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God Of Truth Series
Contributed by Jeffery Anselmi on Mar 30, 2001 (message contributor)
Summary: What is truth? God is truth and the world needs to know that God is truth.
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INTRODUCTION
A husband stepped on one of those penny scales that tell a person’s fortune and weight. "Listen to this," he said to his wife, showing her a small, white card. "It says I’m energetic, bright, and resourceful." "Yeah," his wife nodded, "and it has your weight wrong, too." Sometimes the truth hurts.
I want you to imagine for a moment a world that did not contain truth. I want you to think with me about a world where all truth is relative (in other words, no truth is firm, what is truth for you is not truth for me). What kind of world would that be?
I want you to think about what the world would be like if there were no standard of truth, in other words, truth is whatever you want to make it.
Think about how it would be to drive down the road if there were no standard of truth. What would happen if you came to a stoplight or a stop sign? Some would stop some would not. What if you did not believe that you had to drive on the right hand side of the road? What if all the people could decide to drive on whatever side of the road that they wanted to? There would be chaos on the roads if there were no standard of truth.
Think about a society in which parents would no longer teach their children that there is absolute truth? They would not want to impose their beliefs on their children.
Think about how our kids would turn out if mom and dad would no longer teach what is right and wrong, what if they said there really is no truth?
What kind of society would we have if there were really no standard of truth? What kind of society would we have if we all just made up our own truth? What kind of people would we be if the truth were something that we could not possibly understand because “there are many different interpretations”?
The disastrous consequence is that without any absolutes, the world becomes a place of unbounded cruelty and anarchy. We are seeing the fruit of this in our society today.
Before we get too far into this, I want to take some time do define what truth is. If we understand what the word means, then we can better understand the importance of knowing it.
One idea is that of “firmness,” “stability”, hence “constancy,” “faithfulness.” Webster’s pocket dictionary defines truth as, conformity to fact or reality, integrity: consistency, exactness, verified fact.
The truth is the foundation from which we build our thoughts and ideas and lives. The truth is something that transcends time. Truth is the thing that we can anchor our lives to. If there were no truth, then we have no foundation from which to build our lives. If the foundation is moving, the foundation will come apart and the building of our lives will come tumbling down.
We are living in a society that is increasingly intolerant of truth and we are reaping the fruits of that. Increasingly society is tilting to the point that there is no absolute truth from which you can base your lives and even if there are absolutes, you cannot know them because they are too complex and life is easier if I do not have to deal with absolute truth.
Today I want to take you down a path that will show you that one of God’s attributes is truth. As we journey further down the path of truth, you will see that God wants you to know the truth and we will finish our journey looking at why God wants you to know the truth.
SERMON
I. GOD IS TRUTH
Intro remarks
Have you ever been around a person that could not seem to locate the truth about many things? It reminds me of the young mother who encountered her son on the street when he should have been in school. When the boy finished explaining why he was not where he was supposed to be, the mother replied, "I’m not accusing you of telling a lie. I’m just saying that I have never before heard of a school that gives time off for good behavior."
We would call a person who has a hard time with the truth, a liar.
Many of us know people that are very honest people, we would say that one of their attributes was that they were truthful.
When we look at God, we find that God is not only truthful, but the bible says that He the GOD OF TRUTH. Listen to these passages: Truth is presented in Scripture as a chief element in the nature of God as shown in these passages.