Allen Jackson - Do Not Be Deceived - Part 2
It's good to be with you again. We're gonna complete the study we began on "Don't Be Deceived". But it's not a frightening time, it's an exciting time, we are growing up in our faith. Spiritual maturity has little to do with your age chronologically or even your tenure around church. It has to do with our spiritual maturity, and in this season, God is growing up his church, he's purifying us. So if you've been a Christian for a long time, it's an exciting season, there's a new growth spurt coming for us. If you're a new Christian, you've gotten into the journey at a dramatic time, an exciting time. God is opening our hearts and our eyes to see and understand what he's doing in the earth. What a privilege we have to walk with him through this critical point in human history. I want to encourage you not to look at the darkness, don't give your attention and your focus to the expressions of wickedness. Turn your attention to what you see God doing, relate it over and over, celebrate it, give thanks to him. We have a greater opportunity for the proclamation of the gospel than in any time in human history, and the King is preparing to come. What a privilege you and I have for this season. Grab your Bible, open your heart, God's got a lesson for us today, I believe it'll be a blessing.
How deception enters, how does it come into our life? What makes us so vulnerable? Why is deception such a persistent problem? In century after century, culture after culture, doesn't seem to matter what point in time or history. What is it? Well, there's one primary door that's identified in Scripture. You wanna guess? What makes us so vulnerable to deception? It's pride, pride. Behind all deception, I would submit to you, is pride; it opens us up to deception. The great deceiver, Lucifer, was an archangel, many scholars would suggest the most beautiful and the wisest of all the angels. He had authority and power in the kingdom of God, and in his pride, he led a rebellion.
It's almost unimaginable. His pride led to rebellion and it ended in deception. It was a very, he found himself so deceived that he led a rebellion that wasn't going to succeed. If it happened to an archangel, may I humbly submit, we should all be cautious? Now, you see expressions of this if you pay just a bit of attention. The attraction of almost any cult, of any false religion, and I'm not talking about things that you identify as wicked, I mean deviations of Christianity that take you away from the redemptive work of Jesus. The attraction, principally, is join us and you'll be a part of the supergroup; it appeals to our pride. Well, I'd like to be a part of the supergroup. People in these perspectives often will say, "Well the church has been a little ineffective, a little misguided, but if you join our group you'll be more right than everybody else".
See, the lie, the first lie which Satan turned on the human race, is you can be like God, you can know right and wrong, you can be the arbiter. Folks, we are the sheep of his pasture, it's why listening is the primary characteristic of the people of God in every generation. And if you've imagined that your theological system was so tight, so perfected that you need not listen any further, you're already deceived. Beware of anybody that tells you there's a group that has gone further than any of the others, and when you hear that, they're typically critical of the preceding generations of Christians. What arrogance.
Do you know the tremendous sacrifice that has been paid for you and I to be able to embrace our Christian faith today? The tremendous sacrifices that have been made so that we could have the Word of God? That the Jesus story would be told from generation to generation to generation? We are the inheritors of a sacred trust, how dare us talk about our faith in terms of comfort and convenience. How dare us be more concerned about our children learning athletics than learning to fear the Lord and to understand how to hear the voice of his Spirit. What has come over us? How have we become so sleepy, so disinterested, so groggy?
The Lord is awakening us. Any group that says to you, "To be correct, you have to join us," you can know one thing for certain. If you join them, you're wrong, 'cause correctness doesn't lie in any single group. Now, Jesus has chosen a group, how many of you'd like to be a part? Me too. Well, it's not a supergroup, I'm gonna warn you, and only Jesus would've chosen a group like this. But they're described for us in the Scripture; see if you can pick out where your name should go. It's 1 Corinthians chapter 1, in verse 26, "Brothers, think of what you were when you were called". Do you know God called you? So he called you before your drew your first breath, he called you when you were still in your mother's womb, it's why we stand for those little people.
"Think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; he chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things, and the things that are not, to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It's because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God, that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption".
What makes us righteous? Jesus. What brings holiness to us? Jesus. What's the source of our redemption? Jesus. To be one of God's chosen people you gotta be in that list. That means you gotta be weak, foolish, lowly, based, despised. So if you're listening to this and you think, I'm too broken to be one of the only, come on in, man, we got room for one more. There's no boasting in ourselves, we need to get over ourselves a little bit. You see, it's our compassion for people that motivates us to share our Jesus story, not our arrogance. Now there's one more component, let's unpack this one at least. The topic is deception and how to avoid it.
And there's a toxic combination of your flesh, your carnal self, that part of us that is unredeemed; your spirit's born again, made alive to God, but your old earthly nature, fed by your emotions and your thoughts, that carnal part of us, combined with deceiving spirits that are present in the earth is a significant doorway to deception in our lives. Ephesians chapter 4, verse 11, it says, "It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, and some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors, and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ".
Now, the objective is the maturing of the body of Christ, and it's worth noting that maturity comes in community. It's not a trick to get you to come to church, you can sit in church and not grow up just like you can sit in the gym and not get healthy. But it's hard to get healthier if you don't ever find where there's the equipment to help you or the experience to help you or the expertise to help you, and you will not reach maturity alone, we need one another. Not my idea, it's biblical, so if you don't like it, get mad at God. But it clearly tells us that God's provision for his church, for his people, now Jesus is the head of the church, but he has put in place in the church some things to help us mature.
It said he's given us apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers; some will take pastor-teacher and hyphenate it, some separate it, doesn't matter to me. So those gifts exist in the church and you can't logically or rationally from a biblical basis say, "Well, I believe in pastors but I don't believe in prophets, or I believe in teachers but I don't believe in apostles," 'cause they're all presented to us in the same place for the same purpose. For the church to have the strength we need, and to accomplish our mission, we will need those fivefold ministry gifts in play in the church.
Now we need to understand what they are. Your definition or what Grandma thought may not be fully accurate, and I'll tell you, everyone who calls himself a pastor doesn't necessarily care for and strengthen the flock. I'm not throwing stones at anybody, that's just reality. In the same way, everybody that calls himself an apostle, or calls himself a prophet isn't necessarily standing in that place called by God, they just got business cards printed. Labels and titles don't guarantee authenticity. That's just factual, and you need to be aware and not naive. Sometimes, as Christians, we check our brains in the parking lot. Please don't do that.
There's just some practical issues around this that we need to unpack for a moment or two, how error can enter our lives through people under the guise of those labels. After all, prophecy's high-sounding stuff, how could you act against something that someone said to you and tagged on, "Thus saith the Lord"? The primary purpose of prophecy in Scripture isn't to foretell the future, it's to give us an accurate perspective of how God sees the circumstance. If you'll go back through the prophets and read it with that viewpoint, it will be eminently helpful.
Now, does the Spirit of God give it application to the future? Yes, he does, but there's a very fine line between biblical prophecy and fortune telling, and one is directed by the Spirit of God and one is not. God doesn't promise to reveal to you everything about your future; if you knew, it wouldn't be helpful. And if you have a desire to know and you spend your time seeking it, it's a high degree of probability you'll end up in the occult and filled with deception. So it's not an easy thing. And that combination of our carnal self and deceiving spirits makes us vulnerable, so the Bible gives us some safeguards.
1 Corinthians 14:29, it says, "Two or three prophets should speak, and the other should weigh carefully what is said". 1 Thessalonians 5:19, "Don't quench the Spirit; don't despise prophetic utterances". You need to hear that, because once you've been burned by some people using the name of the Lord in destructive ways, you're gonna think, "I'm just gonna push the whole thing into the rubbish heap". But the Bible says we can't despise it, we need God's perspective on where we are, somebody has to tell us the truth; the truth is the antidote for deception.
So prophetic messages shouldn't always just be encouraging, happy things about promotions and good hair days. Anybody who participates in prophecy has to be willing to be judged. Now what's the standard we judge by? How you feel about it? If it suits your preference for the future? No, Isaiah 8:19, gives us a clue, "What they to say, 'Consult the mediums and spiritists who whisper and mutter,' should not a people consult their God"? Isaiah's saying why do you go to sources other than God to get information about the future? I'd put the question to you. Why do you read horoscopes? Why do you play with ouija boards? Why do you go to fortune tellers? Why do you use systems other than God to anticipate the future?
The answer is, it's not the Holy Spirit, and if you've been involved in it, no matter who blessed it or how religious it may be or if it was put under the umbrella of Christianity, you need to renounce it. Repent, renounce, it'll bring freedom to you. Where was I? "Should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living"? Seances. "To the law and to the testimony. If they don't speak according to this word, it is because they have no light". We judge what is spoken by the Word of God. Now let me add another piece to this, 'cause we talk about those five-fold ministry gifts, it impacts us, it impacts the world in which we live, the systems in which we participate.
And one idea that has proven helpful to me is that spiritual leadership needs to be in proportion to the faith of the individual. And in Greek, faith and faithfulness are interchangeable. They seem different to us, faith seems like some mystical formula, and faithfulness is something else, but in the wording of the New Testament they are interchangeable. If you want to know a person of faith, you'll need to know a faithful person, you can't be a person of faith and not be a faithful person. In Romans 12, in verse 6, it says, "We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man's gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith".
A helpful little idea for you, for all of us is not to go beyond our faith or our faithfulness. Serving the Lord can be emotional, whether it's prophesying or teaching or leading or whatever gifting you may have. And you may aspire to something, you may have a ambition within you that is motivating for that. And ambition isn't evil but ambition has to be yielded to the Lord, selfish ambition is destructive. And if you combine the awareness of godly things and our carnal nature, it's easy to have ambition that goes beyond the place of our faithfulness, and it puts us in destructive, vulnerable places. Stay within your allotted proportion of faith.
Now you can grow in your faith, your faith can be strengthened. Watch the disciples through the Gospels into the book of Acts, watch them grow in their faith, listen to your heroes in the Old Testament. David, when he hears Goliath bellow his challenge and the bravest, most effective warriors in Israelite Army are hiding in their tents, and little shepherd kid rolls in and says, "I can take him". And when he's interrogated about it, remember what he said? He said, "He's challenged the armies of the living God". He didn't challenge the army is Saul, he called God out. And he said I had an assignment to care for my father's flocks, that if a bear came against the flock, I took the lamb away and killed the bear.
And if a lion came and took a lamb, I took the lamb back and killed the lion. And this clown's no different than the lion or the bear. He didn't wait to figure out how his sling worked when he heard Goliath start to speak. You wanna strengthen your faithfulness to the Lord. We have to let go of this notion that, "I'm mature 'cause I can spell the 12 tribes of Israel in their original language". Now I'm an advocate for knowledge, spent most of my life studying and hope to continue to do so, but we want to grow in our faithfulness to him. Can you be trusted in the place where you stand? Are you trustworthy in all of the circles of influence God has given to you? Or are you just trustworthy in attendance?
You see, grow in your faithfulness and then we can become conduits for all that God wants to do; but be aware when you listen, be aware when you follow, pay attention. I'll give you one example, I'm about done, there's hope. Acts 16, Paul and his team, "Once we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future". She has an unclean spirit, a demonic spirit that enables her to predict the future and with enough accuracy that she's producing a significant income. Did you know that spirits have awareness that you don't have? You see, some of us are still stuck arguing over whether there's unclean spirits. Spirits have information and insight and understanding that often we don't have, so you'll hear something you think, well that's true, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the Holy Spirit.
"She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. The girl followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, 'These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.'" That's a pretty good label, most of you would be content with that message on your desk: "Servant of the Most High God, I can tell you how to be saved". In fact, she's the first person in Philippi to recognize that, there are no converts yet. "She kept this up for many days. Finally, Paul became so troubled that he turned around and said to the spirit, 'In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her.' And at that moment, the spirit left her".
Now some of you know the rest of the story. When the owners of the slave girl discover that they've lost their golden goose they're very unhappy with Paul, but it's the circumstances before that I think, that are most helpful to me. Every word that we have that that woman said was true, it was the truth, but it wasn't the Spirit of God. It's very clear in the context, it was a divining spirit, a fortune-telling spirit. Most of us, I suspect, confronted with somebody, if we were on a missions journey or we went into a new office or some new settings of people and we found somebody that would make that declaration over us, we would make them first chair at the table, founding members.
After all, they've got a tremendous grasp of the truth. We need discernment, we need those multiple coordinates because the best deception begins with a part of the truth and almost every deceiving spirit has some truth, and we're gonna have to be more sophisticated. Well Pastor, I don't really like this, this sounds like hard work, can't you just tell me the two verses I need to memorize so I can go to heaven? I just don't like to think about all the spiritual stuff. Bless your heart. In all honesty, I understand the feeling, and there may have been a time and a place when Christianity was such a pervasive influence in our culture that you could find a way to flourish on the blessings of generations who had preceded you, but we're not there any longer.
And if our children and grandchildren are gonna know truth and live with freedom, it's gonna require greater discernment from us. We have labored beneath deception for far too long. See, the point of the cross, the beauty of the redemptive work of Jesus is, no matter in which way sin or ungodliness or wickedness has touched your life, you can not only be delivered from it, you can be redeemed. That is the good news of the gospel, it's why we love Jesus, it's why we advocate for him. It's not 'cause we're bored on Sunday mornings and we need a little side activity to make us polite or tame, the church has not been called to be tame, and it's not polite to follow the Lord. In fact, until you're desperate enough that you're willing to lose the facade of being polite, you won't follow him very far. But it is good news for everyone who will receive the truth.
Now, I wanna close, I wanna give you two verses of Scripture, and I'm going to ask you, I think they can put them on the screens, we can say them together as a proclamation over ourselves, over our families, over our church, over our community, over our nation, over God's purposes because we want the awakening to continue. We intend to participate with people from every nation, race, language, and tribe. Wherever God gives us the opportunity to stand with those who are saying yes to him in this season. Amen?
Why don't you stand with me? Have you got the verses? Isaiah 45, in verse 8, very good, let's read it together. "Your heavens above rain down righteousness; let the clouds shower it down. Let the earth open wide, let salvation spring up, let righteousness grow with it. I, the Lord, have created it". And now from Hosea chapter 10, in verse 12. "It is time to seek the Lord, until he comes and showers righteousness on you". Let's say that one again. "It is time to seek the Lord, until he comes and showers righteousness on you".