But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,”
so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Heb 3:13

We all think we are immune to deception.

Well, that’s the nature of deception, isn’t it?

• it’s never going to happen to me
• I’m too mature to fall for that
• I’m too smart not to see the pitfalls
• I can handle it, it won’t capture me

And it almost seems that as soon as we think we are immune that BAM, we get sucked in! Why is that?

Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil,
prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. 1 Peter 5:8

Because we have an adversary (one who is opposed to us in all things) who is just waiting to pounce. He’s waiting with his lies and half-truths. He’s looking to tempt us into stepping off God’s path of righteousness into a path that leads to destruction. He whispers boastful things to our minds that make us think we are stronger than we are. He whispers things that tempt us to jealousy or envy or anger or lust. He is looking for every opportunity we give him to pounce on us when we are not walking in the full armor of God.

Satan is not our only enemy!

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes
and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. 1 John 2:16

Years ago there was the expression, “the devil made me do it.” Well, in fact, the choices we make to sin are all our own. Satan may have helped push us along toward sin, but the final choice is ours.

We have our own enemy in the lust of our flesh.

Our flesh isn’t, in and of itself, sinful. It is weak. But it also is where lust lives. When the lust of the flesh is left unchecked, not brought under the control of the Holy Spirit, we are ripe for the picking of deception. When we don’t walk according to the Spirit, we walk according to the flesh, which (as I said before) is weak. The flesh has no strength to stand against temptations. And so it doesn’t. And we walk right along the path it follows.

The deception we fall into here is thinking, “it’s not SOO bad.”

We allow compromise into our lives. When we are fully surrendered to the Spirit, there are some things we would never even consider doing. Not because we want to walk from sin as far as we can, but because we want to live our lives holding tight to Jesus! When we let go of His hand, we begin to seek our own path instead of following His. And we let the deception of compromise rule our hearts.

• having all those glasses of wine at night is no problem, I’m not really drunk
• it was just some innocent flirtation, it’s not really sin
• it was just a joke, I wasn’t really gossiping

The list can go on and on… areas where we compromise. Whenever we think “it’s not really sin,” that should be a clue to us to beware! Sin is crouching at the door!

We have our own enemy in the lust of our eyes.

In a world of visual stimulation and pop-up ads, we are bombarded with temptations. But I’m not just talking nudity or sex. There are commercials of things we just need to have. There are lures to draw us into discontentment in what we have (or don’t have) in our lives. The newest toy, the newest game, the newest fad.

All of these things are geared toward the lust of our eyes: envy. Wanting what we see, wanting what others have, complaining about what we don’t have, thinking that having more would make us happy and then we’d have enough.

Like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, we think “would it spoil some vast eternal plan, if I were a wealthy man?”

This is often a subtle thing, this discontentment, this lust of the eyes. And again we are often deceived into thinking that we are only being realistic, only living in the real world. We are not, afterall, wanting a Mercedes or a Rollex. We just want a little more than we have.

Paul tells us that he has learned to be content in all circumstances: both in want and in plenty. But if we are not walking fully surrendered to the Spirit, we reject Paul’s comments as not pertinent for the modern world. Again, the deceptiveness of sin (in the lust of our eyes) has blinded us to truth. We have once again let go of our Lord and begun to walk our own path while convincing ourselves we are right beside Him.

We have our own enemy in the boastful pride of life.

And here, I think, is where we lie to ourselves that we are doing fine with God when we are walking in unrepentant sin. We leave humility behind and pick up the arrogance and pride of thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think. We begin to see ourselves as important, as invincible, as above all the rest. We become puffed up, vain, self-centered.

I have had people actually tell me that they are closer to God than they’ve ever been. That their walk with Him is really fantastic. That they get all kinds of stuff out of their time in the Word and God speaks to them all the time in prayer, giving affirmation of their spiritual maturity and godly condition. All the while in the middle of sexual adultery! Some have even recognized they were in sin but were deceived into thinking that God was blessing them!

This scares me more than anything else!

We all have in sin in our lives somewhere. Generally it is sin that we are working to gain victory over (we walk and fall and get up to walk again) or it is sin that God hasn’t yet revealed to us. But sin that God has brought conviction to yet we reject that and refuse to repent… this is a very scary place for a believer to be. And when, on top of that, we deceive ourselves into thinking that GOD is OK with it… YIKES!

How do we deal with the deceitfulness of sin?

I wish I had some great magic words here that would keep us free from this deception. But, alas, I have none. I do, however, have just 2 thoughts of encouragement.

Stick close to Jesus.

Seek out honest and true saints.

Easier said than done, you say? Yeah, quite probably. But when we drop all pretenses at the feet of Jesus and, in humility, take up His cross and follow, we have a much greater chance of seeing the deception around us and rejecting it.

And, as the Hebrews verse in the beginning tells us, if we encourage one another day after day in the Truths of the Word then we will be sharpening one another with the Sword of the Spirit which IS Truth.

I pray for each of us today that we cling to Truth. That we seek out the deception in our lives and replace it with Truth. That we reject the lies and look wholly to Jesus.

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All Scripture quotations are taken from the NASB.
Unless otherwise indicated, photos from pixaby.com