Eph 4:14   Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.

 

We live in a pluralistic world, a world where anything and everything seems to be all right – except in God's sight! We've come into this place as a society because we have abandoned the Lord and therefore we lost the one and only fixed moral base that is there. Take away the Lord and you have no fixed moral base. Without the Lord, who is to say what is right?

 

That was the state that the apostle Paul was warning the Ephesians against. Our bookshops today are filled with shelves of self-help books, teaching that says, YOU can do it! They often help in small ways but they can also lead us astray, deceiving us into thinking we can cope on our own. We can't, we need God.

 

Then there are people selling us self assurance through a whole variety of things – through shares, policies or who knows what, that make us think we are more secure. Yesterday we considered the people of Edom who were deceived into thinking this. It is deception! The only real security comes from knowing the Lord, from relying upon Him, from trusting Him as one of His children saved by the blood of Jesus and empowered and directed and guided by His Holy Spirit. In this, and this alone, is security and anything else is deception.

All the other ideas that society puts before us, ways of thinking better about ourselves, ways of rising up the social ladder, ideologies that see the world through different eyes, all these sorts of things, if they don't start with the Lord God Almighty, the Creator of all things, the God of the Bible, are deception because they are false, inadequate in some way, because they lack the Lord's perspective.  Let's not get conned and swayed backwards and forwards by such thinking.