Motivated Spirituality

As stated countless times throughout the Bible, God is pure–God is truth.

We are to worship Jesus in Spirit and in Truth. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, the Life. While it seems an overstatement, deceit lays the groundwork for the antichrist–the anti-truth, anti-God.

Deceit: the action or practice of deceiving someone by concealing or misrepresenting the truth. "a web of deceit". Deceit is a corrosive that destroys from within and works its brokenness without. Like vines strangling a tree and bringing it to the ground, deceit removes life and deforms what life remains. Deceit separates us from God; I don’t trust what could happen to me on the other side of truth, so I deceive first myself by saying there won’t be any repercussions, any blowback. By the time we are adults we are master self-deceivers, and often think we are master deceivers of others, with few consequences. Deceit is about putting my perceived in-the-moment needs above anything else. Whether it is begging off of a meeting with a friend with a lame excuse, delaying some household or work task–or not telling a friend or family member the truth about what is going on in my life—I am attempting to affect truth–by telling myself or others only part of what is true (the whole truth), or surrounding a nugget of truth (nothing but the truth) with such shadings that there is no black and white but only a smudgy, gross gray color. 

 

1. Jeremiah 5:3 Lord, do not your eyes look for truth? You struck them, but they felt no pain; you crushed them, but they refused correction. They made their faces harder than stone and refused to repent.
       

2. John 4:23-24 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
       

3.  John 14:6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

4. John 8:44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

5. James 1:18 He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.

6. 1 Peter 1:22 Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.

7. Hebrews 3:13 But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.
   
   

8. 2 Timothy 3:7 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. 6 They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

9. Ephesians 5:9 (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth)
       

10. 1 John 2:8 Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.

11. Psalm 119:29 Keep me from deceitful ways; be gracious to me and teach me your law.
    
    

12. Psalm 101:7 No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house; no one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence.
        

13. Psalm 109:2 for people who are wicked and deceitful have opened their mouths against me; they have spoken against me with lying tongues.
        

14. Proverbs 14:25 A truthful witness saves lives, but a false witness is deceitful.
        

15. Isaiah 5:18 Woe to those who draw sin along with cords of deceit, and wickedness as with cart ropes,
        

16. Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
        

17. Matthew 13:22 The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful.
        

18. Ephesians 4:14 Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.

19. Ephesians 4:22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires;
            

20. John 14:17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

21. John 16:13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.
        

John 18:37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” John 18:38 “What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.