The Most Dangerous Liar
And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. — Romans 12:1–2 (NLT)
Most of us who have spent any time around church have heard it said: the devil is a liar. When we hear that phrase, our minds usually go to the people and pressures around us. The coworker who always seems to get under our skin. The friend who tells us one version of a story and tells someone else another. The gossip who hands us all the latest news, only for us to learn later that we were the topic of the next conversation. Or the voice that leans in after someone has fought hard for a full year of sobriety and whispers, “One drink. No one will know.” Those lies are real, and we are wise to guard against them. But there is another storyteller who is far less suspect and far more dangerous because we trust him completely. In my case, his name is Kent.
I was reminded of this while listening to a teaching pastor talk about the mindset it takes to follow God. He described two ways we arrive at what we believe is true. One is passive. It conforms to whatever is most familiar and assumes things are the way they have always seemed. The other is active. It keeps testing, keeps asking, keeps looking for what is actually true, even when that means letting go of what we thought we knew. I saw a version of this in the news recently, when a lawmaker accused a witness of lying about being at a game, only for the record to show the witness had been at a different game that same day. The accusation felt certain because it fit the story already in his head. A little more searching would have found the truth.
We do the same thing with ourselves. We build stories out of the evidence closest at hand: the class we struggled through, the habit we could not seem to break, the relationship that fell apart, the words we wish we could take back. Over time the story hardens into identity. I am not smart enough. I will always be this way. And the one many of us still carry, even after years of faith: I am not good enough for God to love me. Eventually we stop noticing it is a story at all.
This is why Paul’s words to the Romans matter so much. “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think” (Romans 12:2). The word Paul uses for transform is the root of our word metamorphosis. It is not a fresh coat of paint; it is change from the inside out. And notice where it begins. Before Paul says anything about how we think, he talks about surrender, giving ourselves to God “because of all he has done for you” (Romans 12:1). The order matters. We do not transform so that God will accept us. We surrender because He already has, and then He begins to change the way we see. Paul even says we will “learn to know God’s will,” which sounds a lot like the active mindset that pastor described: holding our old stories up to the light instead of simply conforming to them.
Earlier this week I wrote about being a work in progress, raw material God is still shaping. Transformation asks a harder question: whose view of that raw material will we believe? My own story is built from the flaws I see every day, and because I know them so well, I am tempted to think they are the whole truth. God looks at the same person and tells a different story. John put it simply: “See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1). Surrender, then, is not giving up on ourselves. It is giving up the story that says we can never be more than our worst moments and letting God’s word about us become the one we believe.
His grace was never something we had to earn or feel worthy of first. It was given freely, and it is still being given. That pastor said something I have not been able to shake: “The most dangerous lies are the ones we no longer know we are telling ourselves.” So maybe today is simply a day to listen a little more carefully to the voice in our own heads. In fact, write the lie down that you have, and include with it the truth about how God sees you. When the old story starts up again, we can pull out that paper and set it beside what God has already said about us: loved, chosen, and His.
What story about yourself have you believed so long that you no longer notice you are telling it? What might change if you tested that story against what God says is true about you?
A PRAYER
My prayer is we are thankful to God for loving us before we ever cleaned anything up. Help us notice the stories we tell ourselves that are not true, and give us the courage to hand them over to You. Change the way we think, one day at a time, until we see ourselves the way You already do: as Your children. Amen.