Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Free — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Seeking God’s Face Through His Word

And seek the Lord and his face. He is our teacher, his word is light, it is truth, it sets us free, and we wanna acknowledge him in all our ways, acknowledge our dependence upon him and seek his face during this time together.

Holy Father, we come into your presence with joy, with thanksgiving, with grateful hearts. We love you, we bless you. Thank you for your truth that sets us free. Thank you for your word that quickens us and enlightens our eyes and gives hope and faith and direction and peace.

And Lord, I wanna thank you for making me a woman. Thank you for your divine, wise plan for making male and female. In your image, we are created, and we acknowledge that there are differences. We bless you for those differences, we embrace them.

And Lord, we want in this session to learn how those of us as women can be more completely conformed to your image. And I know there are men here too, and I pray that you'll give to them an understanding and wise heart about how to dwell with their wives according to knowledge and how to provide the kind of covering and protection and leadership in their homes and in our churches that will nurture and care for our lives as women.

So we bless you, you are our teacher, and we look to you with open and expectant hearts. In Jesus' name, amen. I'm having the joy this year of celebrating, and I am celebrating 20 years in vocational Christian service.

There's no master like Jesus, and I love serving him. I love being in the ministry. I don't love everything about being in the ministry. There are days that are discouraging and difficult. I don't love traveling, but I do a lot of it.

And I tell people I wouldn't do it for anybody other than Jesus. But he is an incredible master and lover and friend. And I'm so thrilled that as a little girl, he chose me and called me and set me apart for his service.

I knew from the time I was very, very young that God's hand was on my life, that I was consecrated, set apart for his service. And I'm so, just can't thank him enough for the privilege of serving him, walking with him for more than those years, but serving him these 20 years in a vocational sense.

Most of those years have been primarily involved in ministry to women. And just in the past couple of weeks, I've been involved in leading two women's revival conferences, ministering to about 1 ,700 women in a more extended fashion.

Just in the past couple of weeks, I've had the privilege over these years of meeting thousands and thousands of women, listening to their heart cries, listening to their heartbeat, hearing their stories, weeping with them, rejoicing with them, growing, and learning together with them.

In one of the conferences just a week or so ago, we had a really neat blessing. And that was that there was a handful of men from a local church there who came to the conference to serve, to help with parking and security and serving in different ways.

But then during the actual sessions of the conference, through Friday evening and all day Saturday, those men stayed in another room in the facility just to pray throughout the whole conference. And what a blessing that was to me and to the women and men.

What an incredible role you have as the priest of your home to provide that prayer covering and protection to your wives and daughters as well. During the, early on in the conference, the men said, we would love to pray for these women more specifically if they'd like to fill out prayer cards, we'll take those prayer cards and pray for them.

Don't have them put their names on them, but just have them pray, indicate there any specific burdens for their own life or family that they'd like us to cover in prayer. 500 women in that conference filled out these prayer cards.

We turned them into the men. And one of the men afterwards told me what an incredible blessing it was to the men to pray for these requests. And then I was interested by this statement. The man said, I think every husband needs to read these cards.

So he can better understand what is on the hearts of women and what are some of the issues and the battles that they deal with. Now, I generally speak primarily to women and I know there's some men here and you're free to listen in today, but I'm really going to share my heart with the women and anything that you men want to pick up as far as your ministry to the women in your life, you're free to take home.

But I know that as men, perhaps there may be something that's shared today that will help you better understand the needs in your wife's life, in your daughter's lives and better help you perhaps fulfill your responsibility as God's man and God's leader in your home and in your church.

The Bondage and Confusion Facing Christian Women

As I've talked to, as I said, literally thousands, many thousands of women over these years and sat alongside of them and heard them pour out their heart and just thinking about the women I've met in the last couple of weeks in these conferences.

I sat down the other day and made a list of some of the words that come to mind to describe a lot of the women I'm meeting today. I'm speaking of Christian women primarily. Women in our churches and here's some of the words, don't try to write all these down, but these are just some words and I want to say these words don't describe all women, thank the Lord.

But these are the overwhelming impression I have as I'm meeting and talking with Christian women today. And there's no woman who's described by all of these words, thank heaven for that too. But here's some of the impressions I've received.

So many of them are frazzled, exhausted, burnout, overwhelmed, confused, wounded, angry, a lot of angry women today in the church, not just out in the world, frustrated, discouraged, defeated, depressed, despairing, suicidal.

Increasingly, just in recent months, I'm coming across this with more women in a particular setting of women than I would have ever imagined possible who are acknowledging recent thoughts of taking their life.

Perhaps some in this room, I would not be surprised. Other words, guilty, ashamed, up and down, unstable, hiding, protecting, pretending, uptight, insecure, lonely, fearful, afraid. And then so many, many women in bondage, in bondage to their emotions, in bondage to food.

I hear this over and over and over again. And their weight is not necessarily at all an indicator of whether or not that's an area of bondage. In bondage to the opinions of others, to the fear of man.

And then this other sense that so many, many women I'm meeting today are controlled by their emotions. And the problem is that their emotions are out of control. So many controlled by their emotions, but emotions out of control.

Now, there are some women, and I thank the Lord for the ones that I meet, who could be described as free, gentle, loving, confident in the Lord, secure. But I have to say that they seem to be in the minority.

Why is that? And I'm finding that this long list of words, I don't know if I'm just waking up to the reality of where women are, or if it indeed is more compounded today than it was when I started out in women's ministry 20 years ago.

I have the feeling that there is heightened sense of these issues and problems in women's lives. As we're now counseling third and fourth and fifth generations of divorce, of absentee fathers, of domineering mothers, and so on.

I believe the consequences and complexities of these issues are being compounded. And that we're seeing these words described more and more women, even in our churches today. Now, it's politically correct in our culture, in our generation, to say that others have made women this way.

Their parents, their husbands, men. And there is a common sense among women today, even among Christian women, that men, some men, or men in general, have made me this way. That I'm reacting to the hurts or the wounds that have been inflicted on me by my parents or by men.

But as we go back to the Genesis account, the beginning of how God created all things, we find that it was not parents who got Eve into trouble. And it was not a man. It was not her husband who got Eve into trouble.

In fact, Eve didn't even have in-law problems. I mean, talk about an environment that should have been an easy one in which to succeed. It was not someone else who got Eve into the trouble. The mother of us all, we are the daughters of Eve.

But it was not a man, it was not parents, it was not someone else, but actually, it was a woman's own personal choice that placed her in bondage. It had nothing to do with what anyone else did to her.

Genesis One and Two: God’s Good Design

Now, I think that it is helpful in this whole matter of lies women believe and the truth that sets them free to go back to the beginning. And I found myself in recent months going back to the first three chapters of Genesis.

We could spend the whole session just here, but we won't, just by way of very broad brush overview. I want us to examine, if you have your Bible with you, you wanna open there to Genesis, the first chapter.

And I was reading again yesterday and today in these three chapters, and I wanna give you some broad strokes of the difference between the first two chapters and the third chapter. The contrast is stark when you just read this passage straight through.

There's some overwhelming, broad, general impressions that you get in the first two chapters of Genesis. And then there's just like this jarring, dramatic, radical, traumatic change that takes place beginning with the first verse of chapter three.

And we need to see the difference. So I'm gonna move down the left-hand column first and just to see how God made it, how God designed things in the beginning as we look at Genesis one and two. And again, these are just some broad observations, not detailed in any sense of these chapters.

First of all, we see that this plan, the word of God, the way of God was initiated by God. In the beginning, God. God plus no one, God plus nothing. God was independent. He is autonomous. He needs no one.

He is self-sufficient. In the beginning, God. This plan was started. It was initiated by God. And we're going to see the characteristics of God's plan, God's way as he designed it to be. And then there's another word that jumps out at me through the pages of these first two chapters.

It's the word blessing. God's way is a way of blessing. God intended that his creation should be blessed, that man should be blessed. And so we read in chapter one, verse 22, after God had created even the animal kingdom, it says in verse 22, God blessed them.

Now the world would not have us to believe that God wants to bless us. That the way to blessing, the world would say, is to live your life without God. But we see in these early chapters that blessing is inextricably bound up into the heart of God.

That if we want to experience blessing, we must be aligned with God. In verse 28, after God creates man, male and female created he them, and God blessed them. And then we see in chapter two, verse three, and God blessed the seventh day.

So we see a God who wants to bless his creation and his created man and woman. And then we see that God's way is based on the truth. There's a sense of absoluteness, of rightness, of purity, of wholeness, of truth.

There's no shadow of turning with God. He is absolute noonday. There's no discrepancy with him. There's no shading, there's no fudging. And we see God's ways are clear, and they're right, and they're true.

And that's why when you see a man or woman who has really embraced the truth, that their eyes are clear. The light of the body is the eyes. And there's a clarity and a sweetness and a purity there because God's way is based on the truth.

And then as we read these chapters, there's the sense we get of the certainty of God's word. God said, let there be light, and there was light. God said, everything God said came to be. It was true, it was established.

Forever, oh Lord, thy word is established in the heaven. Every word of God is pure, it is true. There's a certainty about God's word. And even when God commands the man, you can eat up all these trees, but this one tree you should not eat up.

There's a certainty about it. There's no question mark about it. There's an exclamation point where God speaks. It's certain and it's true. And then we see in these chapters that God's way is the way of life.

It's the way of life in the first chapters here, in the first chapter of the Bible, we have the introduction of the word life. God made man to live forever, to live forever. And that was the whole point of the tree of life, that when man partook of the tree of life, he would have, that he was created to have eternal life.

God's way is the way of life. And then I noticed in chapter two, verse 16, that God spoke first to the man. God spoke first to the man, verse 16, and the Lord God commanded the man. Now it's interesting that after the fall, when we come to chapter three, that God also spoke first to the man after the fall.

It was the woman who sinned first, but when God came for reckoning day, for accountability, he came first to the man, chapter three, verse nine, and the Lord God called unto Adam, where are you? God spoke first to the man.

This is God's way. And then the outcome of God's way, we read it throughout these two chapters, but it's summarized in chapter one, verse 31. And God saw what he had made, this is after the creation of man, and behold, it was very good.

It was very good. What God made was very good. Now, if you move to the next page, continuing on God's way, and then we'll come back to see what happened in chapter three. God's way was a way of communion and fellowship.

That's the sense you get as you move through the first two chapters of Genesis. Communion and fellowship, communion between God and man. God created man for intimacy with himself. And there's a oneness, there's a fellowship, there's a communion, there's an openness, there's a transparency, there's a freedom in their relationship.

And then God created communion, union, and fellowship between man and the woman. They were one flesh. That's the sense you get as you read these first two chapters, is that God designed that there should be union, communion, fellowship, oneness.

And then we see in verse 29 of the first chapter that God in this world as he created it, provided all that man needed. Verse 29, God said, behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed and tells man how his needs are to be met.

God says, I have given to you your provision. God provided for every need of man's to be met. And then we see in verse 25 of chapter two that the condition of man and woman before God and before each other is that they were not ashamed.

It was a world free from shame because there was no guilt, because there was no sin, because there was no disobedience or rebellion. And in that obedient, unfallen state, they were not ashamed. What a way to live.

This is what God created us for. This is the world as God intended it to be. And then as you overview these first two chapters, you see a world that is God-centered, a planet that God loves, a planet that God has made for himself, for his enjoyment, for his pleasure.

And we see a world that is centered on God, man and woman centered on God. He is their focus. He is their life. And then we come, and let me say, by the way, as you overview those first two chapters, you get a whole different view of God than what our world gives us today.

Our world has a distorted, and even I'm afraid in our churches. So many times we have a distorted, perverted view of what God is really like, of what his ways are like. That's why we need to counsel our hearts according to the way of the word and get our view of God and of his ways from the scripture.

I find it very helpful not to fill my mind with books and magazines and television programs of this world, because that way of thinking will ultimately shape what I believe and who I am. I wanna shape my life by the word of God.

As Spurgeon said, we should be so filled with the scripture that when someone pricks us, the blood that comes out is bibling. And that's the kind of person I wanna be. So if your thinking is bibling and you live in these first two chapters, you see that what God created is so good.

It's a world of truth, a world of blessing, a world of goodness, a world of God's provision for man. Then we come to verse one of chapter three and we see a major, major change. A new way is introduced, a way that is contrary to God's way.

And it is initiated this time, not by God, but by Satan himself, by Satan. And the first verse of chapter one tells us the serpent was subtle. He was crafty, depending on which translation you have there.

It was a way that was initiated by Satan. The operative word here is not blessing, but curse. Now notice as you get into chapter three that it was not man who was cursed by God, but God cursed the serpent and his seed and God cursed the ground, which man would have to till now to earn a living.

But now instead of blessing, the curse has entered into the world. And instead of being based on truth, this way is based on deception. And we'll examine that deception in some greater detail here. Based on deception.

And instead of our lives being rooted in the certainty of God's word, now Satan calls God's word into question. Has God said? Now notice Satan did not doubt the existence of God and he did not tempt Eve to doubt the existence of God.

He acknowledged the existence of God, but he cast doubt on what God had said. He cast doubt on the word of God. He put a question mark where God had put an exclamation point. So now there's a questioning of God's word.

Instead of the way of life, we have the way of death. There's a way that seems right unto a man, Proverbs 14, verse 12 tells us, but the ends thereof are the ways of death. Satan came, Jesus told us to kill and to destroy.

And so in verse 19 of chapter three, God says to Adam, dust thou art and to dust shalt thou return. This is the way of death. It's the fruit, it's the consequences of man believing the deception and the lie and acting on it rather than acting on the truth.

And the outcome, the outcome of God's creation was that it was very good. Then you come to chapter three and you see, and in scripture, it's very important to look for first mention of words. Where does the word first appear?

It gives light into sometimes into its meaning. And in chapter three, we have the first mention of words such as afraid, afraid, curse, enmity, sorrow, thorns, sweat, angry. Chapter four, verse six, murder, not the word, but the description of it in chapter four.

And we have, by the way, in chapter three, not the words mentioned, but I believe the entrance into the world of blame and of bitterness, of blame and of bitterness. You say, where do you get that? In chapter three, verse 12, the man said to God, the woman whom thou gave us to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat.

We have the entrance here of these problems that have gotten us into so much trouble today. Blame and bitterness against the woman you gave to be with me or against now women blaming and being bitter against the husband God that you gave to be with me.

And now instead of communion and fellowship between God and man and between man and woman, we have conflict and barriers, conflict and barriers, broken relationships, fragmented relationships, broken homes.

This was not God's intent. This was not God's plan. This was not God's way. It is the fruit of man and woman choosing their own way and instead of God's way. And now instead of man just being given by God all that he needs to meet his needs, man has to sweat to get his needs met.

And all the men said, yes, it's true. By the sweat of your face, God said, you will have to till the earth and it will be with sorrow that the earth will yield its fruit up to you. And now instead of the man and woman being in an unashamed condition before God, what do we find in chapter three?

They hid themselves. Hiding comes into chapter three. And just as I was reviewing this passage this morning, I looked again at verse 10 and to me, one of the most tragic verses in all of the Old Testament.

And Adam said to God, when God said, where are you? Adam said, I heard thy voice in the garden and I was afraid and I hid myself. That's not the way God intended it to be. God intended that, yes, we should hear his voice in the garden, I come to the garden alone while the dew is still in the roses and he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me that I am his own.

That's what God intended, that there should be that open, sweet communication that when we hear his voice, as the Shulamite bride says in the Song of Solomon, cause me to hear thy voice in the garden.

I come to the garden to meet with my beloved. God intended that when we hear his voice, we should be drawn to him, we should be wooed to him, we should run into his arms, we should have an intimate love relationship with him.

But instead now, messed up by sin, I heard thy voice in the garden and I was afraid and I hid myself. And so we run from the very voice that is our life, that is our hope. They found themselves hiding from God and now instead of a God-centered universe, we have a man-centered world.

Satan’s Deception and the Need for Truth

Now let me say this, God is still the center of all things, but we have a man and woman who now look upon themselves as a center of all things. Well, I wanna develop just a little bit the whole matter of deception and then truth and then we'll look at what are some of the lies that we as women are tempted to believe and what is the truth that sets us free.

But just briefly, let's look at this matter of deception. First, we can be deceived in a number of different ways. We can be deceived by Satan himself. And we read in chapter three of Genesis that the serpent, Eve says, deceived me, he beguiled me, again, depending on your translation, and I did eat.

The serpent himself deceived. In John 8 verse 44, Jesus says that Satan is a liar and he's the father of it. There is no truth in him and never has been from the beginning. There's no truth in him. Even as there is no deception in God, not a hint, not a shadow of turning, he is guileless.

And yet in Satan, exactly the opposite is true. There is no truth in him. He is a deceiver, he is a liar. And we can be deceived directly by Satan. And Satan himself, in fact, is the fountainhead of all lies from whatever source.

Now, the scripture also teaches that we can be deceived by others. Ephesians five verse six is one of a number of references that tell us that we can be deceived by others. And it's interesting to me, as I jot down another reference there, Ezekiel chapter 13 verse 22, Ezekiel 13 verse 22, that we can even be deceived by religious leaders, by spiritual leaders.

And a sad, sad verse here. God says to the spiritual leaders of Israel, with lies, you have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad. And you have strengthened the hands of the wicked that he should not return from his wicked way by promising him life.

That's what even spiritual leaders can do. That's why we need to get our foundation, our girding up from the word of God. God says to these spiritual leaders, I want to give joy to the righteous, but you have made the righteous sad.

And you have strengthened the hands of the wicked by promising them life, by saying peace and life, when they should have no hope for peace and life. And as a result, he will not turn from his wicked way.

Now we could spend a great deal of time on this matter of deception. One more here, number three. We can be deceived by not only others, but by ourselves. And scripture has much to say about being self-deceived, being self-deceived.

And that is one of the greatest dangers that you and I face. That's why we must be constantly taking our hearts and our minds and putting them through the grid of the truth of God's word and letting God's word be a light unto our feet, a lamp unto our path.

And as I open God's word, I'm asking him, Lord, show me your truth. Show me your ways. Shine the light on any deception that has crept into my heart. Any ways that I am self-deceived, any ways that I think I have no sin, I'm deceiving myself, first John says.

Show me where I have sin. I wanna walk in the light so that the blood of Jesus Christ, God's son, can cleanse me from all sin. Now, deception in our culture, and we could spend a great deal of time on this.

We won't. But the scripture has much to say, particularly in the books of Romans and 2 Thessalonians and the book of Revelation about how entire cultures can become deceived. And Romans 1 talks about those who change the truth of God into a lie.

And as a result, God gives them up to depravity, to vile affections. And then this sobering verse in 2 Thessalonians chapter two speaks of those who would not receive, who refuse to receive the love of the truth so that they might be saved.

And for this cause, and this verse is mystery to me, but scripture says it, so I believe it is true, that in some sense, God actually sends them delusion. God turns them over to deception so that they should believe a lie because they refuse to love the truth.

They refuse to receive the truth. Therefore, God gives them over to believe a lie. And what a description this is of what has happened in our culture. When you see what's going on even in the highest levels of our government today, and you see the response of the American people, they are deluded, they are deceived.

They have been given over to a strong delusion to believe a lie. And you see the slogans of deception all throughout our culture. I hope you don't watch a lot of television, but if you do, begin to examine what you're hearing to listen carefully and pick up the lies that are embedded deeply in our culture and in the minds of our people.

You can never be too rich or too thin. A woman's body belongs to herself. It takes a village to raise a child. He who has the most toys wins. Character doesn't matter. Tolerance. Every viewpoint is equally valid.

And not only do you have to let me have my viewpoint, you have to agree that my viewpoint, as perverted and twisted as it may be in your eyes, is equally valid with your viewpoint. It's a lie. But it is that pluralistic, tolerant thinking that has pervaded our culture.

No difference between men and women, except for the obvious physiological ones. And really, this whole lie, to me, is such an exercise in futility. I mean, you think about the obvious differences between men and women just in the way that we relate to each other, in the way that we communicate.

And your husband talks to his mother for 20 minutes and he gets off the phone and you say, how is she? And he says, fine. And that's his summary of the 20-minute conversation. You talk to your mother and you get off the phone and your husband says, how is she?

And it takes you 40 minutes to tell him the 20-minute conversation. Don't tell me we aren't different. And everywhere you look in our culture, you see the signs of deception. Now, there's a particular sense, and I'm not going to go into any depth on this, and something I'm still really seeking to understand the heart of God in relation to myself, but a particular sense, I believe, in which deception affects women.

Eve, Gender, and the First Role Reversal

Women and deception. I know that 1 Timothy 2, verse 14 tells us that Adam was first formed, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Now, we could spend an entire session having someone more gifted and skilled than I execute that passage, but there is a sense in which Eve was deceived.

Now, there are those who believe, and I tend to agree, that there is a sense in which women are more vulnerable to deception than men. And it's interesting to me that a huge part of the deception, I believe, as you go back to the original account, is that we have here in this exchange between Adam and Eve and the serpent, the first role reversal.

And that is at the heart, I believe, of much of the deception that puts women in bondage. Here we have the first instance of a passive man and an assertive woman. Now, for years, I believed and taught that the woman was alone when the serpent found her, but in more recent years, I discovered by looking at the passage, it's very clear that, and I don't know why I didn't see it years earlier, that's why I don't take my word for anything I say today, take God's word, because I'm still growing and learning, but the scripture says in chapter three, verse six of Genesis, the woman took the fruit, she gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened. So we have both the man and woman sitting here, not just by eating the forbidden fruit, but sitting in another fundamental way that we as the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve continue to send to this day.

Here we have the serpent coming, initiating contact with the woman, the conversation he initiates with the woman, though her husband apparently is standing right there with her. God had initiated the conversation, given the command to the man, and apparently before the woman was even created.

So I believe the man was responsible as the covering, the head, the protection over that wife to communicate God's will and God's word to his wife, but Satan comes and he addresses the woman. He doesn't even, he ignores the man.

He speaks to the woman, and the woman, instead of looking to her husband, their partners, heirs together of the grace of life, and instead of looking for receiving his covering and his protection as her head in that moment, she takes matters into her own hands.

She decides to answer herself. With no regard for the man, she takes matters into her own hands. So we have here an assertive woman, and what does the man do? What is his sin in this instance? Even before he eats, he does nothing.

He stands there. Now, we'll go till Jesus comes, probably deciding whether men are passive because women are assertive, or women are assertive because men are passive. The fact is we're both wrong, and we as women have a tremendous contribution we can make by taking our God-given place under the covering and the protection of God-ordained authority.

We create a climate in which men are free to be men, and I am so weary of us as women blaming passive men for the problems in our homes and in our culture. Yes, it is a problem, but we as women are not responsible for the behavior of men.

We are responsible for our own choices, and I believe we as women have made it incredibly difficult for men to be men, and that if we were willing to be clothed in that spirit of meekness and quietness, to trust in God, to come under God-ordained authority, that we would find men rising up really to be men, and that's the message I have of encouragement for women today.

From Listening to Lies to Walking in Freedom

Now, let's move to this whole area of truth or consequences, truth or consequences, and we either believe and act on the truth, or we do experience consequences in our lives. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

As he thinks in his heart, so is he. Invariably, behavior is based on beliefs. Our behavior is based on beliefs. Have you ever believed something that wasn't true? Of course, we all have, but I think of even childhood beliefs.

For example, as a little girl, I remember hearing that when you come to a red light, you can't go, and I thought that meant you can't go. Your car won't move when you get to the red light. And you know, within the last year or two, I discovered that that wasn't true.

No, I discovered it longer ago than that, but I felt kind of silly when I discovered it's not that your car can't go, it's that you're not allowed to go when you come to the red light. Well, for some period of time, my, if I had been driving at that age, I think that's why they don't let six-year-olds drive, I would have come to the red light and thought my car wouldn't move, couldn't move.