The Lord gives a Word that applies to everyone. Yet sometimes when you hear that Word, you think that it is being directed only to you and that it is exposing you before everyone else. However, it is wrong for you to say, “That Word doesn’t apply to me. It belongs to everyone else.” That attitude leaves you open to deception.
If there is one thing we must seek above everything else, it is that we have a right judgment in every area of the stewardship to which the Lord has committed us. We must have a right judgment in everything relating to that stewardship. Deception is a very subtle thing. Deception is, of course, the great trick of the enemy; he seeks to deceive you.
And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. Revelation 12:9, NASB.
How can Satan do that? There is no heart so fertile or so open to deception as the heart of the person who does not see his own need, unless it is the person who refuses to see his own need. We must understand this. When a great deception or a need comes in your life, the most important thing you can do is to reach in for a fresh revelation of the Lord to your heart. Go seek Him with all of your heart. If you do not, deception will keep you focused in the wrong direction.
Deception comes to keep you focused on anything but the Lord, so that you never see your own need. When deception comes, you see everyone else’s need, or everyone else’s problems, but you do not see your own.
Who does this apply to? Every one of us.
Deception comes when you cannot see your own need, and it is sustained by a refusal to see your own need.
You never see your own need by suddenly realizing, while under deception, “I am deceived! I am looking at everyone else’s need and I don’t see my own.” No one ever does that. There is no “magic formula” that will release you from deception. The only way is to have a fresh revelation of the Lord. When you have a revelation of the Lord, everything looks different. Then you are able to say, “The need is within me. The problem is within me.” But as long as you are deceived, you will never see that.
The only time you are going to see your need is when you reach into the Lord, and you see yourself in the light of His glory. A perfect illustration of this is found in Isaiah 6. King Uzziah was a great reformer in Israel. When he died, we do not find Isaiah and others standing up as a “vanguard of holiness and righteousness,” trying to carry on things as they were under Uzziah. Instead, we read that in the year King Uzziah died, Isaiah went to the Temple (Isaiah 6:1). He did not come out with a revelation to build a great monument to King Uzziah. He did not contemplate what a great defender of the faith he himself had been. Instead, he had a revelation of the Lord. Then what did Isaiah say?
… “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” Isaiah 6:5.
Your need is uncovered by a revelation of the Lord to your own heart. Then you have a clear perception of your own need.
Satan can deceive you only as long as he can keep you from seeing your own need.
His deception succeeds only when a person does not suspect it. Deception is not deception if the deceived know that they are being deceived; there is no deception in that. Consider Judas; he was deceived. I think that right up to the last minute, Judas really believed that Christ was going to do something to save Himself. When he finally realized what he had done, he said, “I’ve betrayed innocent blood!” He could think of nothing but suicide; life was no longer tolerable to him.
Then when Judas, who had betrayed Him, saw that He had been condemned, he felt remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” But they said, “What is that to us? See to that yourself!” And he threw the pieces of silver into the sanctuary and departed, and he went away and hanged himself. Matthew 27:3–5, NASB.
Do not think that evil intent always lies in those who do evil; it is often not in their thinking. It is because they are deceived that they become such vicious instruments of Satan. That is a sobering thought.
“They will make you outcasts from the synagogue; but an hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God.” John 16:2, NASB.
We dare not arrogantly say that we cannot be deceived. That is the most deceptive thought anyone has ever had. You must realize that deception is the great assault of Satan in the end time. Satan wants to deceive, but he does not want you to know you are being deceived. If it were possible, he would deceive the very elect.
“And at that time many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise, and will mislead many. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect. Behold, I have told you in advance.” Matthew 24:10–11, 24–25, NASB.
The only reason it is not possible to deceive the elect is that they have entered into a relationship with God wherein they are perpetual repenters. By their constant state of repentance and their openness to repent, they will escape deception. The elect are worshipers first, and repenters first. The two go hand in hand. You cannot be a true worshiper without being a true repenter, and you cannot be a true repenter without being a true worshiper. To see your need and to repent is to have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and to love Him as the Cleanser of your iniquity.
But if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. I John 1:7, NASB.
Many assaults come against us as we serve the Lord. How many of them do you want to blame on the devil? If you blame him for all of them, then he has succeeded in deceiving you. Satan can come forth transformed as an angel of light (II Corinthians 11:14). Yet you can say, “He’s not an angel of light; he’s the devil, and he’s to blame.” You can blame the devil or you can even blame God; but the chances are that something in your old nature has opened the door to your problems, but Satan does not want you to take a good look at that. That is deception again. Oh, how deceiving deception is! How the devil works! You need to be aware of this, because above everything else, you do not want to be false in your walk with God. You want to really walk with Him. Oh, for truth in the inward parts!
Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Psalm 51:6–7, KJV.
We want to really know the truth. To know the truth about ourselves is our great quest. We can never judge or try to decide that for another person, because we are not their judges. This is what we understand about deception.
The Sermon on the Mount gives us a principle which applies: Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Matthew 5:8. It means that only those who are focused on God will be the ones to break through to His righteousness, to break through to see Him as He is. Reverse this Beatitude and you still have the truth: If you really see God, you will be pure in heart. One means the other. Every one of the precious Beatitudes is capable of reversal. We read in Matthew 5:5, Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Then we say, those who will inherit the earth have studied meekness. They understand meekness; it is part of their being.
The pure in heart will see God. Then the man who sees his brother and judges him unrighteously has in a sense assumed the role of God.
If you see your brother with the eyes of a judge, trying to be his god, you yourself do not see God. You will see one thing or the other. The pure in heart will see God. If you are not seeing God, but you are judging your brother, it is a sure sign of impurity. No man judges another man unless impurity has clouded his own vision (Matthew 7:1–5).
The Lord has opened up a principle to us. Are you saying in your heart, “I don’t want to be deceived”? One of the best ways to keep from being deceived is to get your eyes off of the other fellow to judge him, and keep your eyes on God until you have a real revelation of the Lord. Then you will see your own inner need, and that will open up your vision to see things as God would have you see them. We must reach in to do this. Every one of us finds himself at one time or another in a position to criticize without realizing it. Sometimes you think that your opinion and your view of a thing is not that important in a situation, but it is. You feel that it is not important if you judge your brother, or if you are critical over a problem in his life. It is important! It is bound to affect the quality and the anointing upon the work that you do for the Lord, and the way that you walk before Him.
This is a very serious matter for anyone in a place of authority and responsibility for others. It has been very difficult for me in the commission that the Lord has given me in the Word. Few people understand what such a commission involves. With a thousand situations set before me, and a thousand inputs that are constantly ministering to me, my reactions must be pure before God.
If I am not walking with God with my eyes constantly upon Him, broken in my spirit before Him and seeking His face continually, then I could easily enter into deception because I could begin to focus on my brother. The minute that I focus on my brother’s problems and on his need, that is the day I will not know how to meet his need. That is the day I am open to deception, when I begin to judge my brother.
We say, “But I was doing the best that I could.” The best that any of us can do is not enough. It is when you do the best you can that your need will be exposed to you. It is not when you do your worst, but when you do your very best that God honors you and shows you what to take care of next, so that you can do even better than your best of yesterday.
None of us can apply this Word to anyone else; this must be applied to our own heart. Look at yourself. It is a universal trait that we usually can see objectively the need of another; yet when we look at ourselves, we cannot see anything wrong.
God has to deal heavily with us to show us our needs; but even when He deals with us, our repentance may not go to the depth where it has unlodged and upset that basic confidence we have in the flesh.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Matthew 5:8. Seeing God is the only course for purity of heart; and deception can enter in by a focus on other things.
THE DISCIPLE’S FOCUS
“I am withdrawing myself totally from a position of judging.
“I am not going to judge anyone, because the minute I do, deception can enter in and my judgment will be colored.
“I dedicate myself to this: wherever I have to serve as one of His servants with authority, I will have a Word from God and not a conclusion of my own heart, no matter how honest I have tried to be.
“Whatever God lays before me as a responsibility for me to take care of, I will refuse to enter into the conclusions that my own heart would give. I will look to the Lord for revelation in the matter.
“When the Lord gives me revelation concerning a situation, I may not know why it is so. I may have no proof, I may have no example to show anyone. I have positioned myself that if I speak something of counsel or direction to a brother, it will be by revelation. I may have all of the facts about a situation, but to make them the basis of any decision is not valid. The facts can lie too. Facts can be interpreted by different eyes that see them, when only God sees the situation as it really is.
“I am not going to judge. I am going to lay every need in God’s lap and believe for God to speak to me by revelation, ‘This is what should be.’ If I do not have enough revelation to minister this way, I certainly do not have enough wisdom to sit as a judge on my brother.”
Do you know what objective compassion is? In order to define it, let’s look at what it is not—subjective love. A father sees his son go down the road, steal something, and then return home again. Soon all the neighbors find out that his little boy stole something, and so he punishes the boy severely. He does not discipline the child because of the value of the stolen article, but because of how it made him appear. He declares, “This is terrible! My little boy is a subjective, personal extension of me. He looks like me. For him to do such a thing is a terrible affront to me!” Instead of judging the child correctly and dealing objectively with him, he deals with him subjectively. That is subjective love.
There is only one way to raise children and to discipline them: simply treat them as though they were not yours, but they belonged to your neighbor down the street. With this attitude, you will find far better solutions to problems than when you become deeply involved with your own personal emotions.
The same truth applies in the house of God. A pastor should act as though the members of the church belong to some other group. If he can do that, then he will be able to be much more objective as he seeks the Lord for them. In the same way, if a different group of believers were to come into the church, the shepherds there could do a marvelous job of ministering to them. They could prophesy over them and give them an objective Word from the Lord. They could be objective because they are not related to those people. That is why the best ministry often comes from the apostle or prophet who is passing through a local church and does not have a constant exposure to that congregation. It is very difficult for a pastor not to feel, “These are my children, and they are not reflecting on me the way I want them to.” Pastors can become like parents. Mothers can do a lot to ruin their children; fathers can too. What is the solution? We must be objectively compassionate. That is the love of God.
When we walk in objective compassion, then we do not enter into the processes of deception that are so easy for the old flesh to fall into.
You can look at the churches that are moving in God, and they will look like whatever you want them to look like. You can see them one day and think, “Oh, there are so many needs here!” You can look again the next day and see the Lord moving on the people, and you will declare that this is the greatest thing ever to come in the history of the world. What we see is determined by what is in our heart. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Matthew 5:8.
We could also say, “Pity the impure in heart, for they judge their brother.” They only see their brother; they only see the “other things.”
What are you looking at? What do you see? Of course, that depends upon what you may be going through at the time, and what state your heart is in. However, if someone is chronically critical, almost invariably you will find that he is not really focused on the Lord.
There is an objective faith and compassion in the heart of those who are truly focused on the Lord. They see problems, yet their faith is so set on the Lord that they are constantly believing for God to do something about the problems.
They are constantly believing that God will take care of the situation and everything is going to come out fine, because God’s hand is so evident in all of it.
Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass. I Thessalonians 5:23–24, NASB.
Has this Word searched your heart? Has it caused many new things to dawn upon your awareness? Can you say in your heart, “Lord, don’t let me be deceived. Let my heart be focused on You, Lord, and let me see my own need.”
Remember—if you do not have your eyes on the Lord totally, then you will not see your own need. But if you see the Lord, you will see your own need, and deception will have no place in you.
One who is deceived focuses on everything except his own need.
A deceived heart is blind; it cannot see itself.
Our need is uncovered by a revelation of the Lord to our own heart. Do we see ourselves until we see Him?
No man judges another man unless his own impurity has clouded his vision.
If you are focused on the Lord, you see yourself as well as others with objective faith and compassion.