The Father Of Lies

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning. Welcome to Thrive. Christ is risen, hallelujah. He is risen indeed, hallelujah. I thought I'd catch you off guard, but I'm glad I didn't. The resurrection is still going on. Actually, every Sunday is a little Easter. I don't know if you know that. Every Sunday. Why we worship on Sunday? The resurrection of Jesus Christ, the ultimate reality, God's ultimate plan, not just for Him, but for all of us, that through His death and resurrection, we will be united with Him, and we will one day be glorified with Him, and all of creation be renewed. That's the ultimate reality, and that has changed everything. Even every Sunday, when we worship, why we worship on Sunday rather than Saturday or any other day of the week specifically, is that the resurrection has changed everything. The resurrection has changed everything. Today, we're going to embark on, hopefully, a very impactful series called Live No Lies. Today, we embark on it. We're going to be talking, in a sense, then, on spiritual warfare, which, don't think tanks or guns, not even psy-ops or any of that stuff, but rather spiritual warfare. I know often, spiritual warfare, sadly, has, if you hear about it within the Christian community in America, is very speculative at times. It's hyperbolic. It's even paranoid and fear-mongering. We're not going there, okay? But there is a battle. We are dealing with battles. We are, as I think St. Augustine said, we're really desiring creatures that rationalize our desires. Did you catch that? We aren't rational beings. We're rationalizing. Have you ever noticed that? I did it as a kid often. You come up with ways to get out of things. Do you ever do that? Come up with some way to get out of something, like a chore? Maybe, yeah. So, we're going to be looking at this in a series. Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedient when your obedience is complete. Now, the word there for argument that's used in this text is logismos, which, if you can see in it, you get the word logic from it. But it's not about logic, per se. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament talks about this word as the rationalizing of our defensive posture to kind of push God out of our lives. I think that's about the... And they describe it like the Tower of Babel. The people of God came to... or they weren't people of God, but God's created order. The people came together to rise up against God and try to take his place. And that is what's behind this word. It's really where you probably have heard somebody tell you this before. Who are you to tell me what to do? Did you ever say that to your parents? Not if you wanted to stay alive, right? Well, I know a few teenagers who have said that to their parents. Anybody want to fess up to that? Nobody wants to fess up to that. Have you ever said it to somebody else? Who are you to tell me what to do? Have you ever had anybody say that to you? Who are you to tell me what to do? Yeah. Lisa and I, we lived for the first few years of our marriage, seven years, actually, out in California in the Central Valley. And there, we noticed the culture was kind of interesting. It was this kind of combination of, don't tell me what to do or how to live, but I'm going to tell you how to do it. And we were kind of like, how do you get... But it seems that's kind of the human nature. Don't tell me what... I'm going to tell you. So, that's what we're getting at. That kind of logic. It's kind of the logic, honestly, of an addict. If you've ever talked with somebody who's stuck in an addiction of any type, there's such a rationalizing of why it has to be the way it is, or the excuses that are used in a variety of ways, and how destructive it is for that individual. The very help that they need, the very love that you want to offer, they tend to push away. So, like our opening video, we are going to be looking at this trio of forces that are at work within this world. That is, the devil, the world, and our sinful self. The devil with his deceptive ideas, his lies that come toward us, that play off of and cater to our disordered desires. And then you've got the world just reinforcing and kind of high-fiving you when you go in that direction. So today we're looking at a passage where Jesus spells it out pretty plainly in John 8. As John Marcoma writes, Jesus sees our primary war against the devil as a fight to believe truth over lies. That's the real power. That's the real power. For us to believe and then to live out lies. So let's read John 8, verses 31-47. So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, If you ...