A Devotional Reading
by Pastor Carl Toti, Senior Pastor of Trinity Church, Lubbock, TX
“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” — John 8:32 (NLT)
In January of 2023, a mother in Arizona answered her phone and heard her fifteen-year-old daughter sobbing on the other end of the line. The girl said she had been kidnapped. She needed help. Then a man’s voice cut in, demanded a ransom, and warned the mother not to call the police.
Every instinct in that mother’s body told her the voice was real. It sounded exactly like her daughter. But while the call was still going, her family quietly checked, and the truth came back: her daughter was safe at practice, completely unaware that anyone was using her voice against her mother.
It was a scam. Investigators call it “virtual kidnapping.” All it took was a few seconds of audio pulled from social media, fed into a program that could clone a human voice. Thirty seconds of sound, and a stranger had a microphone that sounded like the person this mother loved most in the world.
Welcome to our moment. The voice that sounds like the one you trust the most can now be the voice lying to you the loudest.
But here is what I want you to see this week: that is not only a news story. It is a spiritual diagnosis. Because the father of lies has been cloning voices since the Garden of Eden. He has simply gotten better at the technology.
The Native Language of the Enemy
Listen to how plainly Jesus speaks in John 8:44 (NLT):
“For you are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning. He has always hated the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
Read that slowly. Jesus is not saying the devil sometimes lies as a tactic. He is saying lying is the devil’s native language. Truth is the foreign tongue he never learned. Every distortion, every accusation, every counterfeit promise that drifts up out of hell is rooted in unreality.
And notice the chilling detail Jesus tucks into that verse. He links murder and lies in the same breath. Why? Because lies kill things. They kill purpose. They kill innocence. They kill discernment. They
kill families. They kill futures. They kill souls.
Charles Spurgeon said it back in 1855: a lie will travel around the world while the truth is still pulling on its boots. That is the terrible advantage of a lie. It doesn’t have to prove anything. The moment a false accusation is spoken, the burden shifts onto the innocent. How do you prove you didn’t do something? The liar invents the story in seconds. The honest person can spend years trying to take it apart.
I felt the weight of this recently watching a friend run for Congress. People fabricated outright lies about him and his family. Not policy disagreements. Lies. And I watched how quickly a fairy tale can be built and how slowly the truth has to climb out from underneath it.
The enemy has always preferred deception over destruction. He knows that people will often destroy themselves once they believe a lie. He doesn’t have to push you off the cliff. He only has to convince you the cliff isn’t there.
So let’s expose his greatest hits. Five old lies, dressed up in new costumes, that he is aggressively playing for this generation.
Lie One: You Create Your Own Identity
“So God created man in His own image...” — Genesis 1:27
Let me say this as plainly as I know how. If you believe you created yourself, you have built your identity on a foundation that cannot hold the weight of your life. Eventually it cracks under the pressure.
Consider the simple fact that you had nothing to do with your own arrival on this planet. You did not design your DNA. You did not assemble your chromosomes. You woke up one day in a universe you did not create, in a body you did not build, sustained by breath you did not manufacture.
The great arrogance of our age is not merely rejecting God. It is receiving everything from God and then pretending we are self-made. That is like winning a lottery worth billions and then standing up to announce that you earned every dollar.
You are not self-made. You are fearfully and wonderfully made by God.
He created you, male or female, on purpose. You reflect Him. You are an image-bearer, not an image-maker. Your identity is something you discover in relationship with your Maker, not something you construct in isolation.
Think of it this way. An iPhone doesn’t wake up one morning and decide it identifies as a toaster. It might feel warm. It might glow. But the moment it tries to toast bread, it malfunctions, because identity is not determined by feeling. It is determined by design.
So hear who you actually are. You are chosen — He chose you before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). You are called — those He justified, He also called (Romans 8:30). You are claimed — “I have called you by name; you are Mine” (Isaiah 43:1).
Reflect: Where have I been trying to author an identity God never asked me to invent, instead of receiving the one He already gave me?
Lie Two: Your Feelings Are the Highest Truth
“The heart is deceitful above all things...” — Jeremiah 17:9
Feelings are real without always being reliable.
This generation has been trained to treat feelings as the final authority. If I feel it, it must be true. If I feel it, it must be right. But Jeremiah doesn’t whisper a gentle suggestion. He sounds an alarm. The heart is deceitful — not occasionally, not in certain situations, but above all things.
Your feelings make excellent passengers. They make terrible drivers.
Have you noticed how your feelings can change faster than West Texas weather? One moment, I’m called. The next, I’m confused. One moment, I love them. The next, I can’t stand them. “Follow your heart” sounds poetic on a coffee mug. In practice it is dangerous navigation.
Here is the good news woven into the warning. God will never lower His truth to match your feelings. But He will transform your feelings through His truth.
We have drifted from Pilate’s old skepticism — “What is truth?” — all the way to our culture’s confident slogan — “My truth.” But deep down we all still believe in objective truth the moment reality has consequences. Imagine being pulled over going ninety-five in a sixty-five, and telling the officer you reject the premise that speed limits hold any objective authority over your lived experience. He will smile and say you can explain your lived experience to the judge — and hand you a very objective ticket.
We believe in truth when the stakes are real. And nothing has higher stakes than your soul.
Reflect: Where am I letting a feeling sit in the driver’s seat of a decision that belongs to truth?
Lie Three: You Will Be Happier Without God’s Limits
“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy...” — John 10:10
This is the lie the serpent has been selling since he first looked at Eve and asked, “Did God really say...?” Notice he didn’t open by attacking God’s character. He attacked God’s fence. He pointed at the one tree God had set off limits and convinced Eve that the entire garden of yeses didn’t count because of a single no.
Hell has been running that same play for thousands of years. The pitch sounds like freedom: God’s limits are keeping you from living. His commands are cages. His boundaries are bars. If you could just get out from under all those rules, you’d finally be free, finally be happy, finally be you.
But look closely at what Jesus actually says the thief does. He steals first. He kills second. He destroys last. And in the original language, every one of those is continuous action. The thief is not coming once. He is on autoplay. He is on a subscription model. He is streaming, around the clock.
Then Jesus breaks the whole pattern with a single phrase: life, abundantly. The word means over and above, more than enough, spilling out past the edges. Jesus is not offering you bare survival. He is offering you overflow.
Watch how the lie actually plays out. You’ll be happier if you sleep with them. So you do — and you wake up the next morning lonelier than you have ever felt. The pleasure was real. The promise was a lie. You’ll be happier if you tear down every boundary and surround yourself with people who only ever say yes. So you do — and the emptiness only grows.
Let me give you a picture I have never been able to shake.
A man buys property on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the ocean. A million-dollar sunset every single night. But the land comes with a fence — tall, sturdy, immovable — set about ten feet back from the edge. The man hates that fence. It blocks his view. It ruins the aesthetic. So one weekend, with a crowbar and a lot of sweat, he tears it down.
For about a week, he is the happiest man alive. Unobstructed sunsets. Unbroken horizon. Total freedom.
Until his three-year-old son chases a ball into the backyard.
The fence was never there to ruin the view. The fence was there to save the child.
Every command of God is a fence on the edge of a cliff. Every “thou shalt not” is a Father who has already seen the bottom of the canyon and refuses to let His children fall. God does not give you limits because He is small-hearted. He gives you limits because He is far-sighted.
There is a Hebrew word for boundary: gevul. Proverbs warns, “Do not move an ancient boundary stone set up by your ancestors” (Proverbs 22:28). To move that stone was to declare war on the order of creation itself. But here is the layer that is easy to miss. That same word, gevul, shows up again in Psalm 16:6 — “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.”
Catch that. The very word for a sacred limit is the very word for a beautiful inheritance. The limit is the love. The boundary is the blessing. The “no” is wrapped around the “yes” the way a hand cups around a flame to keep the wind from blowing it out.
The lie always promises more and always delivers less. You think you are about to gain the world, and you discover you have lost your soul. The devil is not a generous tour guide. He is a kidnapper holding out a candy bar. He is a cloned voice that sounds holy, sounds fatherly, sounds familiar — saying things the real God would never say.
So the next time the voice whispers, “You’ll be happier without God’s limits,” ask it one honest question: Happier for how long? Because the enemy’s happiness comes with an expiration date, and his freedom comes with chains printed in the fine print.
Reflect: Which fence in my life am I tempted to tear down — and what is the fence actually protecting?
Lie Four: You Have Plenty of Time
“Do not boast about tomorrow...” — Proverbs 27:1
This one is subtle. It doesn’t feel like rebellion. It feels like delay. I’ll get serious later. I’ll deal with that later. I’ll follow God — just not right now.
The enemy rarely rushes you into destruction. More often he lulls you into procrastination. Because delayed obedience is still disobedience.
Have you noticed that “later” never actually appears on a calendar? We have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. No one has ever lived a single day called “someday.” And yet people quietly build their whole eternity on it.
Proverbs tells us not to boast about tomorrow, and the reason is simple: tomorrow is a promise you were never given. Life is a vapor — it appears for a moment and then it is gone. Urgency, rightly understood, is not pressure. It is grace.
So let me get honest with you. The greatest threat to your soul is not always the thing you do wrong. Sometimes it is the thing you keep putting off. That conversation. That surrender. That one step of obedience you already know you need to take.
You keep telling yourself you have time. But time is the one thing you cannot store, borrow, or control. And one day what you assumed you had plenty of will simply be gone.
That is why the Spirit never says “someday.” The Spirit says today. Not next year. Not after you have everything figured out. Today.
Reflect: What is the one act of obedience I keep filing under “later” that God is asking me to do today?
Lie Five: You Can Follow a Jesus of Your Own Making
“If someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed...” — 2 Corinthians 11:4
Here is the most subtle lie of them all. The most dangerous Jesus is not the Jesus people reject. It is the Jesus people reinvent.
Paul had to warn the Corinthians about it, because even in the first generation of the church, counterfeit versions of Christ were already circulating. People were preaching “another Jesus” — one who looked similar, sounded familiar, but had been quietly redesigned to approve of whatever the listener already wanted.
We do the same thing today. We assemble a Jesus who only ever affirms and never confronts. A Jesus with all of the comfort and none of the cross. A Jesus who blesses every choice we have already made and asks nothing of us in return. We take the cloned voice — the one that sounds holy and familiar — and we let it say things the real Jesus never said.
But a Jesus you can fully domesticate is a Jesus you have invented. The real Jesus loves you far too much to leave you the way He found you. He comforts, yes — and He also calls. He forgives, and He also transforms. He meets you exactly where you are, and He refuses to leave you there.
The test is simple. The Jesus of the Scriptures will sometimes tell you things you do not want to hear. A Jesus who only ever agrees with you is a mirror, not a Savior. And a mirror cannot save you, because it has nothing to offer but your own reflection.
So measure every voice — including the religious ones — against the Jesus revealed in the Word. Not the Jesus of your preferences. Not the Jesus of the culture. The Jesus who actually lived, actually died, and actually rose.
Reflect: Have I quietly edited Jesus down to a version that only approves of me — and what has His Word been saying that I have been tuning out?
The Truth That Sets You Free
Five lies. One ancient strategy. Behind every one of them is the same whisper that started in the Garden: you don’t need to submit to God’s reality — you can create your own.
But hear the words of Jesus one more time: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” And here is the terrifying beauty of the gospel: every voice the devil clones still cannot speak a single honest word, because there is no truth in the source to draw from. You cannot manufacture water from a dry well. You cannot stream music from a silent server. You cannot clone honesty from a liar. The cloned voice will always — eventually — betray the cloner. Every lie hell has ever told is on a countdown timer, because every lie hell has ever told was built on a vacuum where truth should have been.
There is only one voice worth building your life on, and it is the voice that spoke you into existence, called you by name, set the loving fences, gave you today, and went to a cross so you would never have to follow a counterfeit again.
When the next lie starts to play, you already know how to answer it. Hold it up against the truth. And let the truth set you free.
“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” — John 8:32
If today’s reading stirred something in you, don’t file it under “later.” Take the next step today. Read more devotionals, sermon resources, and ways to connect with our church family at our website — the link is below.
