Untitled Message 2: The Attack on Truth

Message 2: The Attack on Truth SUGGESTED PASSAGE: John 8:31-38, 42-45 31 So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; 32and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 33They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that You say, ‘You will become free’?” 34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. 36 So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know that you are Abraham’s descendants; yet you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you. 38 I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father.” 42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come on My own initiative, but He sent Me. 43 Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word. 44 You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me.” MESSAGE GOAL: The goal of this message is to help people know that even believers can come under the bondage of Satan and his lies because as our enemy, he is constantly on the attack, making lies sound believable by disguising them with a veneer of truth. This message will also show your people how to arm themselves with the spiritual weapon of God’s truth to defeat the lies of the enemy. INTRODUCTION: Juneteenth has been enshrined as a federal holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, legally ending slavery and stipulating that people who had been incarcerated in an illegitimate system were now free. However, Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, nearly two and a half years later. That’s the date on which 2,000 Union troops came to Galveston Bay and set free 250 slaves who were still operating under an old system that had been addressed so much earlier. The reason it took the message of freedom two and a half years to travel from Washington, D.C. to Texas is that what happened on January 1, 1863 was not properly communicated and implemented. The reason was that Confederate troops were still holding territory and refused to yield to the proclamation that had been made by President Lincoln. The result was that people who had been set free weren’t experiencing the freedom that had been legally declared for them. So another, greater power—those 2,000 Union troops— had to be used to bring to reality what had been established legally. Therefore, we now have this national holiday called Juneteenth in recognition of what happened on June 19, 1865 and spread across the country as a result of it. Making Juneteenth a federal holiday is our country’s way of saying that what was declared and won through conflict needs to be formally documented, recognized, instituted and celebrated. Juneteenth reminds us that there is actually something worse than being a slave, and that’s being in the bondage of slavery when you’re supposed to be, and legally are, free! Today, there is another kind of slavery that holds people hostage and keeps them from being what they were created to be. It is a slavery that holds them bound to illegitimate incarceration every bit as damaging as the incarceration of the body—and that is slavery to the lies of the devil. We know the world lies in the lap of this evil one, the father of all lies. But we’re also going to learn that even believers can tonyevans.org | tonyevanstraining.org

fall into this form of slavery, for which the only emancipation is God’s truth. Jesus gives us the clue to this in John 8:32 when he says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Truth will always lead you to freedom once you get a hold of it. But on the other hand, if you don’t have the truth, you may have to settle for being a slave—even as a believer. So let’s find out more about our enemy and his attack on the truth, and then learn how we can arm ourselves with the truth to defeat him and live in the freedom Christ bought for us on the cross. SERMON POINTS: 1. PEOPLE ARE IN SLAVERY TO SIN WITHOUT TRUTH (VV. 31-36) Our challenge as believers is to continue immersing ourselves in the truth of God’s Word, which set us free and can keep us free. Sin isn’t just a bad habit or a few little missteps. It is slavery, putting people in shackles. Jesus is the only One who can break the shackles of sin and set people free—“free indeed,” meaning “sure enough free”! 2. FREEDOM (TRUTH) AND SLAVERY PRODUCE DIFFERENT CHILDREN (VV. 37-38) Sin enslaves people who have no room for God’s truth in their hearts. Sin-enslaved people are the children of the devil, not children of the Father in heaven. This is a sobering challenge to all of us to check our spiritual parentage. 3. TRUTH HAS A POWERFUL ENEMY (VV. 43-45) Our adversary the devil not only roars like a lion, but his mouth is full of lies. Satan has been practicing his lies and deceptions since Adam and Eve were created. • Satan is still working his schemes today, which is why we need to be on guard. • Because Satan’s children were “raised” by him, they speak the same language he speaks—the language of lies. • But the power of our enemy is not the last word for us as believers. As long as we are abiding in God’s Word of truth, the enemy and his lies will find no place in us. SERMON ILLUSTRATIONS: A WARNING UNHEEDED One day a mouse living in a farmhouse saw that the farmer ordered a mousetrap. So the mouse called the chicken, the pig, and the cow together and said, “Farmer has just bought a mousetrap. You’d better beware!” But the chicken the pig, and the cow said, “That’s your problem, mouse, not ours.” The mouse replied, “But I’m trying to tell you to watch out!” But he got nowhere. However, a few days later a snake slithered across the mousetrap and got caught by the tail. Along came the farmer’s wife. She didn’t see the snake, and it bit her. She got sick, so the farmer put her to bed and decided she needed some chicken soup—for which he used the chicken! But the farmer had to go to work on the farm every day, so he had to get some people to help take care of his wife. He decided to feed his wife’s helpers ham sandwiches! So he butchered the pig to feed his wife’s helpers. Unfortunately, the farmer’s wife died. They had a large funeral, and afterward, the farmer had to feed all of these people. So he butchered the cow to feed his funeral guests. The mouse had tried to warn his barnyard pals, but they wouldn’t listen. Little did they know that even such a small thing as a mousetrap would cost them their lives. That’s the way Satan works, setting his “mousetrap” to catch us with his venomous lies. tonyevans.org | tonyevanstraining.org

STUDYING THE GAME FILM Satan doesn’t want us to live according to the values of God’s kingdom of light. The devil wants us to embrace the values of his kingdom of darkness. That’s why he seeks to deceive each of us in ways he knows we are vulnerable to, the way a football coach watches game films of his team’s opponent so he can identify and exploit the opponent’s weaknesses and increase his team’s chances of winning the game. POISON WATERMELONS A farmer got tired of the neighborhood boys coming and stealing his watermelons. After several times, he decided he would be clever about how he handled it. He put up a sign at the edge of his watermelon patch that read, “One of these watermelons is poisoned.”That’ll do it, the farmer thought, as he wedged his freshly painted sign into the ground. The problem is that the farmer underestimated the neighborhood boys. When he came out the next day, he saw that the number one had been crossed out with red paint. In its place was painted the number “two.” The farmer lost his whole crop because he could not outwit the thieves seeking to do him harm. Satan is a thief who wants nothing more than to do you harm—to poison your mind against God. If you think you are going to somehow outwit him, I would advise you to think again. Satan has been doing this too long. That’s why the only way you are going to uncover his lies in your life and reveal his plan to take you down is by taking every thought you have captive to the Word of God (2 Corinthians 10:5). You are to study God’s Word and discern what He says on any matter. And once God speaks, that’s the end of the issue. BACKGROUND, BIBLICAL HISTORY AND CULTURE: We have been accustomed to consider the Pharisees of Jesus’ day as the “bad guys,” always seeking to trip Him up and get Him in trouble with the authorities. They did that, but the fact is that the Pharisees were the conservatives of their day, the “fundamentalist Bible believers,” we could say, who professed to uphold and live by the Scriptures. The problem was that by the time of Jesus, the Jews had overlaid God’s commandments in His Law with so many of their man-made rules and regulations, that they became blind to the Law’s true purpose—and much worse, to the Messiah to whom the Law and the prophets pointed. In other words, they missed Jesus because He refused to abide by their rules and exposed their hypocrisy. SERMON LINES: This sermon will help you draw a sharp dividing line between the lies and deceptions of Satan and the truth as it is in Jesus (Ephesians 4:21). This sermon will help deepen your confidence in and commitment to God’s Word as the only fountainhead of truth. As one Bible teacher humorously said, “I believe all of God’s Word—from Genesis to the maps!” QUOTES BY DR. TONY EVANS: “God is truth by nature, so anything He says is absolutely true on everything about which He speaks. God cannot make a mistake, and it is impossible for Him to lie.” “Don’t look for Satan to show up in a red jumpsuit with a pitchfork in his hand and horns on his head. The Bible says that Saran disguises himself as an ‘angel of light,’ which is what he was before he rebelled against God and was kicked out of heaven. The devil dresses the part of your friend and talks like your friend, but he is your deadly enemy.” “One reason we are being held hostage today by all of this controversy over racism, culturalism, classism and political conflict is that we aren’t continuing, abiding in God’s Word. We may start with the Word, but we don’t abide in it.” “Say to God right now, ‘God, I thank you for the victory that I have in Christ. I will continue in your Word, meditating on it and completing my obedience to it, so the truth of Your Son can set me truly free.’”