Daily Encounter: A Week-day Devotional by a staff of ACTS International.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

"Then we will no longer be like children, forever changing our minds about what we believe because someone has told us something different or because someone has cleverly lied to us and made the lie sound like the truth. Instead, we will hold to the truth in love, becoming more and more in every way like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church."¹

Em Griffin in The Mindchangers said, "Some early studies concerned with prejudice show that we're quite capable of reordering our perceptions of the world around us in order to maintain our conviction that we're right.

"A group of white, middle-class New York City residents were presented with a picture of people on a subway. Two men were in the foreground. One was white, one was black. One wore a business suit; one was clothed in workman's overalls. One was giving his money to the other who was threatening him with a knife.

"Now as a matter of fact it was the black man who wore the suit, and it was he who was being robbed by the white laborer. But such a picture didn't square with the prejudices of the viewers. To them, white men were executives; black men were blue-collar workers. Blacks were the robbers, whites the victims. And so they reported what their mind told them they sawâ€"that a black laborer was assaulting a white businessman.

"As human beings who desperately desire our lives to be consistent and untroubled, we'll go to great lengths to reject a message that implies we're wrong."²

As I've said before, the more dishonest we are with our inner self, the more we will distort all truthâ€"including God's Truth/Wordâ€"to make it match our twisted perception of reality in a vain attempt to justify our every thought, perception, and action while totally denying our reality and real motives.

Suggested prayer: "Dear God, please help me to be honest with myself, with you, and with others, and never twist truth to make it justify what I have done or want to do. Give me a pure heart and help me to always be honest and real about my motives. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus' name, amen."

1. Ephesians 4:14-15 (NLT).
2. Em Griffin, The Mindchangers, Tyndale House, 1976, pp. 48-9

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