Deception Feels Exactly Like Conviction

For four weeks I asked you one question in different clothes.

Will you receive what God sends, even when it comes on the wrong bird?

Ravens. A muddy river. New tools. A Savior an entire nation crucified for showing up wrong.

That series was about recognizing what God sends you.

This one is about stewarding what God already put in you. And before you can spend a single thing He gave you, you have to deal with the one force that keeps most believers frozen for years without ever knowing it.

Deception.

Deception Does Not Feel Like Deception

Here is the part that should stop you cold.

When you are deceived, you do not feel deceived. You feel certain. You feel loyal. You feel like you are doing the right thing.

That is the whole trap. Deception does not announce itself. It does not walk in wearing a costume and twirling a mustache. It shows up wearing the face of conviction.

It feels like duty. It feels like faithfulness. It feels like staying.

That is why people spend years in dead systems, draining relationships, and religious traps that quietly kill them. Not because they are rebellious. Because they are convinced they are being faithful.

You cannot fear something you cannot see. And by design, you cannot see this one from the inside.

The Most Devout People In History Missed It

You already know the example, because we ended the last series on it.

The Pharisees were not villains in their own minds. They were the most Scripture-literate, law-keeping, God-serving people on earth. They prayed. They fasted. They memorized the Word.

And they killed the Son of God, convinced the entire time that they were defending God.

They thought they were being faithful.

Their deception did not feel like sin. It felt like zeal. It felt like protecting the truth. The very thing they were most proud of was the thing blinding them.

If it could happen to them, drop the idea that it cannot happen to you.

Then How Do You Wake Up?

If deception feels like conviction, you cannot trust the feeling. So you stop looking at the feeling and you start looking at the fruit.

Jesus was direct about this. You will know them by their fruit.

Not by their intentions. Not by their sincerity. Not by how loyal they feel. By what is actually growing.

So look at your fruit. Honestly.

Is the thing you keep defending producing life, or is it producing exhaustion, bitterness, and a slow erosion of who God made you to be?

Is your loyalty building something, or is it just keeping you compliant and tired?

Are you at peace, or are you performing peace while everything under the surface quietly dies?

Good fruit does not lie. Neither does dead fruit. If the tree keeps producing exhaustion and stagnation, the problem is not that you need to try harder. The problem might be that you are convinced God wants you somewhere He never told you to stay.

This Is Not Comfortable. It Is Not Supposed To Be.

I am not writing this to make you doubt everything. Doubt is not the goal. Clarity is. TRUTH is.

But there is a certain kind of certainty that is not maturity. It is just a wall you built so you never have to look.

The mature move is to hold your own convictions up to the light and ask, honestly, is this God, or is this just what I have always done?

The Pharisees would not do that. They protected the picture instead of the truth. It cost them the Messiah standing right in front of them.

Do not protect the picture. Protect the truth. Even when the truth costs you the thing you have been defending.

One More Thing

This whole series comes out of the same place Ravens and Algorithms did. Recognizing what God sends is only half the walk. The other half is refusing to bury what He already gave you.

If the last series moved something in you, stay with this one. It goes to a harder place, and a better one.

Click → RAVENS AND ALGORITHMS 

Deception feels like conviction.

That is exactly why you have to check the fruit.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week I am going to tell you about a sentence God spoke to me in the middle of a transition I was fighting. It reframed how I understand every gift He has ever placed in me, and it raised the stakes on what I do with them. I have not shared it before. Do not miss it.