Transcription
Pastor Scott Lamb, plenty of time to minister. Pastor Lamb is an incredible blessing to our fellowship as leadership in West Las Vegas. Let's open our hearts. Let's receive a word from heaven. Let's welcome Pastor Scott Lamb. Hallelujah.
Thank you for that welcome. I thank uh Pastor Mitchell, Pastor Jesse for putting me in the pulpit. Hallelujah. They're always running a risk putting me in the pulpit. Proverbs 16. If you have your Bibles with you this evening, I also appreciate you coming to be a part of this disciplehip gathering. It's always a great joy to minister in disciplehip classes.
I recently came across something in my reading known as the Dunning Krueger effect. And this is a well-documented cognitive bias where individuals with limited knowledge or skill overestimate their own competence. This overestimation arises because their lack of knowledge prevents them from understanding their lack of knowledge. They don't know how much they don't know. So they assume that they know everything there is to know because there's this whole raft out there that they're completely unaware of.
I think to one degree or another we all fall into the Dunning Krueger effect that we have a cognitive bias and it causes us to miss profound truths about ourselves. We completely misread situations because we think we're right. We think the way we think is right. I mean, you'd have to be half nuts to go through life thinking you're wrong all the time. So you think you're right and you analyze and you misread things and you misinterpret consequences. You don't understand why something went so south on you. And it has a lot to do with a failed understanding of who we really are. And we run through life blowing up everything around us: our marriages, our friendships, our jobs, our testimony. And all the while we fail to understand that we're the ones that are heaving the grenades. We're the ones that are blowing things up. And the truth of the matter is many, many times, we don't even know that there's a trail of craters behind us. We don't even see the smoking bodies. We're completely unaware of a lot of issues that are going on in our lives.
And so I want to make an appeal this evening for an intellectual and emotional and spiritual honesty. It's got to start somewhere. And some of you are already moving and trying to establish this in your life and character. But I really want to make a case for this tonight because ultimately it will save your bacon is is becoming self-aware. So Proverbs 16:2 is our base text. Solomon writes, "All a person's ways seem pure to them, but motives are weighed by the Lord."
Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your word. I pray, God, that you will give us wisdom, understanding. You'll help us, God, to see things as they truly are, not as we wish they were. I pray that your spirit have right of way. You'll help us. We need your help. You said if any of us lack wisdom, all we had to do is ask and you'd give it to us. I'm praying that wisdom uh become a strong force in our lives uh and we live lives that are informed by your wisdom. I ask all this in Jesus' name and everyone said amen.
And so I think it's safe to say that we all tend to see ourselves through rose-colored glasses. That those glasses fall on a scale between dark, dark opaque crimson all the way down to a hazy pink. But we all have filters in place that affect the way that we see things. And we tend to see things in a better light, especially about ourselves, than is warranted by the facts. And even when we suffer from insecurity, from low self-esteem, and we don't think that we think highly of ourselves, we still have self-defense mechanisms. It's built into us. And when we reach a certain threshold of vilification, of facing things that are disturbing about ourselves, we start to move into denial and excuses and rationalizations and blameshifting. And we're always defending ourselves. It's it's part of what we are. And we start to say things, well, I'm not that bad. I'm not Jeffrey Dahmer. I mean, give me a break. I'm not terrible, right? Or it wasn't my fault. Or I didn't mean it. Or it wasn't for a lack of effort or I prayed and God didn't help me. So now we're blaming God. It was my upbringing. It's my culture. I'm just not good at communicating. I mean, we can go on and on all night. And some of these phrases are part of your stock vocabulary. It's the way you deal with our screw-ups and our failures and our faults. Because when it comes to facing our own culpability, it's it many times it's more than we more than we signed up for. It's very difficult and we start to suffer from very distorted thinking about really what's going on. What's going on in my life? What's going on in the people around me because of me? There are places that we just don't want to go. Realities about ourselves that we really don't want to see. We don't want to own up to them. And many times we're simply completely unaware that there's a problem here. We we just don't see it.
Our text says this powerfully. All a person's ways seem pure to them. I'm looking. I don't see a problem here. Everything looks fine to me. And that's a remarkable observation because it's not really talking about willful hypocrisy. It's not like I'm necessarily, you know, covering for something that I'm I'm confronted with. It's not necessarily even egoism. These things may come into play, but it's a genuine lack of self-awareness that we simply don't understand ourselves. We're convinced of our own goodness. [snorts] Everything seems pure to us. I don't see a problem here. The problem must be with you because I don't have a problem.
Webster's dictionary defines self-knowledge as the knowledge of one's own real character, abilities, worth or demerit. And so this runs the whole gamut of self-standing from good to bad and everything in between. Psalms 36:2, "In their own eyes they flatter themselves. Too much to detect or hate their sin." What a statement. Too much to detect. They can't even see it. They can't even see how their sin nature is at work in a given situation. And this is why most people don't get saved. You tell them they're a sinner and they say, "No, I'm not. I'm not a bad person. I'm not evil." Well, if you stop and take inventory of all of the nasty stuff that's inside of us, the the unkind thoughts, the anger, the pride, the lust, the perversion, the greed, the selfishness, I mean, you start digging down [laughter] and there's nothing to be proud of. And you got to really be blinded to these areas in your life to say, "Well, you know, I'm not a sinner. There's nothing wrong with me."
In an article in Scientific American researcher Cindy May writes, "Indeed, decades, decades of research confirm that we are all above average, at least in our own minds. When comparing ourselves versus other people, we tend to rate ourselves more highly on a host of positive measures, including intelligence, ambition, friendliness, and modesty. This finding is sometimes called the self-enhancement effect. We build ourselves up. We're all above average in our own minds when it comes to deep matters of the heart. I'm not that bad. I'm I'm a good Christian. I'm I'm always telling my congregation, there's no such thing as a good Christian. Jesus said, "Why do you call me good?" How you doing with that? Jesus said, "Why do you call me good? There's none good but God. That was Jesus. And you call yourself a good Christian. Can we do away with that lie right now? >> We are Christians that are sinners saved by grace. We are dealing with a mess. And I've been saved for 51 years and I'm still dealing with a mess. I'm still dealing with deep inner issues that aren't easily destroyed.
You ever wonder why you get so upset when somebody points out a flaw? Why do you get so defensive? Why does it enrage you? Why does criticism take on such monstrous proportions? It's rooted in the exposure of things that we don't want to look at. And now we're being made to look at it through circumstances, through someone drawing our attention to it, through a sermon that goes right down our stovepipe, whatever it may be. All of a sudden, we're having to look at something that we have just swept under the carpet. And again, it's not necessarily uh, you know, something that we have intentionally done. It's a lot of it is very subversive. A lot of it is just functioning kind of below our radar and we find ourselves upset when we have to look at who we really are.
In our text it says God weighs our motives. Motives are tricky business, aren't they? Why do you do what you do? I like to believe that everything I do is pure, that I am truly selfless, that I am the servant of all. I don't have pride. I am the poster child of humility like Moses who wrote about himself in Numbers 12:3. Now, Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. That's us. If you were to write your own press release, that's what it would sound like. Our motives escape us many times. Men will work 60 hours a week, never go home, never spend time with their wife or their kid, and they're doing it all for the sake of the family, right? This is this is for their welfare. Did it ever dawn on you that they needed you more than they need your money? No, we don't want to think that way. You spend 10 hours a week at the gym for your health, not your vanity. You want to get healthy, take a walk. You can do it in about 20 minutes. Problem is, there's no babes looking at you. And you don't want to take your shirt off when you're walking around the streets. People will mentally dress you. I know you care nothing about the praise of men, only the praise of God. Which is why you feel so disappointed when no one tells you what a great job you did. >> You play hours of video games to unwind. To unwind from what? The work you're not doing, the responsibility that you're shunning. You're not unwinding. You're addicted. >> But see, you don't want to look at it that way. You don't want to address reality. You want to you want to dress reality. You want to make it look good. You want to dress it up so it's not what it really is. And if you can't see it or if you don't want to see it, you end up deluded.
And so our text says God sees with perfect moral clarity. He's not, you know, he's not convinced by our performances. He's not persuaded by our excuses. He understands exactly what we are. And the Bible says it's the goodness of God that leads us to repentance. That the transformative work of Christianity comes through the convicting grace of God. That in his perfect moral clarity, he's able to point out the issues. And if we don't think that we need to repent, we never will. And therefore, we will never change. And you drive your wife nuts and you drive your church nuts and you drive everybody around you nuts because as far as you're concerned, you're good to go. And you're not listening when that conviction comes and says, "This has to change." Isaiah 44:20, he feeds on ashes. A deceived heart has turned him aside, and he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, "Is there not a lie in my right hand?" He's missing it. He He's His thinking is so distorted that he can't see it. And he can't get deliverance because he can't see it. He doesn't recognize the lie that he's telling himself. And without a love for the truth, no matter where it takes you, without a love for the truth, no matter how painful it might be, without a deep desire to live in the light, then we will always be content to live with our own fiction. We're happy with that. We're comfortable with that. Life is good. I'm not feeling bad about things that perhaps I should feel bad about. Matthew 6:23 says, "If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness?"
There's an old preacher J. Harker who wrote these words, "Even where there is sincerity, there may be a subtle action of what I may term intellectual vanity, not always a conscious vanity. We have a self within a self and another self deeper still. We are many selves." So this is you know what the Bible says about the heart being wickedly deceitful that the heart can can run such a scam on us and because we are complex creatures and because we can convince ourselves of our motives of our purity of our intentions you know I know it didn't play the way it should have but I I meant well and we're able to gloss over the real issues that are causing the problems. And the danger is that you're going to live your whole life never understanding the damage you're doing to your own soul and to those around you.
So, where do where do we take this? What what do we do about this? The first thing you have to do is become conscious of this tendency. You have to be aware of it. You have to acknowledge that you don't like to acknowledge anything. Acknowledging is not something we want to do. We don't want to have to go through the miasma. We don't want to have to say this is what I am. You have to look at yourself and at your life from the basic assumption that we are sinners and that we have a built-in reflexive cloaking device. Right? You wave your hands like Obi-Wan Kenobi. There's nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here. And we delude ourselves. We are masters of evasion. You have to recognize it. You have to say, "Yeah, that's me. Everybody in here from the greatest to the least." When it comes to the dirt, when it comes to who we really are and what really compels us, we have to know, I have a tendency not to look at it carefully or honestly. You know, when I was growing up, my daddy's position in life was me and my two brothers were guilty until proven innocent. You never would have heard him arguing with the neighbors. Oh no, not my kids. My little ducky ducks would never do that. He knew my ducky ducks were out back burning houses down. He He knew from the get-go that we were not pristine. And that rubbed off on me. I realized that that I that's not necessarily an unhealthy way to look at life. Guilty until proven innocent. I have to be willing to examine myself.
I I wrote this sermon. And then uh I took a break and uh I love to read Babylon Bee. How many of you read Babylon Bee? Babylon Bee is perhaps the greatest mental relief that you will ever discover. If you're not reading Babylon Bee regularly, you must start. Second to the Bible, Babylon Bee. It's a uh it's a wonderful sarcastic uh parody of everything. It's it's it's hysterical. So, I finish this sermon and I open up Babylon Bee and this is the article right there in front of me. A newly released Harvard Harvard study on human intelligence has provided conclusive evidence that while nobody thinks they're stupid, many are. According to the results of the study, 100% of people think they are not stupid. Which means that 100% of all stupid people think they're smart, but they're not smart. They're stupid. The results of this study were particularly shocking to me and my colleagues, said Dr. Anton Phoenix, a Harvard psychologist. According to our findings, there is a possibility that we might be stupid. We certainly don't think we are, but according to the study, that's exactly what stupid people think. We were surprised to see such lopsided data indicating that IN REALITY, no stupid person believes they are stupid when in fact they are stupid. That is one participant in the study was skeptical of the results. These are obviously there are obviously some flaws in the results because I know I'm not stupid, said Thomas Ridley, who thinks Attack of the Clones was the best Star Wars movie ever made. This would mean that I could potentially be stupid without even knowing it. But I'm not. I'm smart. At publishing time, the results of the study had been called into question after it was pointed out that the team of scientists conducting the research could, unbeknownst to them, be stupid.
So, that's the problem. That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's our very real capacity to say, "No, no, that can't be right. >> That can't be right. I, you know, I hear what you're saying, but that can't be right." Romans 12:3 in the New Living Translation. Because of the privilege and authority God has given me, this is Paul writing, "I give each of you this warning. Don't think you are better than you really are. Be honest in the your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us." We're going to see how that plays out. But the faith that God has given us is the assurance that we are accepted in the beloved. That the blood of Jesus is the answer for our sin nature. That God isn't looking for perfection, but he is looking for honesty. Because the only way he can move us in the direction of perfection is to get us to acknowledge that we're not there yet. >> That we're not even close. >> That there's a long journey ahead of me and I really have to cooperate with God to get where I want to go.
Again, Jay Parker in his sermon, he said, uh, see what a man has to give up in accepting God's truth in the gospel. He has to give up his own respectability. Who can do it? He has to surrender his own infallibility. I'm always right. I'm infallible. We always think that the way we see it is the way it is. We have to become painfully aware that that's not true. And you have to recognize that you have this cognitive bias, this Dunning Krueger of the soul and it works in us.
Secondly, you have to face your fears. You have to face the things that disturb you. You have to let the Holy Spirit convict your heart. Don't shy away from confronting the uncomfortable truths about yourself. Question your reality. Challenge your beliefs. See if who you really are lines up with who you think you are. Listen to me. If your life is a chaos of failure, loss, problems, relational breakdown, you can't seem to connect with your wife. You can't connect with your kids. You always feel misunderstood. It's critical that you get to the root of the matter. And you're probably going to discover that you're the root of the matter, that there's something in you that you have to address or nothing changes.
I appreciate Eugene Peterson's paraphrase in the message of 2 Corinthians 13:5. He writes, "Test yourselves to make sure you are solid in the faith. Don't drift along taking everything for granted. Give yourselves regular checkups. You need firsthand evidence, not mere hearsay, that Jesus Christ is in you. Test it out. If you fail the test, do something about it." So he he rightly interprets that verse and suggests that he's not talking about did I get saved. He's talking about where are we with Christ at this point in our life. It's it's an ongoing self-examination. Regular checkups. And if you find that you fail the checkup, do something about it. Address it. Let God help you affect the changes that need to happen. Let your pastor speak into your life. Don't be afraid of a pastor's rebuke. Don't be afraid of a hard sermon. Don't put your defenses up when it starts coming over the pulpit at you like you're doing right now. Listen carefully to the preaching. Let God's word speak to you in your study. The Bible says that that the scriptures are a mirror. that we see ourselves in them, in all of the wickedness that we see in human nature that's laid out for us in scripture and all of the challenges to a much higher place of living. Let the word of God challenge you. Listen to your wife. She's not an idiot. Now, you don't know my wife. I don't need to know your wife. Women are smarter than us. Amen. Now, they their emotions get things muddled. We get it. And many many times they they launch off into areas that don't make a lot of sense. But I want to tell you something. Your wife knows you better than you do. And you can spend 20 years blaming her or saying she doesn't understand or pointing at her. Well, you doesn't. Isn't that the way the arguments go? You always do that. Don't you hate that? You hate hearing you always do that? No, I don't. What is that? It's immediate defensiveness and rejection of the fact that you always do that. I don't always do that. Yes, you do. No, I don't. Yes, you do. This becomes an absolutely absurd argument. It'd be much better to stop and go, "Huh, where did she get the idea that I always do this?" And then you got to backtrack and then you got to look at what is really going on in your life. But you can't be afraid of that. Listen to your friends if they have the courage to correct you. Let things be exposed. You're not Superman. You don't have to be. You don't have to be perfect. What you want is help to get better. >> You can't fear what God wants to do in your life. >> Can't be afraid of that because, well, you know, it's just he's asking too much. He's not asking too much. He saved you by his blood. Now, all he's trying to do is help you live a decent life, >> a life worth living, >> a life that's good. >> It's much better to be a good human being than a troglodyte. >> But you don't make it from caveman to modern man without some serious changes. >> And you have to let God affect those changes in your life. And it always starts with painful surgery. None of us want this, but we all need it. You have to drag yourself into the white hot light of God.
David addresses this numerous times in the Psalms. He's a man who was blindsided by his own lack of insight into his motives, but he writes things like this. Psalm 4:4, "Tremble and do not sin." When you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent. Come up with a million excuses. Search your hearts and be silent. Psalms 139:23 and 24. "Search me, God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting." He can't be afraid of what God wants to expose because the only reason he wants to expose it is to heal it. He doesn't want to do it to shame you, to make an example of you. He wants to help you. We all hate going to doctors. You know why we hate going to doctors? Because we're afraid they're going to find something. Amen. So meanwhile, the cancer in us just continues to grow. And the pain is there, but we don't want to talk about it. You know, I had a little cough, just a little cough. And it drove my wife nuts and she kept saying, "Go get it checked." And she read somewhere that a little cough is indicative of a heart problem. I I don't know what she read that in. Probably Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest is every woman's medical journal. So she read that that little cough is indicative of a heart problem. So I went to see the doctor finally because she she kept pushing. I'm ignoring it. I'm sapped. It's just it's nothing. So, I go to the doctor and I say, "Well, I've got this little cough and it's driving my wife nuts. Can you give me some medicine?" He said, "Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. But tell me about your mother. What's my mother got to do with my cough? She's been dead for years. She can't make me cough. She's It's not my mother." Yeah. Yeah. He says, "Humor me." He looked like a hobbit. He's about He's about this tall. He had a little ponytail, his ball on top, and his little John Lennon square glasses, little beard. Humor me. So, I told him about my mother who died when she was 49 of heart disease. Okay. So, so tell me about this cough. Yeah. Yeah. It's It's just been going on for months and I I just can't seem to shake it. You got you got to have some kind of medicine. Just kind of knock it out. He goes, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He said, "Tell me about your father, dude. I just want some cough medicine. I don't want to talk about my father. I don't want to deal with this." >> Ah, come on. Just tell me about your father. Well, you know, so I get into his whole health and his heart problems and all of these things. He goes, "Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. You know what? you need an EKG. I said, I've had three in the last three years. And every doctor has said the exact same thing. There's this little anomaly. Nothing to worry about. He says, "Yeah, yeah, humor me." He kept saying that. Humor me. Humor me. So, he hooks me up and he runs the tests. Humor me. And he comes back out and he says, "Yeah, yeah. I'm going to send you over to a heart specialist, cardiac specialist. I don't like what I'm looking at here. Right? So, one thing leads to another. I end up with open heart surgery, which is the last thing in the world I wanted to go through. But my widow maker was 98% clogged. And four other major arteries were ranged from 75% up to the 98. I was walking dead. It was God that was holding me up. So, I go after all of this to my regular doctor and he's looking through this hobbit's notes and he's just kind of shaking his head and he goes, "You know what? This guy is a genius." He said, "I can see by his notes exactly what he picked up on." He said, "If I had looked at that, I would have said, nothing to worry about. It's a little anomaly like every other doctor had said to me and I wouldn't be here tonight.
Don't be afraid of exposing what's inside of what's going on in your heart. Because if you don't let God fix it, it will kill you. It will destroy your life. David prayed Psalms 26:2 to3, "Test me, Lord. Try me. Examine my heart and my mind, for I have always been mindful of your unfailing love and have lived in reliance on your faithfulness." What an incredible prayer. God, just test me, expose me, examine my heart. That's not a prayer many of us want to pray. Where did David find the wherewithal and the courage to pray that kind of prayer? He says, "I'm mindful of your unfailing love and your faithfulness. I've got nothing to fear in you showing me what's wrong with my heart because anything that you do in response to what you find in me, it's going to be for my welfare. It's going to be for my deliverance. It's going to be so that I can survive life. and live it the way you want me to. Does unfailing love or faithfulness sound like something you should be afraid of? Something you don't want in your life? David says, "Oh, no. I want this. So, go ahead. Do what you've got to do because I know why you're doing it." God's desire is always to help us, to free us, to deliver us, to save us. Can you pray that prayer tonight? Oh God, show me my heart. Show me why. Show me what's going on. Show me what the real roots are. Not not the picture I want to paint. Show me reality. God wants to open your eyes so that you can see. So that you don't go through life blind. And I would rather live my life with tears in my eyes than die blind. What about you?
I want every head bowed, every eye closed. Painful things. It's why sinners don't want to repent because they don't want to go there. They don't want to go there. I didn't want to face the depths of my sin when I was a sinner. I always whitewashed it. I always said, "Ah, come on. Yeah, I'm a drunk, but I'm not a falling down drunk. I'm a working drunk. Yeah, I'm I'm uh filled with lust and and uh all kinds of terrible things, but but I'm not a pervert. I'm just I'm just a red-blooded man." We got an excuse for everything. Excuses won't save you. The only thing that'll save you is honesty. Coming to God in the reality of who you are and saying, "Here I am, God. I'm a wreck. I'm a mess. I need grace. I need the blood of Jesus. I can't fix myself." Jesus said, "I didn't come for people who are well. I came for people who are sick. Those who are well have no need of a physician. They got it all wired." That was the Pharisees problem, wasn't it? They got it all wired. I'm good to go. Are we sinners, too? We're the sons of Abraham. Are we sinners, too? There's nothing wrong here. These are the men who ultimately were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. They crucified him. But there's nothing wrong here. Their hearts are good and pure and right with God. Saul persecuted the church and his heart was good and righteous and pure and everything he did was right, but he was completely wrong, wasn't he? And then he had an encounter with Jesus and Jesus just absolutely knocked him down. Said, "Why are you persecuting me? Why do you hate the things of God? And Saul repented, became Paul. You're here tonight. You have to repent. And the only way you'll do that is if you come to grips with who you are, that you're a sinner. And you can't fix yourself. It doesn't matter how how learned you are or how much willpower you have or how self-disciplined you are. The problem is in the genes. It's in who we are as sinners. And our only hope of salvation, only way that a leopard can change its spots, the only way that an Ethiopian can change his skin is a supernatural miracle. God has to get involved in your life.
If you're here tonight and you're not a Christian and you wonder, see, this is ultimately what led me to being saved is here. here. I'm doing everything that I thought I was supposed to be doing to be satisfied and happy. And none of it was producing anything close to satisfaction or happiness. There's got to be something wrong with the formula here. There's got to be something wrong in my life. And I had to come to the grips with the fact that what was wrong in my life was me. the way I thought, the way I treated people, the way I viewed myself. Oh, so many things. So many things that were so wrong inside. You're here tonight. God wants to help you. He don't want to kill you. He wants to save you. If you're not born again, if you're not saved, if you haven't opened your heart to God and let him out of his goodness and mercy lead you to repentance, then while heads are bowed and eyes are closed, would you raise your hand? Say, you know what? I need God in my life. I have been living my life with blinders on. I have had an excuse for everything. I have always looked at myself through rose-colored glasses. But this evening, I know that I am a sinner in need of grace. Raise your hand all over this building. I see these hands. I see this hand. I see this hand. I see this hand in the back. Who else? Join these honest hearts. Say, "Yeah, I need God right now. Now, I need God to get involved in my life. I see this hand. Maybe you're backsliding. And maybe you backslid because you were blindsided by things that you were ignoring, things that were creeping up on you. You know, you're taking you're taking those pills because you got a little pain in your body. And then the next thing you know, you're taking those pills even without the pain. You're taking them all the time and you've become an addict. But, you know, they're prescription drugs. And so, you're not an addict, are you? But you are you're addicted to it and it'll destroy you. Maybe that's what happened to you. Or maybe it's something else. Maybe you kept ignoring your little jaunts into porno and said, "I, you know, I'm not I don't do it all the time. I just do it when I get anxious and nervous and I have to scratch and itch." And you and you're just not dealing with it. And then little by little, it overtakes you. It overtakes you because there are things that you're not facing in your life and now you're backsliding. You're away from God. Lift your hand. Say, "Pray for me. I want to get my heart right tonight. I see this hand. I see this hand. I see this hand." Others, I'm not doing this to shame anybody. I am the last person in this building to throw stones. I am doing this because Jesus loves you and wants to save you. I see these hands. I want every one of you that raised your hand to do one more thing. I want you to get up out of your seat, come to the altar right now. Just slip out. Don't worry about what anybody is thinking. That's completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is you finding the grace of God to deal with the issues of your heart. Need men over here to help us pray. Hallelujah. If you raised your hand, maybe you didn't raise your hand, but you know you need to come to the altar. Come right now. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of the Holy Ghost heart surgery. He knows what he's doing. He knows how to fix us. Come and lay hold of God and let him fix you. Amen.
Speaking to Christians here tonight. This whole thing starts with the recognition of the Dunning Krueger effect in your own soul. The the bias in the way you think. That's what a cognitive bias is. It's it's a way of looking at things where you weight the results in your favor. say, you know, that's I'm not [laughter] I'm not a bad guy. I'm not this. I'm not that. We make a million excuses, but what we're doing is we're burying reality and losing touch with who we really are. We're we're not self-aware. And my appeal to you tonight is to become self-aware. Let God point things out to you. Let God convict you. Question question your motives. Question your self-perceptions. Question why you're doing what you're doing. Why you're saying what you're saying. why you're in pursuit of the ministry, why you want to do this or that. It's it's an ongoing self-examination, which is exactly what Eugene Peterson nailed in the message. Regular checkups. Regular checkups. What's going on? Uh it's it's not just that you're tired that you stopped coming to prayer. What's really going on? Are you losing an appetite for Christ? Is the world little by little sucking your brains out? You got to stop. You got to ask. You used to pray fervently. You used to be a constant witness. You used to spend lots of time in the word. All of that's gone by the wayside. I'm not saying that you're not saved. I'm not saying you're backsliding. I'm saying you got to ask yourself why without making excuses. Without saying, well, you know, there is no well, you know, with God. All of our ways are pure in our sight. But God knows the motives of the heart. This altar's open. God's speaking to you. Come find a place to pray. Come say, "Oh God, you got to help me with this part. I recognize and acknowledge my cognitive bias." And I so often gloss over things that I should not gloss over. And I need to I need help with this. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask in faith, not doubting, and God will give you what you need. Let's sing this song. Let God have his way at this altar. Create me a clean heart. Oh God, and renew a right spirit within me. Create [music] in me a clean heart. Oh God, and renew a right spirit within me and cast me away from thy presence, oh Lord. and take not [singing and music] thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the [music and singing] joy of thy salvation. [music] And renew a right spirit within me. Created in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right [music and singing] spirit within me. Create in me a [music] clean heart, oh God. And renew a [music and singing] wise spirit within me and cast me away. from thy presence, [music] oh Lord, and take not thy [singing] holy spirit from me. Restore me the joy of thy [singing and music] salvation and renew my spirit within me. Hallelujah.
I'm going to lead you in a prayer. We're going to pray the prayer of David together. We're going to believe God for grace here tonight. And I want you to say, "Father God, >> Father God, >> I come to you in Jesus name. >> In Jesus name, >> test me. >> Test me. >> Try me. >> Examine my heart. >> And my mind, >> show me. >> Show me >> what I can't see. >> I can't see. >> I know. >> I know >> that I am a sinner >> in need of grace. And I will only become >> the man you designed me to be. >> As I let you test me >> and expose me >> expose me >> so I can repent >> and change. >> I want change. >> I want >> I want to become >> I want >> the best man I can be. >> I can be >> and I need you for that. Help me. >> I submit myself to you. >> Have your way in my heart. >> I pray it in Jesus name. Let's worship God together here. I have spoken because this is truly an issue. I am here tonight and as you pursue me the reality of truth as you look at yourself in this mirror and you see yourself for who you really are. It's not my will to continue, but it is my will to you. It is my love. It is my love that you manipulate your will, but I will make these choices tonight. I rejoice in your honesty. As you may forgive me, you are assure that my grace is here to carry you beyond where you're at. It's not the impossible. It's the possible that I know this will I will deliver you. >> Yes. Thank you for [applause] your wonderful Bao.