OK, so maybe this is long. I hope it's worth a few minutes of your time. This is a talk I gave to our high school kids here at the children's home where I work. If only we could all see how totally designed this world is to distract us from God. Here goes.....
How the World Works
Imagine if today you heard from God Himself. I don’t know how He’d call or write or whatever, but you know you’re hearing from Him. Shocking as that would be, imagine if the message He had to give you was this: Everything You Know Is Wrong.
If I could give you all any gift in the world, it would be the gift of perspective. The gift of being able to understand the big picture about life, how the world works. I’ve heard so many people over the age of 23 or so say to me, “Boy, I really thought I had it all figured out when I was a teenager. Was I ever wrong!” You’ve already formed many views and opinions about different issues in life, issues about how you want to bring yourself joy, satisfaction, self esteem, etc.
But where did you get your opinions and views? What sources have you consciously or unconsciously trusted to plant their seeds in your mind? Do you even know? Don’t you think you’d better know?
Not caring or being cautious about this would be like finding a sandwich at the side of the road, and just scarfing it down. Where did it come from? Who made it? What’s in it? I don’t know, it just looks good, so I’m gonna eat it.
The perspective and insight I pray that you gain someday is that of how the world works, and also how the world is supposed to work.
How the world started: God made it for us, to commune with us, for us to love each other and Him in. In creating us, He gave us a most powerful tool: Free Will. He made us beings who could choose what they wanted to do. He didn’t create robots whose brains would only love Him and live as He said. That’s not love. Only if people chose to accept and love God would it be truly the kind of communion God wanted to share with His beloved ones.
I can picture Satan thinking: How can I get those creations of God away from him? What power can I use to force them to reject Him? And then it hits him: Wow, I can just get them to CHOOSE to leave! How great is that!!!
This power of choice is what Satan chose to attack when he broke away from God and wanted to take God’s beloved away from him. He showed Adam and Eve that there was a world apart from choosing God’s way, and they chose it. God’s way came first, but they chose Satan’s.
And one important thing to realize about how Satan uses this choice thing is this: He tricks us into thinking that by choosing not to follow God, that we are being our own person, that we are free thinkers and charting our own course. What you have to understand is this: When you choose to follow self, you’re really choosing to follow Satan. If he gets you to think and decide that way, you’ve fallen for his leading, and you’re his servant. You’re not the big bad captain of your own fate that you think you are.
So what’s changed over the years? What new devices has Satan come up with to thwart God’s plan for us?
Nothing. Satan’s not doing anything new now that he hasn’t been doing all along. It’s all just one theme: you can choose something other than God’s way.
So why would anyone choose other than God’s way? Because ever since Satan put that choice in front of Man and he chose door number 2, he’s had what’s called a sinful nature; a desire for things to please him.
I John 2:16
For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world.
So, all Satan needs to do is to construct a world where everything you see and hear is designed to get you to choose that human nature to please yourself.
Does that sound familiar? Isn’t that what the entire world throws at you? The things you see in the media, what you read, what other people your age say is really what brings satisfaction?
Satan is in charge of this world. God has let that happen for the time being.
What I want you all to recognize is that what you all have grown up seeing as life, the ideas that you’ve picked up from many different sources, are all part of a grand show Satan is putting on for you! (Not counting, of course, the guidance and leadership you’ve experienced towards a life of following God)
And the last thing Satan wants you to realize is that he’s doing it on purpose. He wants you to just keep on thinking you’re cool, that everything’s ok and living for what He’s tricked you into thinking is satisfaction is all that matters. He doesn’t want you to know there is another side to life, that that side came first, and that the current side is designed from start to finish to keep us blind from God’s side.
Me trying to explain this to you is what many of you experienced as you hollered at the movie screen for Anakin Skywalker not to fall for the deception of Senator Palpatine. You saw him being seduced a little at a time, and you knew the end of the story. But Anakin couldn’t see it. Right after he helps kill the Samuel Jackson character along with Palpatine, he moans “What have I done”, and is fully under the control of Palpatine.
You don’t know “the rest of the story”. You’re walking out into the street, you don’t see the car coming, and you scoff at those who are trying to tell you to stop. “ I love going out into this street. It’s never hurt me before”. And it’s all because Satan can get you to think that what you’ve grown up to think is OK is all there is. And there finally comes a time when, like for Anakin, it’s too late to go back.
And one mistake people make about thinking about this is that Satan wants us to be bad sinners. He doesn’t care what we do. We can work for the Red Cross saving lives, we can be “good people” in whatever way we want, as long as we don’t seek a personal relationship with God.
So, we’ve got this whole world out here, constructed by Satan, that parades itself in front of us and tries to get us to buy in to what it tells us is important in life, what it tells us will bring us satisfaction and peace and joy, what he tells us will make up for a sad past and give us happiness.
And the thing is, God has contacted us. God has warned us about this world and how it’s only aim is to draw us away from Him. Fortunately, that contact (the Bible) also tells us about how that Free Choice thing can be turned around and used for our benefit, to bring us back to Him. It tells us about what life can be in pursuing what I’ll call the other world, the true world, the world God intended to share with us from the start.
But we have to have open minds. We have to analyze and recognize what we think why we think the way we do, and be able to honestly compare that to what that communication from God says. Before you do that, you’re only hearing one side of the story. Have you ever made a judgment about something after hearing someone tell you about it, and then later changed your mind when you’ve heard the other side of the story? Then you know how important it is to get all the facts, especially in this case where the facts are from God and they will determine where you spend eternity.
It occurs to me that whether we follow God or Satan, we are all just sheep. Dumb sheep being led to the slaughter if we blindly follow Satan, or trusting sheep following a Shepherd who has proven He loves us over and over again.
I pray that you don’t just dismiss this, or say that you’ll get serious about it later. I don’t want you to be surprised when you stand before God and realize that yeah, it’s real.
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