Self-deceptive Strategies

1. Attention management 
Attention management has two sides. On the one hand, we manage to deceive ourselves by systematically avoiding attention to evidence against those beliefs upon which our felt well-being depends. On the other hand, we direct inordinate critical attention to evidence that opposes our cherished belief if that evidence can’t be avoided or if we think we’ll have to answer for it in public. We give it our attention, it seems, not so much to learn from it as to creatively discount it. Either way, through careful management of attention, we enable ourselves to be deceived over the long haul. Attention management, then, is the first of our self-deceptive strategies.
 
2. Procrastination
Many have agreed to take on the heart of Jesus, but they’re planning to do it later . . . much later. They’ll have the character of Jesus — just not now. For now, they’ll be, as the bumper sticker says, “not perfect . . . just forgiven.” Having received forgiveness because of the work of Jesus on the cross, they’ll live with the expectation that perfection will come to them all at once in the blink of an eye at the moment of passing from this life to the next. As a result, they procrastinate acting upon the clear biblical imperative to put on perfection. And the longer they procrastinate, the less clear it is to them that this is really what they ought to be doing anyway.
 
At this point, procrastination joins forces with attention management. It’s extremely difficult to reconcile with the witness of Scripture the belief that noticeable progress toward Christ-likeness awaits my bodily death. So I’ll need to direct my attention to those passages that emphasize themes like grace, forgiveness, and passivity. I’ll need either to avoid attention to, or explain away, those passages suggesting that I’m expected to work hard now to make progress toward Christ-likeness in this life.
 
 
3. Perspective Switching
Most of us monitor with some care the perspective others have of us. Often a decision to see the world from their perspective gives us relief from painful truths that haunt us. But we’re not happy to settle permanently into the perspective of the other. Our own perspective gives us special insight into our own circumstances and often yields the more attractive picture. So, as Sartre suggested, we switch back and forth depending on the demands of the moment.
 
4. Rationalization
Perspective switching is but one variation on what is perhaps the most recognizable of our strategies for self-deception: rationalization. To rationalize is to construct a rational justification for a behavior, decision, or belief arrived at in some other way. When we rationalize a behavior, for example, we locate reasons that would justify the behavior were they operational. We then present these reasons to ourselves and others as explaining our actual behavior. But the reasons are mere fictions. They play no causal role in the production of the behavior. One strategy for rationalizing, as we have seen, is to capitalize on the perspective of another. We find or create in those around us a perspective from which our actions and decisions are reasonable and right and we adopt that perspective.
Sometimes, though, there is nobody with the perspective our rationalizing requires. In this case, we are left to the devices of our imagination. We must construct — out of thin air, as it were — a story that satisfies the constraints of rationality and justifies our behavior or decision.
 
Instead, the mind is taken hostage by the will, and a more palatable explanation is invented.
 
 
5. Ressentiment
Crying sour grapes is one form of what Friedrich Nietzsche (and later Max Scheler) called “Ressentiment” — a re-ordering of the sentiments. We adjust our affections, sentiments, and value judgments in order to avoid severe disappointment or self-censure. When we cry sour grapes, we avoid the severe disappointment of not having what we want by convincing ourselves that we don’t really want it after all. Often the ploy for discrediting the desired object is to place inordinate value on something else instead…… Nietzsche famously attributes the Christian praise of humility and prizing of suffering to the ressentiment of the persecuted church. Since they could expect no better than humiliation and suffering, he said, the Christians re-ordered their sentiments in such a way as to praise humility and prize afflictio
 
Three forms of ressentiment:
(a) First, a generally recognized good is made an object of outright scorn for its unavailability.
(b) Second, a seemingly unavailable good is pushed to the edges of consciousness by super-valuing something else. We see both kinds of ressentiment in the various forms of Christian anti-intellectualism.
(c) In this final form, it’s not so much that there is an unavailable good creating a demand for the re-ordering of sentiments. It is rather that particular sentiments are deemed unacceptable, inappropriate, inconvenient, or otherwise undesirable. They are then recast as something other than what they are. They go undercover. They continue to operate, but they are renamed in such a way as to make them acceptable to the person who has them.
 

 -  Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, 2009

 
 

Deceiving Ourselves About Self-Deception

Philosophers, social scientists, and psychologists have long been aware of the pervasive reality of self-deception. For centuries, it has been called upon to explain various forms of irrationality and dysfunction. Interestingly, it has also been called upon to explain survival and success in a variety of contexts. Historically, few masters of Christian spirituality have failed to notice the significance of self-deception. Christian thinkers through the ages have had a special interest in the bearing of self-deception on the Christian life and the pursuit of — or flight from — God, and it has long served as a key element in the explanation of sin, moral failure, and the avoidance of God.
 
The prophet Jeremiah reminds us that the heart is deceitful above all things and asks, rhetorically, “who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). The prophet Obadiah identifies a primary motive for self-deception: “Your proud heart has deceived you . . .” (Obadiah 3). The apostle Paul explains in his letter to the Galatians how self-deception enables those who are nothing to think that they are something (Galatians 6:3)…
 
An interesting thing happened, though, with the rise in prominence of the philosophical movement called existentialism. Beginning with Kierkegaard, the existentialists (including Sartre, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others) elevated authenticity to a place of primary importance in their understanding of the virtues. Due to the writings of the existentialists and other cultural trends, the “Good Person” was increasingly understood to be the “Authentic Person.” Being true to oneself became a — or, in some cases, the — chief good. Self-deception, then, was given a promotion in the ranking of vices. What was once a derivative vice — one whose primary importance was found in its ability to facilitate other, more serious, vices — became itself the most egregious of all sins.
 
But my point is that the elevation of “authenticity” as a virtue carries with it a promotion for self-deception among the vices. So, to the degree that we value authenticity, we will be averse to the suggestion that we are self-deceived. Believing myself to be authentic — to be true to myself and to others — will be a source of significant satisfaction and felt well-being for me. But, as it turns out, being genuinely honest with oneself is often hard work. And it is at this point that life cuts us a deal. If we can convince ourselves that we’re authentic people — that we’re not self-deceived — we can have all the benefit of theft over honest toil. We can experience the satisfaction associated with saying, “Whatever else is true of me, I’m honest with myself and with others. I know myself. I’m real.”
 

- Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, 2009.

 

Acting Out Our Beliefs

Sometimes I offer my students a thousand dollars if they’ll simply believe that there is a pink elephant standing next to me at the lectern. I even give them a few minutes with eyes closed and heads bowed to work up the relevant belief. I have yet to have anyone take the deal. They know that nobody will believe them if they claim to have taken on the belief, so they chuckle at the ridiculous invitation. We all know that belief just doesn’t work that way.
 
Interestingly, though, we seem to forget that belief doesn’t work that way when we go out evangelizing. We present our friends with the rewards and punishments associated with believing, or failing to believe, that Jesus died for their sins and conquered death in his resurrection. We then invite them to bow their heads and take on the belief. When they open their eyes, we invite them to think of themselves as believers — as having crossed over from non-belief to belief.
 
It won’t be long before they’ll be aware of a certain tension between their lived experience and what they think of themselves as believing. “Why,” one might ask, “do I not naturally act as though Jesus gave his life for me? Why don’t I find myself behaving toward him the way I would toward any other living human being who suffered what he suffered to set me free?” So long as we take it for granted that we believe — after all, isn’t that what happened at conversion? — we’ll assume that the problem is behavioral. “I’m just having the hardest time acting out my beliefs,” we’ll say.
 
But with very few exceptions, no one has any trouble acting out their beliefs. You do act in accordance with your beliefs. More likely, you just don’t believe what you’ve thought of yourself as believing. Rather than trying to work up behavior consistent with what we think we believe, we should be begging with the man who wanted desperately for Jesus to free his son from the demon that possessed him, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
 

-  Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, 2009

Prayer Directs Your Goals

Reorientation and goal setting do not need to be cold and calculating as some suppose. Goals are discovered, not made. God delights in showing us exciting new alternatives for the future. Perhaps as you enter into a listening silence the joyful impression to learn how to weave or how to make pottery emerges. Does that sound too earthy, too unspiritual a goal? God is intently interested in such matters. Are you?
 
Maybe you will want to learn and experience more about the spiritual gifts of miracles, healing, and tongues. Or you may do as one of my friends: spend large periods of time experiencing the gift of helps, learning to be a servant. Perhaps this next year you would like to read all the writings of C. S. Lewis or D. Elton Trueblood. Maybe five years from now you would like to be qualified to work with handicapped children. Does choosing these goals sound like a sales manipulation game? Of course not. It is merely setting a direction for your life. You are going to go somewhere so how much better to have a direction that has been set by communion with the divine Center. 
 

-  Richard J. Foster, "Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth”

Praying "In His Name"

 Our first inclination usually is to pray in a way that fits with what we think is best, or according to the results we desire. For example, if we are in pain, or receive an unfavorable diagnosis, we will usually immediately pray for God to take away the pain or completely heal whatever is ailing us. We pray for our circumstances to change.
 
It is not wrong to pray for these things, but it would be better to pray something like this:

 
Lord, I know you have a purpose for everything you bring into my life, and my prayer is that you would be glorified in whatever way seems best. Please teach me what you want me to learn from this so that my faith will grow. Please help me to see what your sovereign purposes might be, so that I may rejoice in your plan and rely upon your grace. But Lord, if it would be pleasing to you, I do ask that you would bring relief from this pain and healing from this hurt, for this is my desire. Either way, I trust you and I pray that your will be done. I ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

This, I believe, is a healthy way to pray. It may not be perfect (I am growing in my understanding of how to pray), but it does display trust, teachableness, and reliance upon God. It also seeks to humbly accept his sovereign plan, whatever that may be. At the same time, there is no hesitation to ask God for the desire of your heart, knowing that if God’s answer is no, or not yet, God will give sufficient grace to meet the challenge.
 
Our goal in prayer is to see God glorified no matter what. Our goal is to see things his way, so that our will aligns with his. And once this happens, our prayers are filled with power. They will be answered, and with confidence we can say, “We know that we have the requests that we have asked of him” (1 John 5:15). This, my friend, is what it means to ask “in his name.”

- Eric J. Bargerhuff, The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 2012.

Church History 1: The Contrast between Free Church And Established Church

What exactly did legal establishment mean? It is so far removed from our own experience that we may not realize what an intensive role the government played in administering the churches. Typically, the state collected tithes (which all citizens were legally required to pay, whether they attended the established church or not). The state also laid out new parish boundaries, subsidized new church construction, maintained parish properties, paid clergymen’s salaries, hired and fired them, and even took measures to suppress dissenters. (Baptist preachers, for example, were sometimes jailed and beaten. Yes, here in America!) Finally, in many states, government positions were limited to church members—there were religious tests for office.

It might seem that having the government on their side would have given the established churches quite an edge, and to some extent it did. But ultimately, it weakened them. Monopolies tend to be lazy, whether we’re talking about businesses or schools or churches. The established clergy often lived like members of the gentry (the class that did not work but lived off of investments and rents), enjoying ample time for leisure activities. For example, in Scotland’s state church, which was Presbyterian, Thomas Chalmers observed that after holding worship services, “a minister may enjoy five days in the week of uninterrupted leisure.”

By contrast, the evangelical ministers were enthusiastic activists, throwing themselves into ceaseless efforts to spread the gospel. They set up additional worship services, started Sunday schools, taught Bible classes, made personal visits, established charities, and founded missionary societies. Chalmers himself later became an evangelical, after which he is reputed to have visited 11,000 homes in his Glasgow parish during a single year! Becoming an evangelical made a significant difference in one’s style of ministry.

People at the time were keenly aware of the difference in ethos. A document from 1837 (after all American churches had been disestablished), describes the vivid contrast between America’s free churches and England’s established church. Having seen both firsthand, the writer observed that legal establishment made the clergy “indolent and lazy,” since a person with a guaranteed income would never “work as hard as one who has to exert himself for a living.” As a result, the writer concluded, the Americans had a threefold advantage: “they have more preachers; they have more active preachers, and they have cheaper preachers than can be found in any part of Europe.”

A monopoly faith breeds religious indifference not only among the clergy but among members as well. This is one reason rates of religious adherence were lower in colonial days than we typically suppose. A modern analogy might be societies like Sweden where everyone is putatively Lutheran, or Italy where everyone is Roman Catholic. The level of religious participation in these countries is astonishingly low compared to that in America.

Finally, the established churches tended to be the first to drift into theological liberalism. The wealthier the church, the more likely its clergy were to enjoy social status and formal academic training—and thus also the more likely to welcome the liberalism emerging from European universities at the time. Well before the American Revolution, leading scholars at Harvard and Yale had become Unitarian. Instead of exhorting their congregations to repent and be saved, they delivered elegantly styled lectures on “reasonable religion,” with the supernatural elements increasingly stripped away. When the First and Second Great Awakenings broke out, the liberal clergy firmly opposed them, declaring themselves on the side of “Reason” against the revivalists’ “religion of the heart.”

That was a sure recipe for failure. It is a common assumption that, in order to survive, churches must accommodate to the age. But in fact, the opposite is true: In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture. As a general principle, the higher a group’s tension with mainstream society, the higher its growth rate.

- Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004

 

THE FOUR P’S

Preach - pastors must give ourselves to preaching, not programs; and that’s why we need to be teaching our congregations to value God’s Word over programs.  Preaching the content and intent of God’s Word is what unleashes the power of God on the people of God, because God’s power for building His people is in His Word, particularly as we find it in the Gospel (Rom. 1:16). God’s Word builds His church. So preaching His Gospel is primary.

Pray -  Prayer shows our dependence on God. It honors Him as the source of all blessing, and it reminds us that converting individuals and growing churches are His works, not ours (1 Cor. 2:14-16; 3:6-7).

Personal Discipling Relationships - discipling can function as another channel through which the Word can flow into the hearts of the members and be worked out in the context of a personal fellowship.

- The Deliberate Church: Building Your Ministry on the Gospel