We don’t need the movies to show us how much of a disparity there is between truth and lies, though the twists in plot and suspense often remind us. We all hold certain values, and if we’re honest, we might admit how often we fail to honor them. And yet, there is something peculiar about how our minds work. We can so easily bracket our own lives from an acknowledgment of how consistently we miss the mark. It is like a built-in avoidance mechanism.

The issues of self-deception and denial are more serious than we care to admit. Tendencies toward self-pity, self-preoccupation, self-righteousness, and self-aggrandizement are intense and dangerous. Or as Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr describes it: “Sin is thus the unwillingness of man to acknowledge his creatureliness and dependence upon God and his effort to make his own life independent and secure.”(1)

One of the most helpful insights I know toward sorting through truth, lies, and deception is in Scripture’s calling us out of ourselves and always towards God. We are reminded often that the human heart is more deceitful than anything else. “Who can fathom it?” asks Jeremiah. “God alone, who searches the heart and tests inner motivation.”(2)

While readily acknowledging our ability to be deceived, the gospel nonetheless places a high regard on truth, honesty, integrity, and consistency. This might be terrifying if not for the gospel’s assurance that we are united with the human Christ, and in that union, we are enabled to live lives of sacrificial love, dependence, and obedience. We are enabled to surrender our own preoccupation and distractions, sin and failures. We can acknowledge our creatureliness and dependence on God. While repentance and confession have become almost forgotten practices, we are reminded that they are necessary habits. These disciplines inform our attitude and shape our perspectives as we learn to walk in the light of Christ. Confession helps us to avoid what I call the dangers of progressive amnesia: forgetting that we are sinners saved by grace. Similarly, living lives marked by repentance helps us to overcome delusions of privileged heritage, where we think we are actually better than we are by virtue of our upbringing or talents or uniqueness. We cannot pretend that we are perfect or that we don’t need help. We are called to walk as people of the light; Christ is our only hope.

In the book of Hebrews we are given another powerful reminder of that hope: “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.”(3) Fixing our hearts and minds on Christ, on his excellencies, and on his word, will, and way, God shifts our focus and subverts the inward pull. We are reshaped by Christ.

Stuart McAllister is regional director of the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 137-138.

(2) Jeremiah 17:9,10.

(3) Hebrews 4:14-15.

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