we open our Bibles to Luke chapter 12. We're going to read the first three verses again. starting with verse one. In the meantime, when an innumerable multitude of people had gathered together so that they trampled one another, he began to say to his disciples, first of all, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For there is nothing covered which will not be revealed, nor hidden which will not be known. Therefore, whatever you have spoken in the dark will be heard in the light. What you have spoken in the ear, in the inner rooms, will be proclaimed on the housetops. May the Lord bless the reading of his word. Let's bow our heads in a word of prayer. Our Father, we thank you so much just for the opportunity to come to your word. Lord, that we can hear from the very words of heaven, from the King of heaven, that when we read this word, we are hearing Your voice. Father, we just ask that as Your word goes forth, Lord, that it would do what You have sent it out to do. And Lord, that You would send it to do much. May it break our hearts. May it reveal our innermost secrets. And Lord, may it bring us closer to You. Father, we thank you so much for what you have done. In Jesus' name, amen. Thank you. You may be seated. We have been working our way through the book of Luke and we have just finished Luke 11 with an entire chapter on, almost an entire chapter on the Pharisees. And Jesus has been very clear as they have rejected him, this is his last clear, loving, and harsh warning to them. It concludes with the judgments they are under, and it is definitely harsh. But I just remind you again of what an awful thing it is when truth is lost, when you are in a position where you no longer know what is truth, and you have been deceived, and you are floating in darkness and deceit. That is such a dangerous thing, spiritually even more than physically. It's dangerous physically to be out in the night, in the dark on a night when you don't know where you're going, but it's even more spiritually when you don't know where you're going. So this is loving when Jesus deals with a rebuke like this. There is a love there as He is showing them what is coming upon them and calling them out to consider it. He then comes to this where he now warns his disciples. He has dealt with the Pharisees and yet the disciples are in danger too. And whether or not they were talking about something that sparks some of this conversation, we don't know all the details. There's a lot of details that the Gospels don't cover of their daily travels, of where they went. This appears to have taken place or at least started in the boat on the way to Bethany. He's left the group that he was with. They've taken to ship. They've moved about. Jesus has warned them about the leaven of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians. We see that in Matthew and Mark. The disciples were initially confused. They thought he was talking about this because they had forgotten to take bread. They were a little bit too literal. And Jesus had to remind them that he had just fed the 5,000 and the 4,000 and that he had created bread from nothing. And then they understood that it was the doctrine he is referring to. Here in Luke, it's slightly different. We get a little bit more of an emphasis from Luke. He talks about it being hypocrisy. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul talks about it, and he says, Now obviously, all of these, this is an analogy, a metaphor when he uses leaven. It is some sinful practice, teaching, attitude that if you're not careful, it infects everything around it. Just like when you put leaven in a bread, you mix it in and you almost don't see it as you're mixing. It appears to have gone away. And yet as it spreads out throughout the bread, it just continues to permeate until the whole lump is leavened. And this is what Jesus is warning about them, that there are things. Now again, this is not to say that there's a disagreement in Scripture. What we're actually seeing is a larger conversation with bits and pieces taken over time as this conversation goes on. and different focuses as Luke takes a section that neither Matthew nor Mark picked up on. They both picked up on the disciples' lack of understanding and Christ's rebuke of them and reminding them of the miracles and Luke just skips right over all of that and he goes into a second section of teaching that we don't have in any of the other three Gospels. This is the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. They had just claimed to be worshiping God, and they were just planning on how to destroy Jesus, who is God. This is probably part of what's beyond that. Now, I thought before we did this, there's one thing I would like to just point out. It seems to me that it fits here. So just give me permission to kind of take it and look at this. Occasionally we look at a section like this and we try to understand scripture a little bit more. And one of the verses I often go to is Psalms 119, 160. The sum of your word is truth. That's in the ESV or the NAS. New King James and Old King James read just a bit different. It says the entirety of your word or of your commandments are true. I really prefer the ESV in this one where it says the sum of your word is truth. You've got truth when you can get it all to agree. When you can get it all to agree. And this is even why when we looked at Levin, I didn't just stop here. I didn't just look at it. You know, he defines the Levin here as hypocrisy. But because Matthew and Mark define it as the doctrine of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and Mark defines it as the doctrine of the Herodians, I felt we had to go deeper into that. We had to look at it. And I just wanted to point out that when we have multiple verses on a single subject, sometimes we think of them as or verses. Let me give you an example. In John 15, it says if, this is I am the vine, you are the branches. It says if you abide in me and my words abide in you, you will ask what you will and it will be done for you. So this is a verse on answer to prayer and the prerequisite is that the word of God abide in us. Now, if you go to James 5, it talks about if anyone is sick or troubled among you, let him call for the elders of the church and the prayer of faith will save him, will heal him. And now we have what appears to be an or, the prayer of faith. And if we look at I think it's 1 John, it says, if anyone prays in the will of God, he will get the petition that he's asked for. And then we have several times in the end of John, not his epistle, but his gospel, where it says, if you pray in the name of Jesus, he will give you what you have desired. And we can take those and we can look at them as an or, I think that's wrong. I think each one gives us a fuller picture of the same truth. Now let me show you how I would look at this. First of all, if we just go back and we praying with the Word abiding in our heart, that seems to be a pretty clear understanding. We read the Word, we abide in Christ, we read the Word, and we let that Word abide in our heart. That becomes the guiding principles of our life. Then we have the prayer of faith, and you say, well, how does that tie in? Well, Romans 10, 17. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by? The Word of God. So you see, there is a tie. We have faith, not because of some emotional thing we work up, but because God promised it, we read it, and we heard the voice of the Lord through the scriptures, and we said, this is true. I can base my life on that. So that's the prayer of faith. Then you go to praying in His will, and you say, well, how do we know His will? Well, it's given to us in the Word of God, is it not? His commandments, His character, His guiding principles. And then you have praying in His name. And what does praying in His name mean? Well, that's, if you think about it, I can come up with a couple of examples that we might understand from maybe older days. You can remember from like a story of the Middle Ages where a herald would come and say, in the name of the King, I command. or even from the Bible, you can remember Caesar Augustus. Each man, you know, he sent out a census and he declared, and you did not hear Caesar say this, but you heard the representatives of Caesar say, in the name of Caesar, Each man is to return to his own city for a census. So Joseph and Mary get up and they leave and they go to Bethlehem. A judge might declare at the end of the trial, by the power invested in me by the state of Wisconsin, I sentence you to, and he would declare it. Now, that is praying in the name and it is controlled and confined to the laws and the character of the ruling authority. You don't get to just ask for anything. You know, in James 4, there's a verse that says, we have not because we ask not. And then the next verse says, you ask and you don't receive because you ask amiss that you might consume it in your lusts. So when you're praying for your own personal desires, and it actually calls that strong desires, lusts, Lord, I just need a new truck. I need a new truck. I don't want an old one. I need a 2025. You know, that might appeal to you and me personally, but it's not gonna appeal to God. And God does not promise to answer that prayer. That's not praying in His name or praying according to His will. It's outside of the confines of the law and character of God. It is when the ruling authority is observed and you are speaking in their name, then you can use that name to bind, punish, or set free. You know, there's some really interesting verses in church discipline where The church in Peter, it says, has the keys to open and close, literally, the gates of heaven. And you're like, how can that happen? And some churches actually believe they have that power. I believe what that is is that we declare, there's actually another verse, I found it the other day, I can't remember what it was, but it's the keys of knowledge. We declare the truth of God's word. And as people accept that truth and as they stand, it's as if we were opening the door to them so that they can follow God correctly. And as people reject that truth and disappear and turn away into sin, you think of 1 Corinthians 6 and the man that, I don't know if it was 6, but the man who's in sin in the church and had to be dealt with. And Paul says, you know, I've heard about this and even though I'm not there, I've judged him already. He's in immorality. It's clear. It's well known. It's flagrant. He's sleeping with his stepmom. Put him out of the church. And they do. They put him out of the church. And what they're telling him is not that you cannot be saved, he actually will repent and come back, but they're telling him that where he is right now is outside of the will of God. He is in sin, it is clear, it is vagrant, and it is dangerous. He's not showing. evidence of following the Lord, of having the true light inside of them. So this again is, you know, what it means to pray in the name of the Lord. And you see this, how all of them fit together. They're not really ORs, they're AND verses. You can look at each one and it explains a different part of that same picture. of how you pray in the will of God, in the character of God, in the name of God, with His Word abiding in you, in faith because you have the Word of God strengthening your faith and giving you a promise to claim. All of these fit together. They tie together. And when you get all of them together, you have found truth. You have found a rock-solid nugget of gold that you can mine for truth. When you start to pull them apart and make them ore, you can push them to areas where, you know, as long as you have this formula, I can get that new truck. No, you can't. God will not change, you know, based on what you try to make Him say. God is who He is. He is God. He is creator. You are a creature. So this is important. And we see this, you know, with the leaven. And we looked at this last week. I don't know if I did quite as in-depth in bringing it together, but we see this with Levin, and that's why we looked at all of them, so that you can get this understanding of where Levin is used in the Bible, what it means, how it's always this sinful, I love Paul's 1 Corinthians 5, malice and wickedness. And he compares that to the sincere worship of sincerity and truth. You know, a heart and a mind of truth before God. It's the opposite of that. And you think of the opposite of sincerity, and that is literally what hypocrisy is, is it not? It's having words with no sincerity. You really believe something here, but when you're out here in front of other people, you're saying something totally different. And so today we want to kind of pick up on this idea of the hypocrisy, because verse two and three is part of the teaching that we don't get in the other Gospels. And Jesus says this in other places, but it's not recorded in the same lesson here, except by Luke. Now, hypocrisy, as most of us know, was a term from their days meaning to be an actor, to be two-faced. It meant to have an outward appearance that when you were in play, in a drama, you looked like something you weren't and you portrayed a character who you weren't. Just, you know, literally a drama or a play. And it became a term that was commonly associated also with how people behaved. That they were a hypocrite. They were two-faced. They would say something to your face and something else behind your back. And this is so tempting for people, is it not? And the Pharisees were were prime examples as they talked about how they were righteous before God and they lived this life and they did their fasting. And Jesus would point out, you do your fasting in front of men to be praised by men. You make your prayers on the street corner so that you may be heard by all. You know, if you want to really pray to God, go in your closet. Don't let others know what you're doing. And if you're going to fast, fast in your closet. Fast to the Lord. And why? Because if you really are doing this for God, you don't care if anyone else knows. You want God to be the witness. And he gives us the promise that if you do this and your heart is right, God will reward you openly. And that is a promise worth holding to. God will reward you openly. And the disciples were probably in danger of this as well. All of the dangers of false teaching are there. In fact, as you go through the end of From here to the end where Jesus is crucified on the cross, you see the disciples struggling more and more with their desire to be first in the kingdom of God. I can't even tell you how many times it's listed. Once you start looking for it, it just starts to pop up all over the place. They are arguing here, they're arguing there, they're arguing on the way up at the Last Supper. Jesus has to deal with it. And then Peter says, no, I'm never gonna depart from you, Lord. Even after he's dealt with it and he's pointed out their sin and not welcoming and loving each other, they're still arguing about who's the greatest and who's gonna stay. And it's just, you know, this is the sin that so easily gets into us, so easily gets into us. Now, Luke focuses on this because he just sees how important it is, and he wants us, under the inspiration of the Spirit, to really be focused on that and in our words. And you see this in verses two and three, he says, This is kind of a couplet. One talks about action and the other talks about speech, and they both basically say the same thing in different words, don't they? I mean, you can look at it and see. There is nothing covered that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will be not known. Therefore, whatever is spoken in the dark will be revealed in the light, and what you have spoken in the ear in the inner room, whispering a secret, will be proclaimed shouted, announced from the housetop. And I mean we, a lot of us understand this. There are things that you thought you were hiding and they come out. And there are things that you whisper to one another and you say, I work with quite a few people at work and it's always amazing to me how somebody will be talking and the person they're talking about is standing right behind them listening. And it happens again and again. And sometimes it can be innocent and sometimes it can be malicious stuff and it will start a whole period of strife and conflict. So what Christ is saying here is not new, but it is a warning to take to heart, that like a poison, this leaven of hypocrisy comes in and it spreads. Once you cease to control your tongue and your thoughts and your actions, it starts to permeate into your life. And so he's telling the disciples, there is a requirement for sincerity and truth in the worship of God. Those two words come from Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. But remember, even when Christ is talking to the Samaritan woman, he says, God desires those that come to God to worship him, must worship him in sincerity and truth. You know, there must be a spirit of reality. Lord, I'm coming to you and we're not putting on a show for somebody else, not showing up here in my suit so you can look at me. I'm here to stand in front of the Lord and give an account to Him. And I must do it according to His Word, according to truth. I can't just choose how to worship Him. Remember from Leviticus chapter 10, two of Aaron's sons, the high priest of Israel, when they sanctified the tabernacle, And they had just finished consecrating it all and offering the sacrifices and the cloud comes down and covers the tabernacle and the glory of the Lord appears in the tabernacle probably as a bright light to such a degree that no one can come into the tabernacle. They're all driven out. And Nadab and Abihu see this. and they offer strange fire in front of the Lord. They take brass censers and this was only supposed to be done in the tabernacle. It was supposed to be a gold censer and it was supposed to be coals from off the altar outside of the tabernacle. from the sacrifice. That was the incense God required. And instead, these two sons of Aaron take coals, probably from a campfire, and add the incense in a brass censer outside, trying to please the Lord. What difference does it make? Well, God's fire, the fire of the Lord, comes out from the tabernacle and consumes them and kills them on the spot. You can ask God that question. Don't ask me. It was not pleasing to the Lord. It was not. God requires us to worship in the way that he has told us to worship. We don't get to pick and choose. This is part of the reason when we, the elements of a church service are all things that you will find, you know, songs, speaking to one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, making melody in your hearts to the Lord. That's one of the reasons we sing. It's one of the reasons we read the Word of God. In Timothy he is told, until I return, give diligence to the reading of the Word of God. One of the reasons we preach. I command thee by 2 Timothy 1.4, I charge thee in front of the Lord. What is it? Preach the word, be instant, in season. Let me read the whole verse, 2 Timothy 1, 4, 1 and 2. I charge you, therefore, before God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at his appearing in his kingdom. Preach the word, be ready in season, out of season, convince, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and teaching. We do these things because the word of God has told us to do them. And that's why we come together. That's why we come to preach, not to discuss. To be a support for truth, a pillar and a support of the truth. To declare, thus saith the Lord. Because it isn't an option. God has spoken. So, we come to this idea of hypocrisy coming into our lives. And Luke warns us. that there are any action that we are involved in, there's nothing which is covered, which will not be revealed, nor hidden, which will not be known. You know, this is, sometimes we think of this as the end days, you know, when we stand in front of the Lord and every man must give an account to himself. And, you know, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to put them off. I don't know that that's that. But there is such a thing that if you continue in it, God is going to convict, He is going to deal with it, and eventually He's going to expose it. He's going to expose it. Because He would rather expose it and cut it out, like a cancer surgery, than He would let it consume you and deal with you. And in all honesty, this is exactly, that is a great analogy of what is happening. In fact, in 2 Timothy, he actually uses that word that is translated cancer in our English translation. That false doctrine is like a cancer. There are two men that denied that the resurrection is that there will be a future resurrection and he says it's like a cancer and it will overthrow the faith of some. It will cause them to stumble and to trip and to fall because they're teaching false doctrine. Now, so God will expose what is hidden, those behaviors that are hidden. You come to chapter three or verse three and it says, therefore, whatever you have spoken in the dark will be heard in the light. And this is another, this is, you know, don't think it's just behavior, it's even what you talk about, what you whisper. And yet I think there's some positive in this as well. When we talk and we praise God and we're together and we're holding him up, even that will be spoken of in the light. It's going to come out. It's going to come out. Now, I wanted to, along with this, I wanted to just take a slight detour and just say, why is this so important? I mean, obviously, hypocrisy is a lie. At its very character, it's a lie. But I want you to think about this from the view of who is God. We happened to mention this in Sunday school this morning. I thought it was a wonderful tie-in and kind of amazing. But in 1 John 1, 5, there's a wonderful verse that says, this is the message that we have heard from Him and declared to you, heard from Jesus and we declare this to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. Now, why does the Spirit of God lead the Apostle John to write that? What's the purpose? Well, God wants us to think of this illustration, this metaphor that God is light. He wants us to understand it, to meditate on it, and to understand something about the character of God. Now, this even becomes greater when you understand God is the creator and that he knew everything that was going to happen. None of these, you know, nothing has ever taken him by surprise. And he probably created light to be an illustration for us to communicate this point. That's deep. He could have made us like bats that lived in the dark and lived on sound. He didn't. He made us with eyes to see and eyes that work significantly better in the light and worse in the dark. We don't have cat's eyes that open, you know, that can open up indefinitely in the night to see. Our eyes are very limited by the dark. And so this is, you know, he has created us for this analogy. I really, so that it brings it to our understanding. What does light do? Well, let me tell you the very first thing it does is it reveals truth. It reveals truth. Light always shows what is there in front of you. Now, man might make a trap that's under the ground and put a tarp over it. The light shows you what's there. It's not going to show you what's under the ground, but it shows you what is there. What is true? In a very basic, it shows us what a proper relationship is to an object. You look at a seat and you say, okay, there's a seat, it's standing on four legs, it looks strong, I'm gonna sit on. Or you look at the seat and you say, oh, that's broken. Better not put your weight down on that one or you're going down. It shows you your relationship and lets you make plans. It reveals knowledge. so that you can live right. You can plan a path ahead of you. You can say, all right, I want to get there, but there's a fence there. There's the door to the fence. I have to go out of my way down to there, get in the door, and then go there. Gives you what you can do. So, you see this also in scripture. Let me just read you a verse that refers to this, 2 Corinthians 4, 6, and just notice the word light in this verse, okay? For it is God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, that's creation, God had to be called forth light, who has shone in our heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. The light of the knowledge of glory of God. So I think there's two characteristics about light that are very important to God. The first is knowledge. It reveals who and what everything is in a practical sense. And the light of the Bible, when we talk about that, is who is God. It's light. He always reveals. And the second thing is purity. It's purity. Light cannot mix with darkness. If you light a match in a box, the darkness leaves. You didn't have to let it out. It's just gone. Darkness is the absence. Light is positive. It fills. And you think about 2 Corinthians 6.14, it says this, do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. Okay, this doesn't mean just interacting with them, but this means marriage or business dealings where you are in a partnership maybe with an unbeliever and you've got two people running two different directions and you keep hitting each other. Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. Then it says this, what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness and what communion has light with darkness? Now both of those are opposites. You can't have righteousness with a little lawlessness. If you're lawless, you're lawless. If you've broken the law, you're lawless. We don't like to admit that, but you're going 56, you're over the speed limit, you're a lawbreaker. What communion has light with darkness? How can you have fellowship between two such opposite things? They are antithetical of each other. The one reveals, the other obscures. The one helps, the other hurts. And now think of this with a verse, another verse from Titus 1, 2 or 1 John 2 also, in hope of eternal life, which God who cannot lie promised before time began. Now all I'm interested in is that one phrase, God cannot lie. Why can God not lie? Because he's light. He is always revealing truth. When it hurts, when it helps, when you want it, when you don't want it, He must always reveal truth. It must be true. And the reason He cannot lie, it is so contrary to His nature, He is there always showing what is true. Can you see how this is a problem with hypocrisy? Hypocrisy at its root core is deceit. Oh, no, you're my best friend. Man, I can't stand him. It is a lie. It is deceit. It is darkness. And we know who the father of lies is. According to John 8, it's Satan. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own nature, for he is the father of it. So God cannot lie. He is light. He is revealer of truth. Every time He comes near, He reveals truth. He chooses this to help us to understand who He is. I think that light and darkness helps me understand when God says He cannot lie, it's not that He doesn't want to lie. That's not what He said. He said He cannot lie, just like darkness cannot exist when light comes in. In fact, it talks about, in James, talks about God and he says he's the father of lights. And then it says there's no variable or shadow of turning. There's no light that's greater than him that's causing a shadow behind him. He is the source of all light. And this is what we're to be. We're to be a people that are a light set on a hill that cannot be hid. Cannot be hid. Because we declare truth. We stand for truth. We live truth joyously in front of others. You see this section here, an hypocrisy. And it is basically a lie. And God cannot deal with this. agree to it. It is one of the things, according to Proverbs 6, there are seven things that the Lord hates. Two of them are in lying. A deceitful tongue and a lying tongue. He hates it. He hates it. It is obscuring what is true. What is true. It is amazing to me that people complain about the Lord, about God. You listen to the atheists and the people who follow Satan, the witchcraft and all of these others, especially around Halloween, and you get some testimony of them, and they go, you know, God is just too hard. God is this old grump who has all this list of rules and tries to make you obey. Meanwhile, you can be in Satan's deceit and anything goes and it destroys you. You can't plan. You stumble along the way. You trip. You fall. You're eaten up by this. It's literally destroying you. And God's way has the fruit of righteousness, which is just all the good things. And we look at it and we say, oh, the light is awful. It's awful. Well, it's awful because it reveals our sin and our need of a Savior. So let's just kind of close this out, and let me ask you a couple of questions. that I'd like you to consider. First of all, do we really think on God as light? I challenge you to go home and meditate on that, to think over it. God chose this metaphor for himself. You think of light with a plant. The word of God is also compared to water. You have the light of God and the word of God and you have what? Growth. for a plant. We are going to grow when we are walking in the light of God and in the water of the Word. It is going to produce fruit in us. Do we go to Him for all our truth, all our answers, all our knowledge? Do we understand that as the Creator, yes, He knows everything. As infinite God, He knows our thoughts, our feelings, our heart, and the thoughts and feelings and heart of everyone who's ever lived. And, you know, as the judge of all the earth, not only did he know this beforehand, we're going to stand before him at the end and we're going to have to give an account for these words. And he's also promised that as the sovereign Lord, he will lead day by day, working everything out for our eternal good to those that love him and those that are called. Romans 8, 28 and 29 conforming us to the image of His Son. So past, present and future we should be coming to God for our knowledge. Do we? I find that we are strangely weak and prone to look logically. To look logically. I tell you, Wednesday night I taught on Ruth and Ruth's decision to leave her homeland, to become a foreigner in the land of Israel, to follow Naomi and to be a child of God. Your God will be my God. And she uses the word Yahweh. She uses the word Yahweh. I am choosing to follow the Lord God of the Bible. And it was a decision based on faith, not based on rational things. You know, going to a foreign people where you were forbidden from marrying a Moabitess, she's committing to a life of celibacy, to die a widow woman, to die an outcast, despised foreigner in a land of another people. And she chose it. And what we're gonna see is that she commits to God, God will commit to her. and because there's a reality in her testimony, God will produce and draw her into a marriage and she will be redeemed and brought back, brought into the covenant people of God and from her line will come King David and the Lord Jesus Christ. Because she chose to walk by faith and not by sight. How many of us start with the word of God and are willing, willing to suffer even a little bit. She gave her whole life up. Possibilities of marriage, possibilities of health, wealth and prosperity to follow God. And God met her and gave her more than she'd ever dreamed of. Can you even imagine what life would be without light? I mean, we go out sometimes at night. My dad used to take us out walking in the woods, on a hike in the woods at night. You'd walk along like this on the trail, you know, trying to feel out the trail and walk. Okay, I think there's a turn coming up. Steps, yep, there it is. Hope I don't fall off the edge here as I do this. You think of what life would be like? You know, they go through life and they're blind. Oh, we can see with our physical eyes, but people are blind. They're running into walls all the time and they don't understand what's wrong with them. They don't understand why it hurts so much. It's because they've left God out of their calculations. Do we strive to be like God, a creature that hates lies, hates deceits, that is always on guard for You know, the start of hypocrisy, the start of bitterness, the start of something that comes in that would lead us astray. Lastly, do we really understand that God knows our thoughts and our heart? He knows what we think about on our beds at night. We can't deceive Him. How foolish is it to even try? We have a loving God who comes to us and He reveals all of this so that we can deal with Him in truth. You know, the one advantage of a God that knows everything is there's no longer a reason to hide. You don't have to deceive Him. You don't have to argue it in. He came to save sinners. He's promised, if you confess your sin, He is what? Faithful and just to forgive you of your sins. 1 John 1, 9, to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. This is our God who is light. What an amazing God. I can understand why he warns his disciples of this. And it should be a warning to us and an encouragement to be real with God, not to be caught up in the fashion of the world and to be pulled aside by the deceitful lusts that are around us, but to be real with God. Say, Lord, here I am. Take me, I'm yours. I pray that each one of you would consider this because he did start this section out with a warning, beware, beware. It's also translated be on guard. It was an exclamation of extreme danger and that it was a danger that is going to be continually with us that we have to set a guard against. that we don't try to deceive God. We just come before him with who we are and say, Lord, here I am. I need forgiveness for this, this, this, and I need a new heart. I pray you'll consider that. Let's stand as we close in a word of prayer. Our Father, we come before you, and Lord, we just want to thank you for all that you've done. And Lord, we want to thank you that you are light. What a blessing it is to walk in the light of your word and in the light of fellowship with you. What a joy to be able to know that there is a real truth. That to walk without fear because we can see clearly around us. To know what is right and what is wrong. Lord, and to know what will please you. Father, I just pray that you'd help each one here to know you more. Father, may this be a call that draws us to you. Lord, even as we see the light outside and we rejoice in the blue sky and the beautiful sun, even in the cold weather, it draws us. Lord, may your light draw us to you. We ask this in the name of your Son, Jesus, we pray. Amen.