Cortney Warren is a clinical psychologist who teaches in the UNLV School of Medicine. Her book is The Lies We Tell Ourselves.

Warren was an undergrad when she got interested in the topic of self-deception, and immediately she saw it “everywhere in everyone.” 

She said, “We lie to ourselves about the smallest details, like how much we ate today and why we didn’t list our actual height and weight on our driver’s license.” 

We lie about the “big things” too, like the reasons we choose a career path or who we choose to marry. Looking back on her own romantic life, Warren found that her fear of being left behind led her to make all kinds of poor choices when it came to men.

But she says there’s hope. “When we admit who we really are, we have the opportunity to change.” 

In church we call that “confession.”

Confession and accountability are key reasons we need church.

If you say you are “spiritual” and don’t need church, guess who’s lying? 

And of course when you lie to yourself you can’t just stop with little things. 

When the Allies liberated the concentration camps in Germany after World War II, people living near the camps said they didn’t know about the horrors happening inside.

But they knew.

Today, one of the worst things you can call someone is a “Nazi.”  But calling someone a “Nazi” is one of the worst mistakes you can make because you’re assuming that you would never look the other way in the face of evil.

Which is exactly what western leaders did in 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War, when upwards of 800,000 Tutsis were hacked to death by Hutus.

We all prefer to live a lie than believe the truth.

We tell ourselves that something is true if it “works for you.”

The Heidelberg Catechism calls this our “misery.”

So we need an outside source of truth…

We need to confess, again and again…

We need to remind ourselves of the wonder of the cross…

Lest we get comfortable in our misery.