A Test For Self-Deception

“Yesterday in Baltimore, something didn’t happen, despite convincing accounts that it did.” This is the opening line of a NPR story about a non-shooting in Baltimore. There was an incident where multiple people described police shooting a man who was running away from them. While their testimony was passionate and spoken with a degree of certainty, it didn’t actually happen. The story goes on to report the way people can takes bits of information and fill in the gaps with assumption or hearsay. Those gaps then become like memories, though they never happened.

This is damaging in civil matters, and it can be damning in spiritual matters. People can take various events and experiences from their lives, and stitch them together to create a reality that isn’t actually true, though they are convinced it is. Self-deception is real and it can be deadly.

What can this look like? Imagine a person growing up in a decent home with church being a part of their upbringing. Add to the mix some particularly convicting sermons they heard, a few powerful concerts that sang the praises of God, and for good measure stir in several unexplained coincidences and near-disaster events. None of these are necessarily marks of salvation. But when a person ties them together using the thread of personal goodness and an appreciation for the supernatural you have a tapestry of self-deception; the person thinks they are saved based on some feelings and perceptions about God.

The questions you must ask are these: does the above account describe me? How can I know what is true? While there are a variety of ways this can be examined, I only wanted to look at one today. Prayer! Prayer can serve as a marker of born-again status or the lack thereof. What makes prayer so effective as a self-deceit test? It is something that can happen every day. You don’t have to wait and see with this test. Just ask yourself what the last month looked like in regards to your prayer life.

A man named William Temple said, “Your religion is what you do with your solitude.” Robert Murray McCheyne said, “What a man is on his knees before God, that he is, and nothing more.” The reality is; what happens in the secret place will be an extremely revealing thing about you. Therefore, there are a series of questions about your pray-life that will help you discern if you are in danger of self-deception.

1) Do you pray in secret? – This the most basic question when it comes to prayer. The absence of meaningful prayer when no one is around means that there is no real relationship with God. Whatever you say you know about God is purely on the abstract level. Like quantum physics, you know it is out there somewhere, but there is little that impacts daily living and thinking.

2) Are your prayers marked by a grocery list of requests? – Prayer that is mainly about stuff and situations and health reveal what a person truly loves. The things that matter most to a person will fill his thinking, come out of his mouth, be pursued by time, effort, and money, and be prayed about. Idolatry can be fashioned in a regular prayer life as easily as it can be fashioned out of wood.

3) Do you pray mainly when things are going wrong? – Sometimes praying only exists at a low idle of spiritual lukewarmness. There is nothing really wrong in the praying, except that it is without a general fervency driven by love for souls and the glory of God. That is, until something threatens our true treasures. When what is valuable to us is at risk, then we will do whatever it takes, including fervent prayer. This is a very bad sign. If God is your true love and sin is a present enemy, then fervent praying will characterize your secret prayer life. This is not to say that true Christians don’t go through spiritually dry times, or periods of lukewarm living. But remember, we are asking about the overarching bent of your spiritual life. If you cannot find some track record of regularly having a compelling desire for God’s name to be hallowed, God’s kingdom to come, God’s will to be done, your sin to be killed, and people to be saved and sanctified then you are in danger.

4) Do you have little to no peace after you pray? – Sometimes people pray about their issues in life, but find that worry and anxiety still follow them? Why is this? It is due to the reality that those issues are too close to the heart. They still love them more than the Lord God. The very notion that they might be lost or negatively impacted in some way even after prayer means that they are still the great love. But if God is one’s true love, then peace will come because it rests upon an omnipotent God who is a father to us.

The concluding reality is this; what makes prayer so useful as a test is found in the way a heart prays or doesn’t pray about what captivates it. Is the heart captivated by the glory of God? That is the real question. For a Christian, the captivating nature of the glory of God rises above every request, every problem, and every threat and changes how they are view and prayed about. The gospel has changed everything and prayer is one of those places where it can be seen regularly and with relative ease.