Jeremiah 31:31-33
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
December 1, 2024
You and I cannot be entirely trusted!
We, unawares, often lie to ourselves – and do so with such persistence that we end up unconsciously believing our lies.
For example, in a poll of heterosexual married couples, researchers discovered that wives believe they do 70% of the housework and their husbands 30%, while husbands believe they do 40% and their wives 60%. The math says they can’t both be right. Most likely, both are unconsciously overestimating their own contribution and underestimating the other’s.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has cited research that confirms that we Americans are particularly adept at self-deception and self-flattering delusion. He marshals a long list of statistical findings that indicate it. For instance, when pollsters ask people from around the world to rate themselves on different traits, Americans give themselves the most positive ratings. While American students do not perform especially well on global math tests, they are among the world leaders in having self-confidence about their math skills. Seventy percent of American high school students claim they have above-average leadership ability, and only 2% admit they’re below average in that regard. The number of high school seniors who believe they are “a very important person” climbed from 12% in the fifties to 80% in the nineties. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching competency.
The use of social media enables this tendency toward self-flattering self-deception. For hiding the truth about ourselves and appearing much happier, more virtuous and more accomplished than we actually are is much easier to do online than in-person.
What’s scary about all this is that the longer we lie, the more we believe our own lies. Hitler instilled his lies by heeding the maxim that “if you tell a big enough lie frequently enough, it will be believed.” In both our public life and private life, the repetition of a fabrication makes it sound more credible, and that enables us to blind ourselves to the delusions behind the rationalizations and self-justifications we tell ourselves.
The two delusions I find in the Bible to disturb God the most are 1) that we don’t need other people all that much and 2) that we need God hardly at all.
Regarding the first, we are becoming increasingly delusional in our sense of independence and self-sufficiency. David Brooks calls such individualism “the story of the last half-century”. In one article he noted how Google has amassed online all the words and phrases of the five million books published since the invention of the printing press. From that database one can find out how often certain words and phrases are used in a historical period. Brooks says that in the past 50 years, individualistic words and phrases such as “I come first”, “I can do it myself”, and “self” have been used more and more frequently, and communal ones such as “common good”, “community”, and “sharing” less and less. This shift in language reflects a shift into the delusion of self-sufficiency. We rely on independence and self-help more than interdependence. The thought is I am the best I got, and I am equal to the task. I can save my life.
Though Brooks doesn’t talk about this, the second delusion we tell ourselves is that we don’t need God. Despite our character defects, shortcomings and failures, we stubbornly cling to the unfounded faith that we have it in us to make our life as good as it can possibly be.
This is antithetical to the message of the Bible. In John 15:5 Jesus told His first followers, “Apart from me you can do nothing!” Six hundred years before, Jeremiah told his demoralized, despairing fellow Israelites, destined to be dragged from their homeland into Babylonian exile and grievous enslavement there, to look for help from beyond themselves – to not look to themselves but to look for the coming of a divine Savior from outside the earthly realm. The One who is to come comes, not to help us in trying to save ourselves, but to save us from ourselves, all by Himself. He will make with us a new covenant, new rules of engagement between God and His human creatures. The salvation He will offer will bring, not so much a reformation of us, as a recreation of us: a replacement of our old self with a new self. He will change us at their core, from the inside out, making us His “people” in a deeper and fuller way. He will, God says here, “put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts”. God will give those who trust Him new motivation to obey Him, and new power to live true to their heart’s new desire.
Today’s scripture tells us that our hope lies not in self-help, but in help from beyond us; not in the intensity of our moral and spiritual effort, but in the immensity of God’s great grace; not in our unreserved intention, but in God’s unreserved inhabitation of our heart. “Christ in us!” Paul exclaimed in Colossians. It is “the hope of glory.”
As last Sunday’s scripture exhorted us, we are to look to Jesus as “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith”. We are to lock our eyes on Him as our everlasting source of hope and trust Him to always come through for us. As Corrie Ten Boom once said, “If I look at my circumstances, I am distressed; if I look at myself, I am depressed; but if I look at Jesus, my heart is at rest.”
Though Jesus gives us tasks to perform such a praying, bearing witness and doing justice, our work derives from our first resting in His promise to do for us what we never could do. Our labors then are launched by His prior labors of love on our behalf.
If we only bring to Him our desperate need of His help, we may hang all kinds of hope on His goodness.
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