“And no wonder, since Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.”
2 Corinthians 11:14
I was having a great conversation with a friend of mine this week about self-awareness, how important it is, and how the only way to really be self-aware is to always assume you aren’t, and make allowance for the possibility that you don’t know yourself as well as you think you do. In the moment, we were discussing it in the context of how we interact with others, and the things we think about it. But as the week has gone on, I can’t help but think about how much this applies to us spiritually as well, are we spiritually self-aware, or do we have a tendency to lie to ourselves more than we’ve ever lied to anyone else?
In 1st Corinthians 3:18, Paul warns “Let no one deceive himself. If any of you thinks he is wise in this age, he should become a fool, so that he may become wise.” Likewise, the theologian and great Christian thinker C.S. Lewis once said “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” If we think we aren’t struggling with anything, if we’ve convinced ourselves that something is okay that the Bible says is wrong, because it “just doesn’t affect me” is it more likely that we’ve really achieved a level of sanctification that not even the Saints could, or that we’re lying to ourselves? In Ephesians 4:27, it says to not even give the devil a foothold. It seems odd to me that, we all know that one person who will talk your ear off for thirty minutes, and we know how to just smile and keep walking so as to not give them a split second to start a conversation, but we don't take the same care when it comes to not giving the devil that same split second. Why is it that when it comes to sin we have a tendency to see how close we can get without crossing the line?
So what if we stopped JUST asking if something was sin, and began to ask if it’s even WISE or beneficial? What if instead of seeing how close we could get to sin without being engulfed by it, we started asking how close we could get to God so as to be engulfed by all that He is? Because rest assured, the things that are worst for us, the things the Devil most wants to use against us, will never seem awful on the surface, they always seem enticing in the moment and he is going to do everything he can to make them not even look like sin. Lust is easily disguised as appreciation of beauty and romance, greed is easily disguised as ambition and security, pride and ego are easily disguised as just slightly too healthy self esteem, self-righteousness is easily disguised as concern for others, and idolatry is easily disguised as patriotism, just to name a few. As you go through this week, I would encourage you to ask yourself, and ask God in prayer, where you might be lying to yourself. Ask yourself where you’ve excused and explained away things that aren’t of God for the sake of entertainment, fun, or temporary satisfaction. Don’t you know the devil wears a suit and tie?
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