They tell us we should live in the moment. And we should – we should enjoy here and now. But the devil wants to deceive us with the lie that this moment, is all there is that it’s all about here and now. And that’s just not true.

It’s Monday again. Mondayitis – all that sort of thing. Back at work again for most, hard getting going some Mondays isn’t it? Can I tell you? I’m always a bit excited on Mondays; new week, chance to chat with you again. By and large I look forward to Monday’s, how about you?

You see the thing for most of us who kind of work generally a Monday to Friday thing, is that the weekend is about us; not just about us, family, friends, relaxing, that’s the theory right? Of course it doesn’t always quite work out that way.

Some of us have to work over the weekend and that’s something of a sacrifice, others well, there’s running the kids to their various sporting events or music or social activities and then there’s this and that and before you know it you can look back at the weekend and think, ‘Hang on a minute, what happened to it, where’s it all gone? I didn’t get a rest; I spent the whole time racing around after other people? What about me? What about some time for me?

And pretty soon we can start resenting that. There’s something about the here and now, there’s something about missing out on opportunity enjoy now. To enjoy the moment as they say.

I mean sure there’s tomorrow, sure there’s the future, and hey there may even be an eternity but well, eternity? Forever? Nah blow that, I just want to enjoy today, live in the moment, to hell with eternity.

And that’s pretty much how things go. To hell with it, people say, give it to me today, I want everything today. I used to be like that and this whole living in today thing, the fact that there is an eternity becomes completely obscured. It’s the easiest thing in the world to live just for today and the more we want it, the more we want to enjoy what the world has to offer the more obscured the reality of eternity becomes, the more distant, the more unreal, the more implausible eternity becomes.

Now there’s someone listening today and saying to themselves, “Well yeah, I guess but that’s for non Christians”. By the way I don’t like that term non Christians, I never have, I’ve never thought of myself say as a non Buddhist although I guess I am right?

So someone’s saying that this focus on the here and now is really only for people who don’t believe in Jesus and yes most of the people in that boat focus very much on the here and now but can I tell you something? As a passionate follower of Jesus Christ, as a guy who’s decided to spend his life telling others about Jesus, the Jesus who came for me in my darkest hour, I find it really easy to get caught up in the here and now too.

Because stuff just happens, we do. We run, we work, we play, stuff and stuff and stuff and stuff and the totally biggest reality in our lives becomes the here and now; the biggest reality in our lives becomes getting the most out of today that we can. And when that doesn’t happen, when we get to the end of the day or the weekend and we look back and we feel like we’ve missed out what we experience is resentment. It should have been better, I should have got more out of it than I did.

It’s all about the here and now and can I tell you something? Our enemy the devil loves, he absolutely delights in obscuring the reality of eternity from our sight.

Today we’re continuing again in our ‘Top 10 lies the Devil Wants You to Believe’ and today is lie number 6 which is where we’re up to in the top 10, it’s lie number 6 and it says that ‘it’s all about today’ and when he combines that with lie number 1 which is ‘that the devil doesn’t exist’, he ends up playing merry hell with our heads and with our hearts and with our lives.

I don’t know if you’ve read the Book of Job in the Old Testament but it’s all about when the devil goes to God and asks His permission to ruin Job’s life. Job’s a godly man, he’s blameless, a really good guy and God nevertheless gives the devil permission to progressively take things away from Job – more and more and more and then when Job hits rock bottom the devil takes away yet more all in hope of turning Job against God.

And yet Job never forsakes God but what he does do, he goes back to God time and time and time again and asks basically, “God what is going on? God why are you doing this? God when is this going to end? God what have I done wrong?” Does that sound familiar? What’s our problem? Our problem is when we’re in those places we don’t want to be. We lose sight of the fact that God’s got a bigger thing happening.

Do you see how easy it is for us to fall for the devil’s lie that the only thing that exists, the only thing that matters is the here and now? The stuff we see, the stuff we experience and most importantly the stuff we feel.

Feelings are so important after all the advertising industry has been telling us for years now that it’s all about me, it’s all about you and so what we do is we set about making our here and now as good and as comfortable and as wonderful and as apparently fulfilling as we possibly can and at that point we’ve totally lost the plot, completely lost the plot. Completely swallowed the devils lie hook, line and sinker that there is no eternity, it’s only today that matters. Perfect, he’s rubbing his hands, gotcha. Luke chapter 12 beginning at verse 16:

Jesus told them a parable. The land of a rich man produced abundantly and he thought to himself, ‘what should I do for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I’ll do this, I’ll pull down my existing barns and build larger ones and there I will store all my grain and my goods and I will say to my soul, ‘soul you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, drink, eat and be merry.

But God said to the man, ‘you fool, for this very night your life is demanded of you and the things that you’ve prepared whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.

He said to his disciples, ‘therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or about your body or what you will wear for life is so much more than food and the body is so much more than clothing.

See Jesus is saying, guys get a grip, there’s an eternity, there’s a future and something happens, something totally awesome happens when we lift up our eyes to gaze upon heavenly things, when we open our eyes to the expansive view of eternity.

All of a sudden the trials and the tribulations we’re going through now, well somehow they fall into perspective. No longer is everything about the here and now and no longer do we live in this constant state of dissatisfaction because somehow the here and now never quite lives up to expectations.

There’s always something to rob us of the satisfaction we think we’re entitled to and that’s because the truth is that we’re living in just a small part of eternity. Again have a listen to the writer of the New Testament Book of 1 John puts this here and now thinking, this only here and now lie in sharp contrast with the truth of eternity. 1 John chapter 2, verse 15:

Do not love the world or the things of the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world for all that is in the world, the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches comes not from the Father but from the world and the world and it’s desires are passing away but those who do the will of God, they’ll live forever.

That’s the cold hard reality that one day this world and our association with it is going to pass away and yet the more the devil can dupe us into believing that that’s not true the more he’s going to rob us of our lives, here and now and for all eternity.

It’s knowing the truth, I mean really knowing the truth that actually sets us free.

At last count there were over 7 billion people walking planet earth. So if we all have the attitude “it’s all about me” – which many by the way do – then it’s not hard to see how wars break out. In fact it’s one of the devil’s top 10 lies – it’s all about … me.

There are times you know when we get things completely out of perspective, completely out of whack. I was sharing over Skype recently with a friend of mine who lives in South Africa, some of the issues around living here in Australia where I live. The traffic it’s getting pretty crowded you know and that sort of thing.

It’s funny how you can live in a fantastic place like this and sometimes you get to complaining about things and he said to me, “Berni, you know those are pretty much first world problems, over here so many of us just trying to survive, just trying to get by, just trying to scrape enough together to put food on the table for ourselves and our kids.”

And yet in that context too, even at that basic level of survival if I can put it as bluntly as that, there’s a sense of resentment, of entitlement, it’s not fair! Why is this my lot in life? Why is this so hard?

On the one hand we’re all different, different family backgrounds, different cultures, different experiences, different personalities, different outlooks, different financial situations but then on the other hand we’re all pretty much the same. It seems that it doesn’t matter who we are or where we live sometimes we get to looking at our lot in life and comparing it to the next guy’s and wondering, “what about me?”

And please the last thing I mean to do here is to trivialise the incredible suffering that some people are experiencing but at the end of the day we all come to this point of thinking, “what about me?”

You’ve been there, I’ve been there, it’s a universal condition and it’s a condition that manifests itself in the good times and the bad. The better things in our world get, the better our lives are the more comfortable we are, the more well off we are, the more it turns into an insatiable appetite for more.

I remember one social commentator a few years back talking about cocooning. Cocooning is the name given to the trend that sees individual socialising less and less, retreating into their home more, the term was coined in the 1990’s by Faith Popcorn a trend forecaster and marketing consultant. This is what they wrote:

Cocooning has been in our bank for thirty years. That’s how early we discovered cocooning and cocooning is about staying home creating a safer place around you, the garden as being the barrier. Between the garden and the alarm system being the barrier, filtration systems for water and air, how many days can I work at home? That’s cocooning.

And so what we try to do is nestle ourselves in a safe comfortable environment and don’t we just start complaining when everything doesn’t quite go our way, when the traffic in our neighbourhood gets a bit heavy, when the neighbours make more noise than they should, when anything comes along to disrupt our nice safe little oasis as Jonathon my South African friend pointed out.

Those things we complain about here in the affluent west are so out of perspective with the pervading reality for the vast majority of the worlds population who are struggling just to survive but even when we face genuine trials and I’ve faced a few of those in my life.

There was a time when I simply didn’t have anywhere to live, a time when literally I had no money in my bank account to buy food. Now I’ve never been in a refugee camp watching my child die of malnutrition, nothing as painful as that but my trials were nevertheless trials.

Even when we’re in that place we struggle with this sense of me, my rights, my entitlements, my comfort, my lot in life compared to everyone else’s. In fact it seems that our sense of me is a very strong one. It’s rooted deep in our basic survival instincts and it manifests itself in all sorts of different ways.

So there’s a good side to it but when we get things out of perspective, when we become me-centric, when we get into cocooning then it becomes dangerous. As I’ve previously observed on the program with almost seven billion me-centric people walking around planet earth at the moment it’s really not that hard to figure out why wars start is it?

We’re continuing this week in our series of top 10 lies the devil wants you to believe and today we’re looking at that lie that in my little world, I am at the centre of the universe, it’s all about me and that you in your little world you are at the centre of your universe and it’s all about you.

I know we know that’s not true but so often we end up living our lives as though it is. The very first deception of the devil over humanity involved this same notion that we are at the centre of the universe. Let’s have another listen to it and see how insidious it really is, Genesis chapter 3 beginning at verse 1:

Now the serpent was more crafty than all the other wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘did God say don’t eat from any tree in the garden?’ And the woman said to the serpent, ‘no, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, God just said, don’t eat of the fruit of the tree that’s in the centre of the garden nor touch it or you’ll die.

The serpent said to the woman, ‘you won’t die for God knows that when you eat of the tree your eyes will be opened and you’ll be like God knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make her wise she took of it’s fruit and she ate and she also gave some to her husband who ate with her.

Do you see what happened? The way the devil, disguised as a serpent, got Eve to take the apple was to convince her that her need, her desire, a desire incidentally which she didn’t seem to have until the devil fed it to her, her desire to be like God, to eat the good fruit, to be elevated, promoted, satisfied, whatever you want to call it her desire came above God’s will.

She put it before her obedience to God despite the enormous blessing that God had already given her by making available every other living thing in the garden for her and hubby to throw in the wok for dinner tonight and it’s exactly that lie that the devil feeds us in good times and in bad.

Mate you’re entitled, you deserve it, you should have the best, you should. Got it? Recognise it? Then remember it. The next time you’re feeling sorry for poor little old you, the next time you imagine that you’re lot in life just ain’t fair when compared to everyone else’s, please remember the insidious lie the devil’s feeding you.

Can I tell you something? I don’t know why great tsunami’s hit Japan nor Indonesia nor Thailand, I don’t know why some people suffer so much and why some don’t, I don’t know why some parents give birth to a beautiful child who in its twenties contracts schizophrenia and they have to look after that child into their old age.

I don’t know those things but what I do know is that sometimes life dishes up some stuff that doesn’t seem fair and other times we have to live through some stuff that we cause through our own disobedience just like Adam and Eve ultimately did but this one thing I do know, that when it comes to suffering God didn’t even spare His own Son.

When it comes to loving us He paid the price of suffering and death so that we might live and when it comes to His lot in life He accepted it in love and did what He had to do no matter what the cost to Him to obey and to honour His Father in heaven.

Hey next time you’re feeling sorry for yourself, next time you’re being fed this lie by the devil, the lie that the devil says it’s all about you may you remember Jesus Christ in that garden in Gethsemane as He struggled with the suffering He was about to face and yet ultimately He said to God:

Father not my will, let your will be done.

Have you ever had the devil on your case – and you just know it. His temptations are so powerful. He’s knocking you around so much. It’s easy to start believing that he’s just as powerful … just as powerful, as God. But that’s just not true.

I’ve often wondered what the world would be like if rats were as big as cats, or if cockroaches were as big as a pet dog. Have you ever wondered what the world would be like or how your world would change?

It’s not a nice thing to think about is it? Just imagine a rat in your house the size of a cat or a cockroach in your house, in your bedroom the size of a dog. They’d be big and nasty and ugly and scary and frightening and very, very dangerous things to be around wouldn’t they? I mean if a cockroach could be the size of a dog, imagine the power in its jaws. If cockroaches were as big as dogs I think I’d have bars on my windows and doors, you’d have to otherwise they’d be able to kill you.

Okay enough of that, fortunately God was smart enough to make sure that that wouldn’t be the case. I know in some places rats are pretty big and ugly and they can gang up on a cat or a dog but in the main Gods put things in pretty good order and perspective.

He’s created a pecking order in the animal kingdom that by and large makes it a pretty safe thing although I know there are exceptions, I don’t think I’d like to run into a grizzly bear in North America or a polar bear in the Arctic, for sure but cockroaches, disgusting disease carrier though they are, fortunately are nice and small. Same with rats, they’re manageable, I hope I haven’t given anyone nightmares.

Why are we talking about this stuff? Well quite simply for this reason, because this is exactly the sort of nightmare the devil wants you to believe. How so you may well ask?

Well as we continue in our series called ‘The Top 10 Lies The Devil Wants You To Believe’, one of the big ones is that he is as big and as powerful as God. As if that were true. Imagine the devil was as powerful as God and what was really happening in this world was that the two of them were slogging it out to see who was going to win.

If that were the case, well you and I would just be like corks tossed around in a wild stormy ocean. You and I would be completely out of control, do we end up with eternal life or is the devil going to win? It would be like letting a cockroach loose in your house that was the size of your pet dog, no actually it would be worse than that, it would be like living in a cage with a cockroach and a dog fighting it out not knowing how it was going to turn out, which one was going to win.

Can you imagine? I mean can you just imagine living your life like that? So why do so many people live their lives like that? Why is it that so many people believe in this Jesus and yet they live their lives in fear? They live their lives feeling condemned. They live their lives not really knowing in their heart of hearts whether they are forgiven, whether God does love them, whether they’re blessed or cursed, free or chained, right with God or condemned by Him?

Why do people live like that? Well I’ll tell you why, because someone has dropped this idea in their heads that the devil is just as strong and just as powerful as God; that life is really a battle between the two equal yet opposite forces of good and evil, God and devil.

That view of the world is called Dualism, problem is you won’t find it anywhere in the Bible. It’s just this idea, this false idea, lie, that someone … someone has dropped on our heads. Gee I wonder who that could have been?

See this is one of those lies that on the one hand in the cold hard light of day you ask someone who believes in Jesus whether they believe this lie and they’ll tell you, “No, no, no! No way!” But come on, how often do we find ourselves living our lives as though it was true? How often have you struggled with a sin and thought to yourself, “There’s no way I’ll ever overcome this one, I just have to live with it, I just have to accept that in this particular department of my life the devil has won?” Well?

Today we’re going to deal with this lie once and for all. Are you ready? The well accepted narrative of how the devil came into being comes to us in Isaiah chapter 14. It was actually written initially about the king of Babylon but I and most others accept that this is the narrative of the devil’s rise and fall as it were. Have a listen, Isaiah chapter 14 beginning at verse 12:

How you have fallen from heaven O day star son of dawn. How you are cut down to the ground you who laid the nations low. You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven, I will raise my throne above the stars of God, I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphir, I will ascend to the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the most high.

But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the pit. Those who see you will stare at you and ponder over you. Isn’t this the one who made the earth tremble and shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew it’s cities, who would not let his prisoners go home?

All the kings of the nations lie in glory each in his own tomb but you, you are cast away, away from your grave like loathsome carry on clothed with the dead. Those pierced by the sword who go down to the stones of the pit like a corpse trampled underfoot. You will not be joined by them in burial because you have destroyed your land, you have killed your people.

Pretty picturesque language isn’t it? There it is, Satan’s narrative from beginning to end. He saw to lift himself up to make himself equal to God and as a result he will be destroyed. That’s his ultimate end to be destroyed, read the Book of Revelations, he ends up with his demons in a lake of fire.

An angel created by God who fell and has fallen to the depths of depravity because he sought to raise himself up to be equal with God. He tried to be the equal and opposite force and could not be.

Sure he’s someone clever, someone wily but someone who’s living out his own lie and he wants us to believe that same lie, that he is equal with God. He wants to perpetrate that lie in my life and he wants to perpetrate that lie in your life.

When Jesus sent seventy disciples out to do amazing things among the people they came back just stunned at the power of God that they’d seen at work through them. Luke chapter 10 beginning at verse 17:The seventy returned with joy saying, ‘Lord in your name even the demons submitted to us’ and Jesus said to them, ‘I watched satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightening. I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy and nothing will hurt you.

Friend that’s the truth, it comes from Jesus’ own mouth and when Jesus speaks the devil has to submit because Jesus is the Son of God, Jesus has the power and the authority, Ephesians chapter 1 beginning at verse 20:

God put this power to work in Christ Jesus when he raised him from the dead and seated him at the right hand in heavenly places far above all rule, all authority, all power, all dominion and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.

And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the Church which is the body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

And as Paul writes elsewhere in Corinthians chapter 2, verse 15:

Jesus disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them at the cross.

Friend, that’s the truth. Jesus has won, the devil is a lie. The devil can never be equal to God because he is under the dominion of Jesus Christ just like every other living thing. The devil believes his own lies and he wants you and me to believe them too.

Well let’s not, let’s choose not to believe them anymore … anymore than a cockroach the size of a dog, anymore than a rat the size of a cat because they’re no more believable or plausible than that.

The next time you feel defeated, the next time the devil’s got you duped into believing that he’s just as powerful as God again, the next time you can’t see a way out may the Holy Spirit remind you that we are more than conquerors through Him who loves us. No matter how compelling, how convincing, how powerful a lie this lie may seem, a lie is a lie and this one that the devil is just as powerful as God is just another lie in the devils long list.

Following Jesus is hard sometimes. It’s meant to be. Jesus said it would be. And then the devil comes along and adds just one word to that and turns it into a lie. He tells us that following Jesus is too hard

Many, many people have spent a life time on yoyo diets. Their weight goes up, it goes down, goes up, goes down and eventually they just give up and decide they have to live life fat. I used to be one of those, these days I’m something of a shadow of my former self. The problem seems to be their willpower, actually it’s not and in a few months we’re going to spend some time on this program to discover what the real issue is.

So the Holy Grail, if you will, of the multi-billion-dollar weight loss and fitness industry is how to lose weight quickly without really trying. You see it now not just in the wealthy west, you see the whole ‘overweight’ thing happening as an epidemic in developing nations as well. It all has to do with one substance, a substance that is in just about every food that we eat but a substance that you won’t discover in the Bible. I digress, it’s for another time.

The effect however is that people struggle with their weight. Most lose the struggle, give up, get cancer, die of heart attacks and strokes or succumb to complications around Type 2 diabetes. Diabetes is what killed my father and I have to tell you it was a horrible way to go.

The problem isn’t that people don’t want to lose weight. I’m speaking here from first hand knowledge, most of my life I have been seriously overweight. I knew all the consequences and as personality types go I had a lot of self discipline, a lot of self control. The problem is you can’t live life as a constant struggle.

If your body’s saying to you ‘eat’ and you’re constantly having to say ‘no’ over and over and over again every day of your life, what happens is eventually you get tired of that; it’s just too hard to live your life like that.

I mean you’re out with friends and they’re handing around those nice salty, cheesy, fattening things or those sweet, creamy, yummy things and everybody else is tucking in. Eventually, it doesn’t matter how strong you are, how strong willed you are, how much self discipline you have, you’re going to break, we’re going to give in right?

Anybody who has ever struggled with their weight knows exactly what I’m talking about. If you happen to be one of those skinny freaks who seems to be able to eat anything without gaining weight, hey well God bless you, but the rest of the 99% of us we aren’t. We walk past a fish and chip shop, take in a deep breathe, ooh that stunning aroma and just two or three times and you know what happens? We seem to put on two pounds.

See the constant struggle wears you down, the constant battle is exhausting and eventually you give up. It’s not that we lack will power so much it’s just that we’re tired of living that and so we’re back on the odd bit of cake here and there and the odd chocolate bar, the odd ice cream and before you know it you’re back to being the size of a house. Is anybody with me today?

What we need, what we really need is a way of changing what we want to eat. What we really need is a way of changing our appetite so that we don’t want to eat all the stuff that makes us fat. What we need is a way to regulate our appetite so that when we’ve eaten what our body needs we decide we’re full and we stop eating.

Now think about this, if we could change our appetite, if we didn’t have to exercise self control anymore, well it would be easy. You only need to exercise that muscle of self control if you have to deny yourself of something you really, really want.

What if, when it comes to eating, you could look at ice cream or chocolate or whatever it is you desire and just not desire it? Losing weight and sticking to a healthy weight would cease to be a diet, it would cease to be a sacrifice, it would cease to require huge bucket loads of self control and maintaining your weight would be the most natural thing in the world.

It turns out that that’s how God created us in the first place and it’s because of the huge volumes of just one substance that’s been introduced into our diets just over the last half century or so, in my lifetime that our appetites are whizzing off out of control.

So we’re going to talk about that another time but the reason that we’re talking about it today is that we’re in the middle or at least towards the end of a series of messages that I’ve called ‘The Top 10 Lies The Devil Wants You To Believe’ and the one we’re going to talk about today is that it’s just too hard to follow Jesus, it’s like it’s just too hard to maintain our weight.

Jesus sets the bar too high and it requires too much self control, after all Jesus Himself said this, Matthew chapter 7 beginning at verse 13. He said:

“Enter through the narrow gate for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction. There are many who take that but the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life and there are few who find it.”

They’re Jesus own words and again He said to His disciples, Luke chapter 9 beginning at verse 23. He said to them:

If you want to become my follower then deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.

Jesus said that and so, so many people decide to follow Jesus and the going gets tough and it gets hard and harder and harder and harder and the devil comes along and sits on your shoulder and tells you, “You see, it’s like that yoyo diet thing, you can’t win, you can’t live the rest of your life struggling like this”.

And up to this point the devil is absolutely right. But then he continues on and whispers, “Jesus set the bar too high, just give up, just let go, just stop trying to live up to something you can’t live up to. Go through the wide gate, take the easy road.

And the thing is when you’re tired and you’re exhausted and you’ve been doing things so hard that second bit is so tempting, it’s so easy to turn around and take the easy road, have you noticed? But the problem is, the problem is that it leads to destruction.

So here we are, we know the truth, we’re faced with this dilemma in our exhaustion and the devil is starting the hand around those cream treats with icing sugar all over them, ah man they are so easy to swallow.

What’s the answer? Well the answer is Jesus; the answer is that Jesus has already provided a way to change our appetite. He’s already provided a way to change our hearts and that’s the thing, just like the whole eating diet thing, if we could change our appetite, if we can change the desires of our heart we need a whole bunch less willpower.

Willpower becomes a now and then thing in those really tough moments not a 24X7 thing. Listen to this fantastic truth, I know it’s going to set a few people free today, Philippians chapter 2, verse 12:

Therefore my beloved just as you’ve always obeyed me not only in my presence but also much more in my absence, it is God who is at work in you enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

The point Paul’s making here is that we don’t have to struggle because God is at work in us enabling us both to will and to work. Did you pick that up? ‘to will and to work for his good pleasure’. Just drink that in.

You know what I’ve discovered? The more time I spend alone with Jesus each morning the more He changes my appetite, what I want, my will. It used to be really hard for me not to get angry with people all the time. You know these days 99% of the time it’s not; it’s easy and getting easier because the Spirit of God is at work with me. I don’t want to get angry anymore, I want to do stuff that’s going to bless people.

He’s changed my heart, He’s changed my will and my desires and yes it involves taking up my cross, yes some days it’s hard, some days it hurts, some days it costs and it feels like we’re losing. Point is it’s a whole bunch easier because I’m not fighting it so much anymore because God has done and continues to do a work in my heart to change my will.

It’s not about how hard we work, it’s about how close we are to Jesus; how much time, how much sway we’ve given Him in our hearts. Then when the trials come we have the courage, we have the power, we have the desire to do it His way, end of story.

In this world, the new credos, the by line of today’s generations is that pretty much, anything goes. If it feels good do it. There aren’t any consequences. Not today. Not ever. Oh really?

Man it’s Friday again, where do the weeks go? And we’re almost at the end of a series that I’ve called ‘The Top 10 Lies The Devil Wants You To Believe’. So what are the 10 top lies? Well here are the first nine we’ve already talked about.

Lie number one, that the devil doesn’t exist.
Number two, that God doesn’t exist.
Number three, that Gods Word isn’t true.
Number four, that you aren’t who God says you are.
Number five, that you’ve really blown it this time.
Number six, but it’s all about now.
Number seven, that it’s all about you.
Number eight, that the devil is as powerful as God and
number nine that we looked at yesterday on the program, that following Jesus is just too hard.

It’s quite a list and it’s not finished because today we’re going to look at lie number ten in the devils hit parade. And lie number ten is this, that what you do doesn’t matter. There are really no consequences.

Now before you think me a bit loopy for talking about the devil just consider what God’s Word has to say about him and in fact his ultimate end. Revelation chapter 2, verse 9:

The great dragon was thrown down, the ancient serpent who is called devil and satan, the deceiver of the whole world, he was thrown down to the earth and his angels were thrown down with him.

He is the deceiver and as much as he tries to hold a gun to our head his ultimate end is complete destruction. But in the mean time he wants to drag as many people down with him as he can and so he feeds us with this lie that what we do really doesn’t matter, it doesn’t really have consequences.

You see it all around. We live in a world where anything goes, where in order to sell us their wares advertisers tell us whatever they can just to get us to part with our money. Now look I don’t blame them, the economy is what makes the world go round right? They’re just doing what everyone else is doing right? It’s free enterprise right?

I was in the supermarket the other day, I picked up a box of popular breakfast cereal, it’s promoted on TV as an energy food, shows mum feeding it to her young son when the kid’s just small and then to the same boy when he’s a strong athletic teenager, the sort of son every mother would love to have.

I looked at the little panel that tells you what’s actually in this cereal, it was 33% sugar by weight – one third! Consider this, in the early 1900’s obesity was almost non existent, there were some, but very few people who were grossly overweight.

Today it’s an epidemic and last night on the news on TV I heard that generation Y, which is my daughters generation, by the time they’re in their late 40’s, early 50’s if they keep consuming sugar in their food and drink at the rate they’re doing it now around 15 to 20% of the population of this healthy sports loving nation we call Australia, that’s millions of people, will have contracted Type 2 diabetes. Huh, do you see the link?

On the one hand we’re being told that anything goes, that everything’s okay – it is, do whatever you want, you deserve the best – and yet there are dire consequences. We don’t like to think about those let alone talk about them do we?

Now that’s a practical example. What about the way we live our lives? You might recall if you were able to join me last week when we kicked this series off, the devils ten top lies that he wants you to believe, the number one lie was that the devil himself doesn’t exist.

It turns out that in a comprehensive study conducted by the respected Barna group in the US about the same number of people, almost 80% believed in the existence of an all powerful God, an all loving God, the same number disbelieved the existence of the devil. It kind of blows you away.

So if the vast majority of those who believe in God disbelieve in the devil then you can see how easy it is for him, the devil that is, to fundamentally and powerfully entrench this ‘anything goes, do it if it feels good, no consequences’ lie in the very fabric of our social consciousness, in a way we promote breakfast cereal for goodness sake, in the way we promote anything and anything goes approach to sexuality, in the way society as a whole has come to a point of vociferously defending a person’s right to choose obvious sin.

If I just bobble along through life doing my own thing as long as I don’t really hurt anyone else too much, I mean seriously injure them, then pretty much what I do with my life – my money, my emotions, my desires, my sexuality, my time – hey, that’s my business buddy. Galatians chapter 5, verses 19 to 21:

Now the works of the flesh are obvious. Fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissentions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing and things like those. I’m warning you (says Paul) as I warned you before those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Now we want to create somehow a hierarchy of sin in our minds, well you know this one is much worse than that one, and depending on who we are and how we’ve been brought up and what the moral framework of our parents was and how much of that actually stuck in our psyche we’re going to have different views of which ones in that list are the really bad ones.

The others, well you know, they’re not really that serious. Adultery, well that one’s really, really bad but the odd quarrel, come on, we all do that. Sorcery, well if you’ve been brought up in a Christian home all your life the very notion of sorcery, the occult, witchcraft, is going to make your skin crawl and give you a horrible cold feeling inside.

But look at the list, right next to sorcery come enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissentions, factions and envy. Just look at the list, the sharp juxtaposition position of really bad sins against the not so bad ones from our perspective, just look at that list again from a different perspective, God’s perspective.

Sin is sin and sin has consequences, full stop, end of story and when you say it like that doesn’t it stand in such contrast, stark contrast to the anything goes lie that the devil has brilliantly, cleverly, insidiously woven into the very fabric of our 21st Century mindset.

And my friend consequences … there are serious consequences. Here’s Jesus on this very same subject, listen carefully to His words:

Just as the weeds are collected and burned up in the fire so it will be at the end of the age, the son of man (That’s Jesus) will send his angels and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and evil doers and they will throw them into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Now there’s an answer to that terrible dilemma, there’s one way, just one way to avoid that fate and no it’s not by working hard, it’s not by pedalling harder; it’s not by doing the things that will get us into Gods favour because you and I, everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The one way, the one answer is Jesus.

By trusting Him, the price He paid for my sin and yours on that cross so that we can be fully forgiven. The consequences of not taking that step, the consequences of not believing in Jesus and trusting fully in Him are truly horrific. I don’t care what the devil says, you feed your son that sugary breakfast cereal and you’ll produce a fat unhealthy young man.

You keep living your life with that ‘anything goes’ mentality believing the lies of the devil then you’re going to end up with a terrible alternative. That’s it, no ifs, no buts, no maybes and yet the moment we give our lives completely, fully to Jesus we have the free gift of life. 1 John chapter 5:

And this is the testimony. God gave us eternal life and this life is in his son. Whoever has the son has life; whoever does not have the son of God does not have life.

Maybe that’s why they call this news about Jesus the Good News.