Do You Think You Are Someone or Something that You are
Not? - Self-Deception Series 19 – Purity 1108
Purity 1108 07/31/2023 Purity 1108 Podcast
Purity 1108 on YouTube:
Good morning,
Today’s photo of a skyward view of a large palm tree
somewhere on Isabela Island comes to us from Mark Germain who shared this scene
on social media back on July 5th during his epic vacation to the
Galapagos Islands, Ecuador.
Well, It’s Monday and I share today’s palm tree as a
visual proclamation of official start of my two week vacation! While I won’t be
taking a vacation from the blog or podcast, I won’t be at my day job for two
weeks and will be hitting the road in a few hours to begin the road trip to
Erie, Pennsylvania, with my wife and 4 out of the 5 of her children (the 5th,
Rachel, is on active duty for the USMC in Japan), So I would appreciate your prayers for safe travels
and the Lord’s peace as this will be the largest extended gathering of this
cast of characters from our “blended family” as we will be spending the next 5
nights together as a group, for the first time, bouncing around the coast of Lake
Erie.
Although I use the term “blended family”, I will
keep it real by saying that we are all still “separate and unbalanced” and getting
to know one and are not quite and may never be “fully blended” in a typical
sense. Is there anything typical about a “blended family”? I mean, we are dealing with 2 separate households
that an hour apart, (5 if you count the ex’s current residences or properties),
and 7 “kids”, spread out in age from 23
to 14 years, who are miles apart in terms of personalities, and who are currently
spread out across two continents in physical distance. So I’m not trying to tell you that this is the
new Brady Bunch or anything like it because I don’t even think Alice the Maid
could tidy up our situation into a neat little package!
But when TammyLyn and I realized that we loved one
another we decided to marry, love one another now, do our best to love and
serve one another’s families, and to meet the responsibilities that come from
our complicated lives. So we have put
the Lord at the center of our marriage and rely on His guidance to make us the
people He created us to be and to show His love to our loved ones the best we
can. We are just two Christians with complicated
situations who are trying to do things the Lord’s way the best we can. And we freely admit that we are a “work in
progress” that needs all the mercy, grace, guidance, strength and love that the
Lord can impart.
So I’m not trying to tell you that we are something
that we are not.
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 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.
So we present the third of the “Ways to Deceive Yourself”:
3. Thinking I am something or someone I’m really
not.
The scripture reference for this point is:
Galatians 6:3 (NKJV)
3 For if anyone thinks
himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.
Today’s item from the Steps to Freedom in Christ challenges us to honestly look at ourselves and to ask, “Am I really the person I think I am or am I just deceiving myself?”
Now this is a complicated issue because although self-examination can lead us to discover the lies that we have believed it can also be used by the enemy to sow seeds of doubt and condemnation to make us “unstable in all our ways”.
Satan would readily accuse us of not being “real Christians” in the first place after all and would happily tempt us to believe that we have “delusions of grandeur” when we seek to claim our new identities in Christ. Satan would be the first to tell us that we are “nothing” or that we are “someone or something” that we are really not. He would be the first to tell you that Pride is a sin if it meant he could cause you to condemn yourself and keep you from experiencing your freedom in Christ or from finding your purpose in God’s kingdom. Or he could tempt you into exalting yourself into believing you are a “Very important person” who is too busy, necessary, or special to humbly follow the Lord. The enemy doesn’t care if he knocks you down or lifts you up and will push you to either extreme of pride to make you believe that you are someone or something you are not.
So, we have to be balanced and agree with what God says about us in His word and avoid the equal and opposite pitfalls of conceit and low self esteem that the enemy would push us towards.
Needless to say this requires wisdom and discernment. We have to accept our new identities in Christ and recognize and remember what we are and where we came from before coming to God. We have to try to see the truth that we are a combination of our histories, attributes, and talents of our pre-Christ existence and our new spiritual inheritance. We don’t deny who we were, but we recognize that we are no longer the same after coming to Jesus and that much of what may have defined us before may not be a part of who God is calling us to be.
Walking in the Spirit is all about living according to God’s truth and accepting our new lives and purposes in Christ and growing into our destinies in the kingdom of God. So we must endeavor to see the lies that we believed about ourselves, renounce them, and agree with what God says about us and what He is calling us to be. We don’t want to be “puffed up” or to think too lowly of ourselves. We want to live according to who we really are now in Christ.
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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 verses come from the section on Affliction, Discipline,
Chastisement, & Trials.
Psalm 119:75-76 (NASB)
75 I know, O LORD, that Your judgments are righteous,
And that in faithfulness You have afflicted me.
76 O may Your lovingkindness
comfort me, According to Your word to Your servant.
Today’s
verses fall under the fifth point of our counseling reference guide resource’s
section on Affliction,
Discipline, Chastisement, & Trials
5. “The psalmist was thankful for
affliction for it taught him to keep God’s precepts.
Today’s verses are the third of a trio of verse couplets from psalm 119 that our reference guide uses to illustrate this point.
This last verse couplet a keen insight from the psalmist that reveals that “the God of the Old Testament” wasn’t just a “law giving – judging – punishing” God, that He is sometimes made out to be, as the psalmist testifies that his affliction was done in faithfulness by a God who was loving and kind!
This paradox – that God could righteously afflict us as a means to cause us to grow – is an ongoing theme or principle in scripture. After all Jesus had to die in order for us to live, so likewise the Lord may have to use “growing pains” to take us from death to life and from childlike faith to a mature disciple of Jesus Christ.
Just as a loving parent will chastise a wayward child to keep them safe and to show them the right way to live, or how a surgeon will cause pain to heal, the Lord may bring the trials of our affliction to our lives to mature us in our faith, to see the wisdom of His ways, or to know His enduring love that will never leave us or forsake us.
As disciples of Jesus, we should know that suffering can have a divine purpose and we should seek the Lord’s wisdom, presence, comfort and lovingkindness when trials or affliction comes our way.
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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
16 - The Spirit Working Faith
How the
Spirit Works Saving Faith
When the soul has sunk into the mire of
despair no human power is sufficient to lift it out and set it upon the Rock.
Now that the renewed sinner perceives that not only are all his past actions
transgressions of God’s Law, but that his very heart is desperately
wicked—polluting his very prayers and tears of contrition—he feels that he must
inevitably perish. If he hears the Gospel, he tells himself that its glad
tidings are not for such an abandoned wretch as he; if he reads the Word he is
assured that only its fearful denunciations and woes are his legitimate portion. If godly friends remind him that Christ
came to seek and to save that which was lost, he supposes they are ignorant of
the extremities of his case—should they urge him to believe or cast himself on
the mercy of God in Christ, they do but mock him in his misery, for he now
discovers that he can no more do this of himself than he can grasp the sun in
his hands. All self-help, all human aid, is useless.
In those in whom the
Spirit works faith, He first blows down the building of human pretensions,
demolishes the walls which were built with the untempered mortar of man’s own
righteousness, and destroys the foundations which were laid in self-flattery
and natural sufficiency, so that they are entirely shut up to Christ and God’s
free grace. Once awakened, instead of
fondly imagining I am the man whom God will save, I am now convinced that I am
the one who must be damned. So far from concluding I have any ability to even
help save myself, I now know that I
am “without strength” and no more able to receive Christ as my Lord and Savior
than I can climb up to Heaven. Evident it is, then, that a mighty supernatural
power is needed if I am to come to Him who “justifieth the ungodly.” None but the
all-mighty Spirit can lift a stricken soul out of the gulf of despair and
enable him to believe to the saving of his soul.
To God the Holy
Spirit be the glory of His sovereign grace in working faith in the heart of the
writer and of each Christian reader. You have attained peace and joy in
believing, but have you thanked that peace-bringer—“the Holy Spirit” (Rom.
15:13)? All that “joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8) and that
peace which “passeth all understanding” (Phil. 4:7)—to whom is it ascribed? The
Holy Spirit. It is particularly
appropriated to Him: “peace and joy in the
Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17 and cf. 1 Thess. 1:6). Then render unto Him the
praise which is His due.[1]
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Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the
mt4christ247 podcast!
at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts
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These teachings are also available on the
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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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and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities the
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Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship