Deceiving Yourself

Numbers 25: 17-18

“Treat the Midianites as enemies and kill them, because they treated you as enemies when they deceived you…”

I think many people will agree that sin is an enemy. If you catch yourself committing a sin, you should put that sin to death. Don't think that if you ignore the sin, it will also ignore you.

When you deceive yourself by rationalizing your situation until the new spin on your own sin is more pleasing to your conscience, wake up and stop it.

Stopping a habitual thief or a murderer makes sense. We don’t want murder and stealing to become commonplace. But catching ourselves before we sin seems to be difficult. We don’t want to think of ourselves as sinners. We want to rationalize until we find a decent excuse for our sin.

We want to hide from the thought that we could commit sin. We’re good people. Right?

If we’re such good people, we should be on the lookout for that ugly sin that wants to make itself right at home in us. We can protect ourselves by confronting our sin.

A good way to confront sin in our own lives is to find an example of sin in the Bible and look for our version of that sin hiding in our attitudes and actions. How can we confront sin in anyone else’s life when we have that much or more in our own lives?

We can put to death the sinful attitudes in our own lives when we catch ourselves thinking about slipping into the comfortable sin we’re so used to. If you and I are going to honor the Lord this year, we have to get rid of our sin. We have to adjust our comfort level so we don’t become complacent and apathetic toward our own sin.

Be on the alert. Keep an eye on yourself this year as you try to protect yourself from self-deceit.