Happy Thursday my friends. I guess it's Thursday where I am where you're listening. It may not be Thursday, but this is the morning mindset. Welcome. I'm glad that you're here.

Did you know we have people listening to the morning mindset all over the world? There are people all over the globe listening day by day, getting their minds aligned with the truth of God.

I have been focused lately on the continent of Africa. There are many listeners throughout Africa, but there are a handful of nations, especially in Western Africa, where there are no listeners.

No one has ever listened to a morning mindset episode from these places, and I would encourage you if you know someone who lives in or serves in or is connected to one of these five countries.

Would you please share the morning mindset with them? I want to see the morning mindset spread to every nation in the world. What are those countries? There is Guinea, Bissau, there is Mali, there is Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Western Sahara.

All of those countries have no morning mindset listeners. Do you know a missionary? Do you know a person who lives there? Please share the morning mindset with them.

I know you can be a part of seeing God spread His work across the globe.

All right, today we are looking at this tendency that we as human beings have sometimes to wind up doing evil while we're trying to do something that we perceive as good.

Now you could call this all kinds of things, but there's ways we try to manipulate. There's ways we try to coordinate circumstances and arrange things so that it serves our interests.

But for in self-interest, though it's not always evil because we all need to brush our teeth, we need to put on our seatbelt, we need to do the things that will preserve self.

But self-interest can also be a thing that's deceptive and can lead us to do things we think are good, but actually turn out being evil.

Now, Proverbs 17 verses 8, 20, 23, and 26 point out four examples of this. And these examples are fairly obvious, but to me they're just examples of how this sort of a self-deception comes about.

Let's look at verse 8. It says, a bribe is like a magic stone in the eyes of the one who gives it wherever he turns, he prospers.

Now, this magic stone idea, it's basically just trying to communicate a person who is convinced that giving a bribe to people is a good thing to do because it gets them what they want.

They are deceived, just like a person would be deceived to think that some kind of a stone has magic.

He's saying in their own eyes they think giving bribes brings prosperity to them and brings benefit to their life, but actually the opposite is true.

Giving bribes is a wicked thing. We see that in verse 23 down below. It says the wicked accepts a bribe in secret to pervert the ways of justice.

You see a bribe is usually given to convince someone or coerce someone into doing something we want that would benefit us when in reality something else should actually be done.

You see, it's twisting the system to serve yourself rather than letting the system of justice in this case work out the way that it should work out.

So a bribe is one way that we can convince ourselves that we're doing good, but really are doing evil.

Verse 20 says, a man of crooked heart does not discover good and one with a dishonest tongue falls into calamity.

Now, this one I think is one we can all relate to a little more because we all have told little white lies trying to paint a situation in a way that makes us look favorable

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