Lost In A House Of Mirrors Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Many ask why seemingly good people turn bad.

How can someone turn violent after a lifetime of apparent normalcy? The answer lies in understanding our fundamental human nature. It's not easy, but if you're willing to face the truth, stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, tell us about the series that begins today, Why Good People Do Bad Things. You know, Dave, I've always had an interest in human nature. It's very interesting to look into the depths of your soul and realize that you're staring into a part of you that can do very good things, but also is capable of very bad things.

And so what I do in this series is take a deep dive into human nature, but we don't stop there. What we do is, is look at the biblical answer to our need. And what a blessing it is to know that God understands us. He knows us.

And so with that beginning, let's go to the pulpit of Moody Church and discuss the question why good people do bad things. Only God knows who I really am, and may he graciously preserve me from finding out. Those are actually the words of Johann von Goethe, the scholar of the German enlightenment. Goethe knew that self-discovery is very painful. That's why he preferred if God alone kept his information and preserved him from finding out.

What Goethe didn't realize is that if he had been willing to go through that self-examination, if he had been willing indeed to go through that painful self-discovery, maybe his life would have been more fulfilling, and of course he could not have done it without confronting God. Self-perception lies at the root, the very core, of who we are and the way we behave. Give a four-year-old boy a cowboy hat and he will ride every piece of furniture in the house. Give a little girl a doll and she will act like a mother. Marilyn Monroe grew up in a series of homes, a series of foster homes, and was not loved. She felt unlovable.

And because she felt that way, she decided to reach out for love in all the ways that she possibly could, and ended up, as others have, finding out that it was the wrong way to pursue love, and she died with an overdose. Or it's like the woman who said to me, my dad told me I was trash. So I lived out his words and his prophecy. Self-perception determines the way we behave. If that's true, then of course we have to ask the question. What about self-perception? How do we go about discovering who we really are?

And even though it's painful, what is the end result? And actually, while we're talking about it, why this disconnect at times between the image that we portray outwardly and the people that we really are privately? Well, as many of you know, this is the beginning in a series of messages titled, Why Good People Do Bad Things. And of course, we're going to have to talk about issues such as shame and anger and desires and all of those things, so that we better understand ourselves and why you and I could do some very bad things. In effect, what we're going to do is to take a spotlight and to shine it on the human heart. And much of what we uncover is going to be very uncomfortable, but the good news is we're on this journey together.

I need to tell you it's uncomfortable for me, too, but we're going to look into the human heart. But we're also going to see the wonder of God's grace and his answer to our most hidden, deceitful ways. Many years ago, I was in a county fair, and I walked into what was called a fun house. It was really the house of mirrors.

Very interesting. You've probably been there. You look at one mirror, and I remember I was tall and skinny. Look at another mirror, and I had a very, very big head. Perhaps that one represented reality.

But a very big head and a very small torso. And then you walk into another room, and the opposite is true. By the time you go through a house of mirrors, what you're really looking for is a flat mirror to remind yourself of who you really are.

Now imagine this. There are many people who go around in life, and they're spending their whole life trying to find a mirror so that they might know who they really are so that they have some sense of identity, but there's no way for them to be able to find it because they have not looked into the right mirror. Now of course, when we speak of mirrors, who is the first mirror that we have that reflects back to us who we are?

It is, of course, our parents. If you grew up in a healthy home where you were given the two things that a child needs for a good sense of identity, namely love and respect, you have a much better chance of being able to take those values and putting them into your marriage. You have a much better chance of being a holistic person in the right sense of the word, being able to cope with life, having a good sense of who you are and a good self-concept. Now the problem with such people, by the way, is they usually make good marriage partners, but they overestimate their own sense of wholeness and goodness, and sometimes they don't have a heart hot for God because in their mind it's a warped view, but in their mind they really don't need him that badly. Now if you're brought up in an abusive home, talking about alcoholism and where you were undercut and where shame was a part of your existence, if you were brought up in a home like that, you're going to struggle a whole lot more about who you are and you might end up with what I call the big three, shame, anger, and self-condemnation. Recently I read of a father who said to his son in anger, you're nothing more than the product of a one-night fling.

Now you think about that. What the father wanted to do is to destroy that boy, to destroy him at his very core. You know, if he were to take a gun and shoot him, there'd be certain social consequences, but because the boy is still living physically, he wanted to destroy him spiritually, to destroy him at the core of his existence, and think of those words that that boy will take into the rest of his life, determining, trying to find out who he is. So we have our parents, enormous impact. So impactful, in fact, that one of the messages I preach in this series is on the role of the father, because your father shapes you in ways that you may not know anything about, and so that's going to be a message in this series. But then, of course, we have teachers and we have others. If you were brought up in a bad home like Dory Banstone, abused and the like in orphanages, she tells how she used to go to a certain drug store because there was a kind man there who used to let her have a malt without paying for it, and he used to talk to her in a cheery, helpful way, and she never forgot it.

She still talks about it. I wonder, by the way, how many children we sometimes walk by and they are hurting and we're not perceptive enough to recognize it. So here's a little window of hope that my home is abusive, but maybe out there somewhere, there might be some kindness and there might be some love. Well, then we have our parents, we have our teachers, we have other people. If you're married, your partner will certainly help you in your sense of self-perception, and on we could go. But a problem develops, and that problem is, pretty soon, we as children, when we were growing up, discovered something, namely that we can be one person on the outside and someone else on the inside.

And when we discover that, we could be on our journey to deep deception. I'll never forget when I discovered it. I was about 10 or 12 years old and I had the responsibility of feeding the chickens out on the farm at 5 o'clock every afternoon. Because I had nothing to do, all day to do it in, and nobody to help me, I was fully responsible.

Being a last-born, I had so much time on my hands, it was just unbelievable. My brothers and sisters had to work and I just got by with all kinds of things, so I had no excuse. I walked into the garage one day at about 5.30 and my father said, did you feed the chickens? I didn't want to incur his displeasure and I felt somewhat embarrassed, so I said yes, yes I did. Ten minutes later I left the garage and went and did what I was supposed to have done a half an hour before and I remember distinctly saying to myself, this lie really worked.

I remember that. In fact, I thought to myself, you know, that means that whenever I'm in a jam, lies actually do work. You know, the Sunday school pupil had a corner on the truth when he said a lie is an abomination unto the Lord but a very present help in time of trouble.

There's something to that. Fortunately, my foray into the world of deceit and lying was so short lived because my brother overheard the conversation in the garage and when he saw me coming back from where the chickens were, he said, you lied to dad, didn't you? I had to admit I did and he said, don't you know that God is watching?

Oh, God. Why bring God into this? And I'll tell you, I thank God that that ended my lying career.

Do you know what could have happened? I could have told that lie, gotten by with it and discovered, you know, there's something to this business of deceit and I could have told another one and more and then you have people whose whole lives, their whole secret lives become one of deceit where they are so devious and so cunning because they are fundamentally dishonest. Now Karl Barth, I think, the great Swiss theologian was right when he said that we are all incorrigible liars. To some extent, we lie to ourselves, we lie to others and we lie to God and that's the kind of thing we hope to uncover in this series of messages.

I'll tell you, it is going to be painful for a lot of us. I'm reminded of the words of Sir Walter Scott who was so right when he said, oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. Barth was right that we resist every encroachment of light. There is nothing that we fear more than self-disclosure in the presence of God and in the presence of others because we hang on to who we are and our secrets, we want them to remain ours. So you have this discrepancy. On the one hand, there are people who are greedy and selfish but they desperately want to come across as generous and kind. Ananias and Sapphira lied about the amount that they received from the land.

Why? Because they wanted to be well thought of. Sapphira was one of the people in the church. There were deaconesses that were very generous and so they lied in order not only to hide their sin but to project an image that was not true of them. And so you have people whose lives are filled with deceit and all kinds of uncleanness but they come across as people of integrity and are sometimes fastidious. Oh, man, I kind of like that word.

Fastidious in their commitment to making sure that they look just right especially on Sundays and on church occasions. And so you have Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and this summer in preparation for this series of messages, I finally read that book. All my life I hear about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Well, someday I'm going to tell you about them and some of you know somebody who perhaps represents them very well. And so there's this disconnect and then we fall into what is known as denial and we're told that there are two kinds. The first is conscious denial. That's where I hide things because I know right well that I'm sinning and so I hide them very carefully. And then you can actually get to the point of unconscious denial where you actually begin to believe your own lies and you actually think that lies are reality.

People sometimes construct such defenses to avoid further pain or to hide sin or whatever where you actually believe your own lies. Somebody once said to me, speaking about themselves, they said, I don't have any blind spots. Have you ever thought about how funny that is? If you had a blind spot, you'd be the last person to know about it. That's what a blind spot is.

That's the whole point, my friend. If your wife tells me I live with a man who doesn't have any blind spots, now I have some reason to think that maybe, maybe he doesn't. But if he tells me, are you kidding me?

You're telling me you don't have any blind spots? I remember a man whose life could be best characterized by being one big blind spot. And yet he argued ferociously for his position and who he was. And no matter what was said to him, there was no intake.

In fact, I can tell you his reality check bounced. Now the question is, where do we turn? To what mirror do we look? Not merely to see our bodies, but rather to x-ray our souls.

That's what we need. Our parents did a job that may have been good, it may have been bad, but it could not possibly be thorough. Our teachers and our friends and even our wives and other members within the family, they might reflect back to us who we really are, but you're thinking of Judas there at the Last Supper, nobody really knew who he was and who they were sitting beside. So where do we go to finally find out who we really are? Well, I want you to take your Bibles and turn to James chapter 1. James is going to help us here, and I'm going to begin at verse 22 of chapter 1 in the book of James. He says, do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves, do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and after looking at himself goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.

But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard but doing it, he will be blessed in what he does. James says that the word of God is the mirror and it is to the word of God that we come to find out who we are. Now in those days, the mirror was actually, what shall we say, made of tin and bronze and they were not very accurate. The mirrors were not like they are today. And people saw themselves, but James is going to call the Bible the perfect law. It is the unbent mirror that finally helps us have a sense of identity. Now in the primitive cultures, they do not have mirrors. I've heard of missionaries who gave mirrors to people and they were astounded.

Imagine living your entire life and not knowing what you looked like except perhaps what people might tell you about yourself. In fact, I heard of one woman who took the mirror and looked like this and thought that she was seeing someone behind her and said, translated into English, the missionary said the equivalent was, who is this hag that is living in this village? When we come to the word of God now, we finally have a reflection as to who we really are. And James talks about those who have two different responses.

The first is what I call the passive listener. He's the one who forgets. And James says that it is like a man, you'll notice the text, he is like a man who looks at his face in the mirror and after looking at himself goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.

Now friends, I need to just give you a little word from my heart to yours. James here is an accurate student of human nature. He uses a word in Greek that definitely means man as opposed to woman. It's just not mankind. It is man.

It is male. Because may I say that if there's anything that's true about women, it is not that they have a tendency to look into a mirror and immediately go their way and forget what manner of women they are. That's a man thing. That's one reason why James uses a man. There's another reason also is that men find it very difficult to admit who they are, much more difficult than women do. I want you to know that when a man says he's working through his pain, he may only be finding another way to really hide it.

Because we as men are not very good at vulnerability and openness. And so James says we are like the person if we simply hear the word that goes in and then we turn away from it. Another comment. When James says that the person who hears the word of God, and he says in verse 22, do not merely listen to the word, you'll notice how often he uses the word listen. And if it's all that he does, the word that is used was frequently used for an auditor. Do you know who an auditor is?

Because auditors would say, we want to come and listen to your lectures. Do you want to do the reading? No, we're just here in case it's interesting. And if you're not interesting, Starbucks is just around the corner. Yes, my friend, we live in an era when people really don't want the truth.

And if it doesn't suit them, as I've mentioned, Starbucks is just around the corner. You know, I've written a book entitled Managing Your Emotions, God's Good Gifts Gone Wrong. In this book, I discuss many different kinds of emotions.

And we could list them here, depression, disappointment, anger, love. Did you know that we are very prone to deception when it comes to love? What we want to do is to love who we want to love. And we don't take into account the consequences.

All of these are the kinds of issues that I discuss in this book. By the way, what's the difference between divine love and human love? Very important distinction. Divine love is always based on the lover, human love based on the one who is loved.

Oh, you're not the person I married. How do we handle all of these emotions? Given to us by God to enliven our lives and yet oftentimes so deceptive. The book is entitled Managing Your Emotions, God's Good Gifts Gone Wrong. Now for a gift of any amount, this book can be yours. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com. Or if you prefer, you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. Remember that running to win exists to help you make it all the way to the finish line. And we always provide resources for our listeners so that they are blessed.

The name of the book, Managing Your Emotions. Time again for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question about the Bible or the Christian life. Today's question came to us via email from Elaine, who asks, Do you believe demon possession exists today? And if so, do you believe demons can be driven out?

Well, Elaine, my answer to you is yes and yes. I believe that demon possession exists today. In fact, I think I've met people who have been possessed by demons. And sometimes there are people in our churches who come to pastors, as we've had here at the Moody Church. They come to me or another member of the pastoral staff, and they will say that I have alien spirits that haunt me, that want to control me. And oftentimes there are pastors who won't believe them. Well, here at the Moody Church, I tell our pastors that we should believe people like that. We should believe them, because I believe that there can be demon possession today. In fact, we've had some instances which, in my opinion, are rather clear where you have people who want to blaspheme Christ, and they find within themselves spirits that want to control them, evil spirits.

Well, your next question is, can they be cast out? Well, the answer is yes, as long as Jesus is Lord, and as long as we understand that he won a victory. The Bible says in Colossians chapter 2 that he disarmed all principalities and powers.

Ephesians chapter 1 speaks about Jesus as being above every principality, every power, every name that can be named, both in this world and in the world to come. People can be free of evil spirits. Now, having said all that, I think it's very important to get some counsel in this matter. I think it's important for Christians to pray together, to understand that sometimes, as Jesus said regarding some spirits, they do not go out except by prayer and fasting. Bottom line, Elaine, keep reading the word, keep studying, go to the library, perhaps go to a bookstore, find some good books on this topic, and keep trusting God for deliverance for yourself and for others. Thank you, Dr. Lutzer. If you'd like to hear your question answered on a future broadcast, go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on Ask Pastor Lutzer, or call us at 1-888-218-9337.

That's 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. Many people are deluded, seeing themselves as they want to, not as they are.

One cause can be refusing to listen to the honest critiques of others. Tomorrow, more lessons from James on self-perception. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.