Welcome to Season 6 of the Excel Stillmore podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson, and I am here to encourage you in your walk with the Lord, and I'm glad you've joined.

Our program continues to be sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John is a good friend and he's helped me and my family in everything

from stock and mutual fund investing to annuities, life insurance, and retirement planning.

I certainly commend him to you if you have needs in any of those areas. You can reach him at

205-326736-3-64. Thank you again for your ongoing encouragement and support. Let's get started.

Hey, welcome to today's episode. I want to talk to you, as you can see in the title, about how to

avoid self-deception, which is not easy and takes a lot of self-evaluation, and I'm hopeful that

you're willing to do that with me today. Before we dig in on the details, let me tell you a little

bit about how this one came together. This morning, I don't even know why. I was looking back into

the earliest digital files for sermons that I had preached, and I found a file called sermons through 2004.

So every single thing in it was at least 20 years old, meaning at the latest, I was about

25 when I wrote these lessons. Now, I'll go back for various reasons and do this every few years

or so, and I usually find some common things. One, I find stuff that I can't believe that I

said. If you've ever been a teacher or preacher, or there's any record of things that you thought

and shared years ago, you often look back and wonder what in the world you were thinking.

I will say, though, it's not always like that. Sometimes I see some really basic fundamental ideas

from scripture, which remind me

that I didn't just learn those five years ago, that I actually learned those in my youth and preach

them in the early days. And that's always a really cool thing to find. And then every once in a while,

and I mean, pretty rarely, I open up something that a 22-year-old Chris wrote, and I look at it and think, I needed that way back then, and I actually put it together pretty well, and I'm glad that I did because I think I may need it even more now. And so today's title is from a sermon that I put together many years ago that I think I need even more today than ever about self-deception

and how it grows in us and more importantly what each one of us needs to do to overcome it.

It's certainly a danger that goes back to the very beginning, the story of Adam and Eve.

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