianity than my simple encouragements provide,
I offer apologist, Frank Turek’s website, https://crossexamined.org/ .
Today’s
Bible verse comes to us from “The Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling” By
John G. Kruis.
(
While Bible verses on various topics of Counseling can be found with a quick
google search, we encourage you to purchase this resource to support the late
author’s work. (https://www.amazon.com/Quick-Scripture-Reference-Counseling-Kruis-ebook/dp/B00CIUJZT2?ref_=ast_author_dp )
This
morning’s meditation verse comes from the section on Affliction, Discipline,
Chastisement, & Trials.
2 Corinthians 1:8-9
(NIV2011)
8 We do not want you to be
uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the
province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to
endure, so that we despaired of life itself.
9 Indeed, we felt we had
received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on
ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.
Today’s
verse fall under the nineteenth point of our counseling reference guide
resource’s section on Affliction, Discipline, Chastisement, & Trials
19. Paul says that he suffered under great stress so that he might learn to rely on God more.
Today’s verse gives us a picture of a Christian giving “full disclosure” and realizing that his trials had the purpose of causing His faith to grow as His desperate situation caused the Apostle Paul to rely more on God.
When the going gets tough, the Christian relies on God.
While there is a measure of truth to, English political theorist, Algernon Sidney’s sentiment that “God helps those who help themselves”, that phrase is not a Bible verse. Although used by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack, that phrase is not in scripture.
While man can do much and is expected to act on his own behalf in following the Lord’s will, scripture indicates that we are to rely on God. I am sharing a link Open Bible.info’s “100 Bible verses about Rely on God” on the blog today (https://www.openbible.info/topics/rely_on_god) in case you need to be reminded that it is the Lord we must trust in.
From that list of verses I like:
Jeremiah 17:5-6 (NKJV)
5 Thus says the LORD: "Cursed is the man who
trusts in man And makes flesh his strength, Whose heart departs from the LORD.
6 For he shall be like a
shrub in the desert, And shall not see when good comes, But shall inhabit the
parched places in the wilderness, In a salt land which is not
inhabited.
Thus says the Lord here guys – That’s God telling us this! Trusting in man or making our flesh our strength is a departure from God and results in experiencing suffering.
And in today’s verse, Paul was telling
it like it is by admitting to his great suffering that caused him to despair of
life itself. He thought he was dead, and it sounded like he wanted to die! But
he survived, and he realized that suffering caused him to rely on the One who
raises the dead, the Lord God Almighty.
So do what you can to fix problems and help others, but never put your whole trust in your own strength, cunning, or abilities, we are to rely on the Lord and only when we trust and follow Him can we truly see what a good, good Father and mighty God He is.
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As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.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 The Holy Spirit By A.W. Pink.
As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage you all to purchase A.W. Pink’s books for your own
private study and to support his work. This resource is available online
for $0.99 (https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Spirit-Arthur-Pink-Collection-ebook/dp/B008CM5292/ref=sr_1_3?crid=AHKAQOM39CTN&keywords=a.w.+pink+the+holy+spirit&qid=1684376225&sprefix=a.w.+pink+the+holy+spirit+%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-3)
A.W. Pink’s The Holy Spirit
20 - The Spirit Cleansing
The
Awful Warning
Our text, then, belongs to the Lord’s own
people, who “are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh” (Rom.
8:12); rather are they “debtors” to Christ (who redeemed them) to live for His
glory, “debtors” to the Holy Spirit (who regenerated them) to submit themselves
to His absolute control. But if an apprehension of their high privilege (to
please their Savior) and a sense of their bounded duty (to Him who has brought
them from death unto life) fail to move them unto godly living, perhaps an
apprehension of their awful danger may influence them thereto: “For if ye live
after the flesh, ye shall die”—die spiritually, die eternally, for “life” and
“death” in Romans always signifies far more than natural life and death.
Moreover, to restrict “ye shall die” to physical dissolution would be quite
pointless, for that experience is
shared by sinners and saints alike.
It is to be noted
that the Apostle did not say, “If ye have
lived after the flesh ye shall die,” for everyone of God’s children did so
before He delivered them from the power of darkness and translated them into
the kingdom of His dear Son. No, it is, “If ye live after the flesh,” now. It
is a continual course, a steady perseverance in the same, which is in view. To
“live after the flesh” means to persistently follow the inclinations and
solicitations of inward corruption, to be wholly under the dominion of the
depravity of fallen human nature. To “live after the flesh” is to be in love
with sin, to serve it contentedly, to make self-gratification the trade and
business of life. It is by no means limited to the grosser forms of wickedness
and crime, but includes as well the refinement, morality, and religiousness of
the best of men, who yet give God no real place in their hearts and lives. And
the wages of sin is death.
“For if ye live after
the flesh, ye shall die.” That is a rule to which there is no exception. No
matter what your experience or profession, no matter how certain of your
conversion or how orthodox your belief: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked:
for whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap
corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life
everlasting” (Gal. 6:7, 8). O the madness of men in courting eternal death
rather than leave their sinful pleasures and live a holy life. O the folly of
those who think to reconcile God and sin, who imagine they can please the
flesh, and yet be happy in eternity notwithstanding. “How much she hath
glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her”
(Rev. 18:7)—so much as the flesh is gratified, so much is the soul endangered.
Will you, my reader, for a little temporal satisfaction run the hazard of God’s
eternal wrath? Heed this solemn warning, fellow—Christian: God means what He
says, “IF ye live after the flesh, ye
shall die.”[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the
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at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts
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Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
to be encouraged.
My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
encouragement via her Ask Seek Knock blog (https://tammylynask.blogspot.com/ ), her
Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on
Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)
For those who require the assistance of a Deeper
Walk International Prayer Minister to experience healing or your freedom in
Christ, I highly recommend Christy Edge’s Life on the Edge Freedom Prayer
Ministry. You can schedule a session by going to : https://cedge216.wixsite.com/life-on-the-edge
“The views, opinions, and commentary of this
publication are those of the author, M.T. Clark, only, and do not purport to
reflect the opinions or views of any of the photographers, artists, ministries,
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Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship
[1]
Arthur Walkington Pink, The Holy Spirit
(Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, n.d.).