Message Title: Good and Bad Distance
Message Text: Mark 14:27-72
Jesus Predicts Peter’s Denial (vv.27-31)
Principle: Developing self-awareness is vital toward building a relationship with ourselves and with God.
“The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.” Proverbs 20:5
“The heart is more deceitful than all else. And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? Jeremiah 17:9
There are three levels of self-awareness:
- Awareness of our physical bodies (including the level of comfort or pain)
- Social self-awareness (how we act in relation to others)
- Spiritual self-awareness (where we reflect upon our relationship with God).
Jesus Prays in Gethsemane (vv.32-51)
- Because we are created in God’s likeness, we have a desire to pray, but as long as our sinful nature affects us – spiritually, mentally, physically and emotionally- it makes prayer feel unnatural.
2.God receives prayer from a humble heart. God is not so much concerned about the words as He is the condition of the heart.
3.A humble heart admits it’s not about their Kingdom but the Kings Kingdom.
4.A humble heart doesn’t have a problem being wrong, doesn’t have a problem waiting, doesn’t try to manufacture an answer, doesn’t have a problem trusting.
5.Prayer will not give you a less busy life, but it will give you a less busy heart. You can have calm in the chaos.
We must implement God’s principles to see God’s power to overcome big problems.
Jesus Goes Before the Sanhedrin (vv.53-65)
Principle: Real faith will be seen and challenged. Jesus followed close with God and stood strong, Peter gave into fear and followed from a distance.
Peter Disowns Jesus (vv.66-72)
Principle: Suffering always follows sin, maybe not immediately, but certainly.
We may engage in self-deception out of anxiety, neediness, desire, or other powerful emotions. As humans, we have emotional attachments to many beliefs, some of which may be irrational. Our self-deception can serve as a coping mechanism for strong feelings of shame about our actions, feelings, or habits.
On the plus side, self-deception can make us feel better about ourselves and help us maintain our confidence in the face of challenges and setbacks. But it can also help us avoid taking responsibility for our action
The High Costs of Self-Deception
Self-deception isn’t only a matter of mental games we play. Unfortunately, its consequences are all too real. For example, self-deception can:
- make it harder to grow and develop because we’re not seeing our flaws clearly
- detract from our mental and emotional clarity
- cause us to lose sight of who we really are and what’s real because we’ve been deceiving ourselves so long
- aggravate our worry and anxiety because it leads to letting things deteriorate further
- lead to numbing behaviors like binge-watching, overwork, drinking, overeating, and more
- make us feel like a fraud
- make us feel exhausted from all the mental gymnastics of lying to ourselves and trying to cover it up
- lead to inaccurate judgments and poor decisions, since we’re going off of faulty data
- make us feel shame and guilt
- lead us to deceiving others often, not just ourselves
- weaken our relationships
- diminish our power and agency in directing our lives effectively
- keep us trapped in bad or even dangerous habits, situations, or relationships
- become a vicious circle and way of life, a bad habit pattern that keeps harming us in many areas
“Some people spend their entire life in self-deception or denial,
but the situations or circumstances that we are denying will usually get worse with time.”
-Terri Cole, Licensed Clinical Social Worker
