MAY 18, 2022
3 People That Are Lying to You
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In life, a large amount of our time and effort is devoted to deciding what is true and what is false.
Whether we’re watching the news, scrolling through social media, or just going about our everyday lives, we’re constantly deciding what is true, what is false, and therefore what information we should use to make decisions.
The problem is that we are deceived easily and often. Many people are lying to you in your life, and you are accepting those lies as the truth.
When I think of deception and lies, I think of The Matrix.
If you’ve never seen The Matrix, it’s largely focused on the ideas of truth and lies, reality and illusion. There’s a great scene where one of the main characters, Morpheus, offers Neo, the main character, the choice between a blue pill and a red pill. If he takes the blue pill, he can go back to his life, forget everything about his reality being false, and go on as if everything is real. If he takes the red pill, his eyes are opened to the reality of what is really going on around him.
We need the red pill desperately.
Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Ephesians 6:11-12
See, according to the Bible, we are kind of like Neo. We are born into this world not seeing the full picture. We aren’t aware of the spiritual war that is constantly going on around us and if you don’t become aware of it, you will fall victim to people lying to you and deceiving you.
Today, I want to focus on three different people that lie to you and deceive you and how you can fight against them in your walk with Jesus.
Liar #1: The Enemy and His Forces Are Lying to You
This should come as no surprise. Oftentimes when Christians or people, in general, talk about being deceived, they talk about Satan. After all, he is the father of lies and he is the first deceiver that we even see in the Bible in the garden.
He caused the fall to take place in the garden and he continues to lie to you today to bring about sin in your life.
The thing about Satan is that his top enemy is unity. Think about it – everything that he does is aimed at causing disunity – in the church, in marriages, in friendships; the devil’s schemes are always aimed at disrupting unity.
Why is this the case? We actually get insight into this in 1 Peter 5.
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
Satan is specifically compared here to a lion.
Think National Geographic here – how do lions hunt their prey?
I’m not sure if you knew this about zebras, but their black stripes actually play a very important role in their survival in the wild.
See, when a lion hunts a pack of zebra, it waits until one wanders away from the pack. This is because when the zebra are all moving amongst one another, their stripes all blur together in the lion’s vision and they can’t pick out one from the rest.
This is what Peter compares Satan to here in 1 Peter 5.
Satan is like a lion because, to attack Christians effectively, he has to wait for them to wander away from the pack.
Satan knows that truly unified Christians render him powerless because the power of the body of Christ is much higher than his own. Instead, he has to pick us off one by one as we wander away from the rest of the church when he lies to us.
This is why he attacks unity specifically – to get us on our own.
To be even more clear about it, check out Peter’s suggestion in the very next verse:
But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world.
1 Peter 5:9
Peter not only suggests resisting the devil, but he specifically suggests resisting the devil by being unified. He says to remember and know that your brothers and sisters in Christ are going through the same thing – there’s unity.
If Satan had a kryptonite, it would be unity.
In Paul’s words:
But one whom you forgive anything, I forgive also; for indeed what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, I did it for your sakes in the presence of Christ, so that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes.
2 Corinthians 2:10-11
Paul’s point is simple – unity fights against the schemes and lies of the devil. Things like forgiveness, understanding, and friendship are essential tools that we need to use to fight against the lies of Satan.
Otherwise, if Satan gets you by yourself, he can convince you of all kinds of things in his lying to you. He can convince you of lies about your identity, purpose, worth, and everything else that makes you, you.
Yet when you are one with the body of Christ, you have other godly people around you who will support you and keep you grounded in the truth.
Liar #2: Other People Are Lying to You
The second main source of lies in your life is other people.
Keep in mind that this can happen intentionally and unintentionally. However, we can be deceived by others quite often.
Paul warns the Ephesian church of this in his letter to them:
Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.
Ephesians 5:6
When you look at the whole context of the book of Ephesians, you’ll see that the church had a huge problem. People were going around within the church spouting false doctrines and lying to people, promoting their own version of the gospel which was not the truth. Does this sound familiar to what we see today?
Due to the lies of other people, there are billions of different versions of the Gospel out there. People are lying to you in the name of God to get something out of you and it’s disgusting!
There are people everywhere taking advantage of others through their lies and deceit.
Now I urge you, brethren, keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and hindrances contrary to the teaching which you learned, and turn away from them. For such men are slaves, not of our Lord Christ but of their own appetites; and by their smooth and flattering speech they deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting.
Romans 16:17-18
I don’t know about you, but I find this description to be extremely characteristic of our world today.
What’s interesting is that he uses the word ‘dissension’ to describe what these people tend to cause. They cause dissensions; they cause disunity. Again, the unity of the church body is always attacked when it comes to lies and deception.
So, how can you keep yourself from being lied to by people about the truth?
Let me ask this: how can you tell a real piece of money from a counterfeit? You know the real one so well that you can tell the fake one when it comes along.
We have to know the Bible.
The Bible tells us what is true and if we know what it says, we can easily dispel lies and false gospels when we come across them.
When I mentioned that deception can happen intentionally and unintentionally, I meant it. We can deceive others unintentionally by talking about what the Bible says when in reality, we don’t know what it actually says.
We cannot be speaking in God’s name when we don’t even know what He has said to us in His Word.
Now, I’m not talking about needing to know the Bible front to back, but I am talking about knowing the foundational truths that are laid out for us in God’s Word.
We should be able to say what the Gospel is and lead someone in their acceptance of Christ at the very least.
If you want to keep yourself from being lied to and deceived by other people and from deceiving others yourself, you have to know the truth.
Liar #3: You Are Lying to Yourself
Finally, possibly the most overlooked yet frequent person that lies to you is yourself.
The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9
When left to our own devices, we deceive ourselves. Ignorance is bliss, right?
If there’s a single common thread throughout all of these Scriptures and all of the things that I have pointed out, it’s that ignorance is the number one weakness that we have when it comes to being lied to.
If we’re ignorant of the battle, how can we fight?
The worst part is that most of the time, it is willful ignorance. If we’re honest, we don’t want to fight the battle because it takes effort. We would rather live the way that we want to live rather than have to worry about lies and deception.
What I fear is, if you go back to the Matrix analogy – I fear that most of us are willingly taking the blue pill in our spiritual lives because we want to live like nothing is happening around us.
We’ve become so engulfed and overwhelmed by our everyday lives that have nothing to do with God that we don’t have time or energy to worry about Satan, other people, or frankly anything else.
We would rather go on living like going to church on Sunday is enough than actually pick up our Bibles, dig into the truth, and dispel the lies that we’ve been believing.
We have not been called to a life of ignorance. Instead, we’ve been called to live lives that are superpowered by the truth that God has given us and that are overflowing with the love of God and His Holy Spirit.
However, we cannot live this way if we do not actively fight against lies and deception and truly strive for truth.
Far too often, we deceive ourselves for what is convenient rather than what is our calling.
We choose what is relevant rather than what is required.
We choose comfort over the cross.
How Can We Keep From Being Lied to?
It’s time to wake up. We cannot allow ourselves to be lied to or deceived any longer.
We have to wake up to the fact that there is a real and dangerous spiritual war going on right now and that we are the army that is supposed to fight against the lies and the deceit in the world.
Who are you allowing to lie to you?
Are you living an independent life from the church and making yourself an easy target for Satan and his attacks?
Are you allowing people to deceive you with empty words without knowing the real truth?
Or are you deceiving yourself; afraid of what you might find if you take the red pill and wake up to reality?
Regardless of where you are, look to the cross. Jesus is truth and to know Him is to know the truth.
If you cultivate a relationship with Him, He will guide you every step of the way and you will find truth and light in all things.