“Our worship of idols on the hills and our religious orgies on the mountains are a delusion. Only in the Lord our God will Israel ever find salvation. From childhood we have watched as everything our ancestors worked for – their flocks and herds, their sons and daughters – was squandered on a delusion. Let us now lie down in shame and cover ourselves with dishonor, for we and our ancestors have sinned against the Lord our God. From our childhood to this day we have never obeyed Him.” (Jeremiah 3:22-25 NLT)
A delusion is “a persistent belief in something false typical of some mental disorders.” (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The irony to me is that many today would accuse those of us who are following Jesus as being “delusional,” and on some levels, they’re correct. What do I mean?
There are those who wrongly believe they can live their lives under the banner of the Lord Jesus, who, like the Israelites of old, follow practices and delusions that lead them to believe what isn’t true. For example, they believe they can be forgiven without repentance; however, Peter and the apostles when speaking to the Jewish high council stated clearly in Acts 5:29-31: “…We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead after you killed Him by hanging Him on a cross. Then God put Him in the place of honor at His right hand as Prince and Savior. He did this so the people of Israel would repent of their sins and be forgiven.”
Repentance leads to forgiveness. Repentance is a change of mind and heart that results in a new direction for our life that is motivated and fueled by the presence of the Holy Spirit. The forgiveness of which Peter speaks is a pardon or remission of our sin. Because of the cleansing blood of our Savior Jesus, God views us through the lens of His sinless Son, seeing us as though we’d never sinned.
R. C. Sproul reminds us: “We can invent a God who forgives everybody without requiring repentance. All such avenues are established in delusion.” To think God would restore us to a position of sonship without any regret, remorse, or intention of walking away from the sin that holds us in bondage is to be delusional. To repent of sin is to walk away from the life we were living and seek to depend solely on the Holy Spirit’s power to enable us to joyfully walk in obedience to the directives of our new Master, the Lord Jesus.
Part of the process of living a forgiven life is the formation of a new view of the world, one that leans not on our own understanding, but on the Lord Jesus who alone can give us a sanctified life. John Stonestreet helps us to see this more clearly as he writes: “What this means is that the Christian worldview is not merely something we look at in order to analyze, study, and use with non-believers. It is something we are to look through. When we do, we see the brilliance of the world God made, the beauty of it along with the truth.”
Truth is the only antidote to delusion, yet those who don’t know Jesus see us and what we believe in much the same way as we see them and what they believe. In the eyes and minds of unbelievers, we’re the ones who are delusional, but why? Largely because we believe in a God we can’t see except with the eye of faith.
That’s why it’s so critical that our relationship with the Lord Jesus becomes visible in and through the ways we submit to the will of God, driven by our dependence upon the Holy Spirit’s guidance and training. That’s essentially how we formulate and follow a Christian worldview. We filter everything we do, say, think and experience through the Holy Scriptures, through which the Truth, not only of what Jesus said, but lived, informs and transforms our lives. That’s how we avoid delusion.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 