Worldly Standards for Success – Self-Deception Series 16 – Purity 1105

Worldly Standards for Success – Self-Deception Series 16 – Purity 1105

Purity 1105 07/27/2023 Purity 1105 Podcast

Purity 1105 on YouTube:

Good morning,

Today’s photo of a dark forest pathway featuring
some foreboding trees and a light beyond them comes to us today from Nik
Harrang who shared this scene from his recent family vacation to red wood
country on social media on Monday.  

Well, It’s Thursday and if you have been following
the blog for a while you know that I don’t just share Nik’s pathway photo because
its’ “spooky cool”, although it is. I share photos of pathways on Thursdays
because that was the night that I originally went into recovery back in 2015
and because I want to encourage others and to remind myself that life is a
journey that is best travelled by following the Lord’s lead into freedom, joy,
and peace.  Although it might be a little
scary to contemplate, I invite you to walk with me as I follow Christ by
stepping beyond being a “believer” and making the continuous decision to live
by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit, each and every day.  I don’t call the podcast mt4christ247 for
nothing. It’s a subtle way of suggesting that we “empty” ourselves of our old
ways of thinking and living and to agree with live according to who we are in
Christ, by not just believing what God’s word says but by applying it to how we
think and live, every day.  

You can call it “walking in the Spirit”, following
Jesus, or walking on the path of Christian Discipleship but what it comes down
to is forming a constant, conversational relationship with the Lord and obeying
His directions and will for your life. 
God doesn’t want us walking in darkness and He doesn’t want us
condemning ourselves. He wants us to become the people He created us to be –
people of hope and purpose who continually proclaim and demonstrate the truth
of who Jesus is and what He can do in our lives when we follow Him.   

Of course, part of this journey is seeing the world according
to how God sees it and recognizing that God’s word reflects the truth of how
things really are and that knowing and living according to God’s truth will set
you free.  As Christ said to the Jews who
believed in Him in

John
8:31-32 (NKJV)
³¹  … “If
you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed.
³²  And
you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

So we want to
be disciples (students and followers) or Jesus, abide in God’s word, live by it,
and renounce the lies that have kept us chains to be finally and forever free.

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 fifteenth, and last, “Way You Can
Be Deceived By the World”:

15. Believing that I must live up to worldly
standards in order to feel good about myself.

The scripture reference for this point is:

1 Peter 2:1-12 (NLT2)
¹  So get rid of all evil
behavior. Be done with all deceit, hypocrisy, jealousy, and all unkind speech. ²  Like newborn babies, you must crave
pure spiritual milk so that you will grow into a full experience of salvation.
Cry out for this nourishment, ³  now
that you have had a taste of the Lord’s kindness.
⁴  You are coming to Christ,
who is the living cornerstone of God’s temple. He was rejected by people, but
he was chosen by God for great honor.
⁵  And you are living stones
that God is building into his spiritual temple. What’s more, you are his holy
priests. Through the mediation of Jesus Christ, you offer spiritual sacrifices
that please God.
⁶  As the Scriptures say, “I
am placing a cornerstone in Jerusalem, chosen for great honor, and anyone who trusts
in him will never be disgraced.”
⁷  Yes, you who trust him
recognize the honor God has given him. But for those who reject him, “The stone
that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.”
⁸  And, “He is the stone that
makes people stumble, the rock that makes them fall.” They stumble because they
do not obey God’s word, and so they meet the fate that was planned for them.
⁹  But you are not like that,
for you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very
own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he
called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light.
¹⁰  “Once you had no identity
as a people; now you are God’s people. Once you received no mercy; now you have
received God’s mercy.”
¹¹  Dear friends, I warn you
as “temporary residents and foreigners” to keep away from worldly desires that
wage war against your very souls.
¹²  Be careful to live
properly among your unbelieving neighbors. Then even if they accuse you of
doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior, and they will give honor to
God when he judges the world.

The Apostle Peter makes a point
of telling us the truth about who we are in Christ here – that we have been made
“God’s people” and the expectation is that we live like it by keeping away from
“worldly desires”. 

And that includes a thorough examination
of what the world says about “the good life” and seeing the lies behind what
could be seen as “good things”.    

The American Dream usually is portrayed
as having material and personal success. Some minimum standards of success
would include a house, cars, money in the bank, a high position or title, a spouse,
children, and vacations to all the right places.   The American Dream promises that if you work
hard enough and or know the right people you can have all the things in life
that will make you happy.  

The problem with the dream is that
it’s a lie.  

Money can’t buy you love or
enduring happiness and positions, titles, and relationships were never meant to
be the means to fulfillment.  

While all the things in the “American
Dream” can be seen as good if we place our hopes on them alone we will one day
be disappointed because they don’t satisfy us, and if we don’t have peace with
God through faith in Jesus, we will discover how empty and meaningless the
promises of the American dream are, when we realize we wasted our lives chasing
after their pleasures and security and did nothing to secure our place in
eternity.    

Meeting worldly standards will
not make you happy because there is always more “stuff” to possess or consume
and in the end those things will be taken from you and the only thing that will
matter is your relationship with the Lord and how much of your time you
invested in serving His kingdom rather than your own.  

——————————————————————————————–

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.

James 1:2-4 (NASB)
²  Consider it all joy, my
brethren, when you encounter various trials,
³  knowing that the testing of
your faith produces endurance.
⁴  And let endurance have its
perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

Today’s
verse falls under the fourth point of our counseling reference guide resource’s
section on Affliction,
Discipline, Chastisement, & Trials

 4. “God at times sends us trials to develop
patience in us. 

Today’s verses teach us
that our trials in our lives have a purpose – they produce opportunities to
test and practice your faith – to demonstrate that you really live according to
God’s ways and will not “curse God and die” no matter what circumstance you may
face in life.  Experience teaches us that
some calamities can be avoided or minimized with proper planning and preparation,
but “trials” are those situations in life that you can’t escape. We can’t go
over, under or around trials. The only way to get through trials is to endure
them.

But James assures us that,
because we have God with us, we can’t it all joy, because if we walk with the Lord,
our trials will assist us in drawing closer to Him and to develop endurance
that we couldn’t get any other way.  

Trust me, as some one who
has suffered a fair share of losses and had some real trials in life, it is better
to go through them with God than to try to do it on your own.  And even though those trials were very
painful,  I had peace in them because the
Lord was guiding me and strengthening me as I went through them and now can
remember them and rejoice over how the Lord led me through those dark valleys
to emerge into a glorious new life of light, love, joy, and peace.   

So keep walking and
talking with God, He will show you the way throughout all of your life and when
a trial comes He will empower you to persevere and to endure, so you too will
one day count those dark episodes as times of victory and a reason to rejoice.

——————————————————————–

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

The principal bond of union between Christ and His people is
the Holy Spirit; but as the union is mutual, something is necessary on our part
to complete it, and this is faith. Hence, Christ is said to dwell in our hearts
“by faith” (Eph. 3:17). Yet, let it be said emphatically, the faith which
unites to Christ and saves the soul is not merely a natural act of the mind
assenting to the Gospel, as it assents to any other truth upon reliable
testimony, but is a supernatural act, an effect produced by the power of the
Spirit of grace, and is such a persuasion of the truth concerning the Savior as
calls forth exercises suited to its Object. The soul being quickened and made
alive spiritually, begins to act spiritually, “The soul is the life of the
body, faith is the life of the soul, and Christ is the life of faith” (John
Flavel).^[1]

—————————more
tomorrow————————

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

(https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mt4christ247s-podcast/id1551615154). The mt4christ247 podcast is also available
on Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartradio, and
Audible.com. 

These teachings are also available on the
MT4Christ247 You Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MT4Christ247

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,
or other authors of the other works that may be included in this publication,
and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities the
author may represent.”

Encouragement
for the Path of Christian Discipleship