When you give alms you are not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. This is quite a high standard for maintaining security. It is a strong statement against virtue signaling. Have you met people who find ways to inform you of their moral superiority? Don’t you find this annoying? I do. It is no compliment to a believer to be called ‘holier than thou’. Yet you are also told not to hide your light under a bushel, but to put it on a candlestick, to let your light shine before men. Do these seem like conflicting goals?

Are you more sure of what you are opposed to or what you are in favor of? I compared the generation I encountered to children playing in the market. We piped and you wouldn’t dance, we played a dirge and you wouldn’t mourn. I was referring to people who thought that John was too ascetic, and I was not enough. There is no pleasing some people. It is easier to tear down than it is to build, but what do you have to show for your effort? Resist the temptation to appear sophisticated and worldly wise by disdaining everything. Commit yourself to something positive and pursue it and build. 

Have you ever been deceived? Are you now? How would you know? For inherent in the concept of deception is that you hold a false view without being aware of it. Can you identify and eliminate deception from your life on your own? It would seem that you need other people, but if you are serious about doing so then you should seek out encounters with those outside of a small circle of like-minded people for they are probably subject to the same deceptions that you are. How large a circle are you willing to draw? The other essential thing is a willingness to revisit long-held beliefs.

Do you know the future? I have given you some indications of long range outcomes in scripture, so you can be confident that the story as a whole has a happy ending. Can you see the path from here to there? There are many prophets of doom who see nothing but decline and despair as a current condition and going forward. Others project extensions of their own ideological positions into the future. Both of these should be suspect. Since you don’t know the future whose guidance should you respect and how should you approach it?