People Of The Lie

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. We are in the second week of our series called Live No Lies. We are talking, as I mentioned last week, about spiritual warfare, which you've probably heard about before, but often I think it's, well, speculative with the way people describe it. Hyperbolic, paranoid. It almost markets on fear-mongering. You know, it uses fear to try to motivate you. And, yeah, there are things to be afraid of in this world or to be in awe of, but not necessarily in the way that it's described by some. So today we're looking at the fact that spiritual warfare has much more to do with just deception, with lies that the devil speaks, that our flesh, our desires, want to believe and the world celebrates. So that's kind of the unholy trio that we're working through in this series. Today we're going to be talking about people of the lie. Scott Peck wrote a seminal book decades ago called People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil. And in that, he states how adhering to truth is sometimes very costly to do, but it's really the only way to live sanely and within reality, to hold on to truth even when it works against you. So often people, though, we all tend to choose comfort. We all tend to choose what we believe is easy. We all tend to want to believe what we want to believe, right? And that often goes down a path toward buying into certain lies rather than believing in the truth. And we become, rather than people who lie, we can become people of the lie. And so he asserts that that's how people turn towards evil, by living out lies. And the more entrenched they get into the lies that they live, the more egotistical, the more narcissistic, the more their relationships are based on mere human transactions, and the more they will end up with a shadow of the reality of the situation. They end up doing their own thing, trying to have everybody orbit around their lives, becoming the center of their own little universe. And that leads down to a black hole of destruction. Now, I'm speaking about all this when we look at, now, the letter of 1 John. So last week we were in the Gospel of John, and today we're in the letter of 1 John, where in it John tells us that if we sin, if we lie, we're only deceiving ourselves. God is not fooled, and usually many others aren't either. So John sets out two paths in the work that we're going to talk about today, how he talks about what is walking in the truth, that is, walking in the light, or walking in the darkness of lies. This is the message we've heard from him and proclaimed to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, I'm writing these things to you so that you may not sin, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world. So in this text we're going to look at these three points today, what it means to walk in the darkness of lies, walking in the truth that is in the light, and how do you move from lies to the truth, okay? Make sense? Pretty straightforward. So walking in the darkness of lies. Have you ever noticed that, I think I really noticed this when I lived in Baton Rouge and went down to New Orleans, that things that happen at night, people seem to go wild at night, at least in New Orleans. Now I wasn't necessarily, we never went on to Bourbon Street during the night time because it was just too much. Maybe you've been there, maybe you've been around some of those situations, but what's wild about it is people think under the cover of darkness, whatever they do, that anonymity, that they can get away with a lot more. Most crime happens at night, not just in the broad light of day, so that we can hide behind it. I think that's why John uses partly that metaphor of darkness to describe how lies work. They're cover-ups. They're trying to hide behind something. And when we lie, we think we're kind of pulling it off to others. But I think John also uses darkness because in the end, as he says in our text, when we lie, when we sin, we are just deceiving ourselves. That is, we're in the dark about our own condition. So John uses a couple of different Greek words in this text, which I found pretty fascinating. I know, here we go, Greek again. The first one is pseudomai. ...