Hi, this is John Ortberg. This is passage to wisdom. We’re almost to the end of this. Tomorrow will be the last episode in the passage to wisdom series. And then I’ll be off for a couple of weeks. And then we’re gonna, uh, launch into the advent season, actually on Monday, the week of Thanksgiving, Nancy’s gonna join me and we’re gonna celebrate it’s will have been a year that I have been doing these videos. And I’m so grateful for this little community. And I want to say thank you another way of doing that. A bunch of people have asked, Hey, what about mark Nelson’s pencils? If you haven’t seen that episode yet, my friend Mark Nelson philosopher talked about how he will give pencils to his students. And he actually, because people have asked about this has offered to send pencils. So if you write today, you could put a note in the comment bar, uh, text us and, and tell us I want a pencil and we will send you mark Nelson’s email address.
And you could arrange with mark to get a pencil to remind you that you are Mark’s special friend. Not that you have disappointed mark, but now today I want to talk. This is from the next to last of SCTE letters about living in truth and being UN modelled. God is a God of truth. Truth is always my friend, even though it may be painful, maybe it’s most important when it is painful and God is a God who will give me the strength that I need to bear truth and evil always tends to ride with deception. And hiddenness when screw tape is writing to wormwood, he talks in the next last letter about maybe they should try to make wormwood patient filled with cowardice, or maybe they should try to make him filled with hatred. Uh, they’re not able to create bravery, so they can’t do that.
All of hell cannot create one single virtue, but screw tape says hatred. Would you manage the tension of human nerves during noise, danger and fatigue makes them prone to any violent emotion. It is only a question of guiding the susceptibility into the right channels. If conscience resists Mudd him, if conscious resists mud him. When we are muddled, when we are unclear about our own thoughts and feelings and actions, we become particularly vulnerable to walking down wrong tracks, to become the wrong kind of person. So God invites us to get unmodeled. And I wanna talk to you for a few moments that I do the best I can to unpack this about a particular form that muddling takes that we’re especially vulnerable to, that can do a lot of damage. And it’s a phrase that you might have heard of before cognitive dissonance, the experience of our vulnerability to cognitive dissonance.
Now, this is a phrase that often gets used, uh, quite loosely and very often inaccurately. Sometimes people think that cognitive dissonance is sparked simply by something that’s confusing in the external world. Or I’ve heard people say things like, you know, you’re sending me mixed messages. You say you care for me, but what I see in you is uncaring behavior. So I’m experiencing cognitive dissonance. That’s not actually cognitive dissonance or we’re troubled or confused by our world. I saw today, we’re experiencing something. Now that’s being called skimp inflation and the stock market keeps going up. And yet there’s all kinds of supply chain issues. And, and we think, I don’t know how to make sense of this world. That’s not cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is not confusion about the external world it’s division in my internal world. Cognitive dissonance takes place when there is conflict or tension between my beliefs, attitudes, values, and actions or decisions because we are whole beings and we are meant to experience integration and harmony and oneness.
And so when there is division inside us, when there is a divided will or a divided mind, that’s actually a sole wound. Cognitive dissonance is a soul wound because the soul seeks to unite and harmonize and integrate us into one single life and then connected in truth with other people and with God. So, uh, cognitive dissonance was actually first coined by a psychologist, Leon Festinger at Stanford university, not real far from where I’m talking right now. This is in 1957. Interestingly, looking at a religious population, there was a quite bizarre cult. And the leader of it was predicting. The world was gonna end in 1957, aliens were gonna come and end everything. And so believers in this cult waited for that. And then it didn’t happen. Uh, duh, cuz we’re still here. And so part of what co with the theory of cognitive dissonance predicted was that while you might think when the world didn’t end, people would stop believing in that leader, in that cult, cognitive dissonance says no, because in my decisions and my actions, I’m committed to this cult.
So what I will actually do then is I will change my beliefs to justify my actions and my commitments. And that’s exactly what happened. People ended up coming up with the idea that the aliens were giving the earth a second chance and folks in this particular cult then actually committed themselves more deeply to environmental concerns. And the cult actually grew as a result of this. And this has led to all kinds of interesting and kind of counterintuitive findings. Like researchers split people up into two different groups to watch a movie that was not a very good movie. One group, they paid $1 to watch it. And one group, they paid $10 to watch it. Now you might think the people that paid $10 would have a higher standard for the movie and say, I paid a lot for this movie. So it better have been really good.
No, it was quite the opposite. The people who paid $10 liked the movie better than the people that got to see it for $1. Why? Well, cuz they said to this themselves, I paid a lot of money to see this movie back in those days, $10 was a lot of money. And so if I paid a lot of money to see this movie, it must be a really good movie cuz I would never do something as irrational as paying a lot of money to see a bad movie. On the other hand, they gave re they gave, uh, subjects a real dull, boring monotonous task and they paid half of them, $1 and they paid half of ’em $20. And the group that did the task for $1 rated it as a much more meaningful, enjoying enjoyable task. Cuz the $20 people could say, well it was a really du task, but I got 20 bucks out of it.
So that’s why I did it. But the people that got $1 couldn’t justify doing it for only a measly dollar. So they say, well, this must have been a really meaningful thing for me to do. Cognitive dissonance is the tendency that we have to want to integrate our beliefs and our attitudes and our values and our actions. It’s a God given gift to us cuz our soul means for us to be whole. But because sin is in us, we will actually become selectively insane to justify our behavior. And you see this at work in the very beginning in the Bible, when the evil one comes to Adam and Eve, his first statements are, did God really say that you must not, uh, eat or Eve even says touch any other food in the garden. God knows that if you eat it, then your eyes will be open and you’ll be like, God. In other words, he is sewing dissonance in Eve. And then in Adam, without dissonance, there cannot be persuasion and he’s moving them to take an action that will be at odds with the notion that God is looking out for their good. And they do that. They take that action. And now these beliefs and attitudes get rooted in them. So when God comes to be with them to walk with them in the cool of the day, their belief now is that God cannot be trusted and their emotion now is shame. And so they hide
And we have been struggling with this dissonance in our soul, this gap between what we believe or claim to believe what we value or claim to value and the actions that we engage in all the antidote to this what’s the solution. Well, two gifts from God, grace and truth. And grace must comes first that John says that when Jesus came, he was full of grace and truth. Grace being loved by God gives me the power to see the truth about myself. I was talking to somebody yesterday about my old job and just thinking about one of the parts of it that I wish I had done so much better. There’s some people I was thinking about David Hubbard, who was president of fuller. That was just great at building wonderful boards. And I just found myself wishing I was better at that than I was cuz there’s so many ways in which I did not do that nearly as well as would’ve served the organization. Well, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t do anything right. Doesn’t mean that I have to beat myself up. But if somebody comments on that, I can just simply look at that and say, yep, that’s the truth.
And I was thinking how, uh, disarming it is when people do that. A friend of mine back in the Midwest had a boss who was a terrific boss, but always challenging. And, and my friend said one time, you know, couldn’t you gimme some encouragement every once in a while instead of getting defensive about it, the boss just said, oh yeah, that’s, that’s a good reminder. Um, I used to be way worse at that thought I am now actually you should have seen me 10 years ago. And there was something so disarming about this person. Not defending, not saying what’s the matter with you just owning it and that’s living in grace and then in truth so that I’m able to see the whole truth about myself and get UN modelled. So the question today is where do you feel a little Pang of dissonance in your soul? Where is that sense in a relationship or uh, in your truthfulness with other people or in your work or in my transparency with God, where’s that little Pang of this in it. God, I let go of my need to defend myself. God, would you flood me with your grace
So that I have strength to see the truth. UN muddle me, deliver me from cognitive dissonance and we’re gonna wrap up passage to wisdom tomorrow. So I hope I’ll see you.