Understanding the World Around Us: What Is Truth? - John 17:13-23
“What is truth?” - that’s the question Pilate asked some 2000 years ago, isn’t it? It’s a question that people are still asking today: What is truth? And they’re asking that question and they’re coming up with a variety of answers. How would you answer that question I wonder?
You see, for many people, truth is no longer determined by what we would call the facts. Instead truth is determined, in many cases, by an individual’s personal feelings on a particular matter. In that sense, truth, has become very subjective. We define it to be whatever we desire it to be. So what is supposedly true for one person is not necessarily true for the next. The outcome of that type of thinking is absolute chaos as everyone does what seems right in their own eyes. It results in a superficial faith that, instead of being built on solid rock, is built on shifting sands, and which can stand neither the storms of life, nor the test of time. So today we’re going to try to answer that question: What is truth?
Open your Bibles with me please to the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John. John 17 and we will read verses 13-21. These verses form a portion of a prayer that Jesus prays shortly before His crucifixion. John 17, beginning in verse 13. This is what we read: Jesus prays saying …
“I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:13–21, NIV84)
It’s popular today to define truth in such a way to suit our own preconceptions of what we think truth ought to be. Therefore truth has become the property of the individual, and there are as many truths, as there are people out there. It is easy to see where this has led us as a society and as a nation.
Adrian Rogers said it this way: “It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills. It is not love and it is not friendship if we fail to declare the whole counsel of God. It is better to be hated for telling the truth than to be loved for telling a lie. It is impossible to find anyone in the Bible who was a power for God who did not have enemies and was not hated. It’s better to stand alone with the truth than to be wrong with a multitude. It is better to ultimately succeed with truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie.”
(www.sermoncentral.com, Illustrations, submitted by Brian La Croix, Quoted in The Berean Call, Dec. 1996)
Truth is of the paramount importance and as God’s people, as His witnesses in this world, we must be people who are standing on, living by, believing in, and trusting through truth as God has revealed it. But in order to do that we must understand what truth is. And the first thing we need to know is this:
Truth belongs to God. It sounds so very simple but it really is the basis for everything we know about truth. Verse 17 says, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.” The word of God is truth. That’s our starting point - it has to be. If the word of God is not truth, then there is nothing that we can know with certainty about life, about death, about the meaning of life and about our value as people. Without taking God’s word as truth there is not even anything we can know with certainty about God, including whether or not God exists, because God has revealed Himself to us through His word. If we do not accept that word, or if the Bible is in fact not truth, then all we are left with is empty speculation and a futile hope based on our perceptions of fairness, and the leading of our feelings. When that happens what we end up doing is shaping God into our own image of what God ought to be like. And people do this all the time.
When God’s word takes second place to how we think things should be, then we enter into the realm of heresy and error. What does that look like in real life? It looks like the man or woman who believes that all roads lead to God; that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe in something; that there is no right or wrong but there is only what is right or wrong for you. Or it looks like those who say God is all loving and therefore will not judge sin – we’ll all get to heaven when we die; or that we don’t need a Savior because at heart we really are a good people. What are they doing? They are substituting their own perceptions of truth, their ideas of what truth ought to be, for the reality of truth as it is found in God’s word.
There is little as dangerous in this world as a half-truth. A teaching, a belief, a deception, a lie, that has a grain of truth to its credit is the most dangerous error of all because it masquerades as God’s truth. Scripture calls Satan “The Father of Lies.” In Luke 4 when Satan tempts Jesus out in the wilderness, Satan did not tempt Jesus with outright lies - they are easily recognized. Instead he used half-truths and insinuations in an attempt to lead Jesus into sin. He took truth - which is God’s - and then Satan distorted it to suit his own desires. Many have followed Satan’s path and have “exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” [Romans 1:25] We must be vigilant lest we do the same. In the 2nd chapter of the book of Jeremiah, God’s condemnation of the Israelites stems from the fact that the people have exchanged the truth of God, which is as springs of living water, for so-called “truths,” that they have themselves created. These empty “truths” God calls “broken cisterns.” “13 “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” [Jeremiah 2:13] In other words they have exchanged the truth of God for a lie.
Secondly, Truth is what Jesus Taught. The word “truth” is found in 182 verses in the New Testament alone. Of those instances, 77 occur as Jesus begins to speak, to the people. And as He begins to teach He says, “I tell you the truth.” In verse 14 of our passage today, Jesus prays saying, “I have given them your word” that is, “I have given them your truth.” Truth is what Jesus taught. Truth is what Jesus has given us. And Jesus never backed down from the truth.
Sometimes we are tempted to back down from sharing the truth because we don’t want to offend someone. A case in point is the story involving the editor of a small town newspaper. He had been called a liar once too often and resolved henceforth to be completely honest in all his writings. The consequences of his resolution were evident to all in the next issue that was printed. There, in a marriage announcement, appeared the “truth” his readers were calling for. It read: “Married, Miss Sylvan Rhodes and James Collins, last Saturday at the Baptist church by the Rev. J. Gordon. The bride is a very ordinary town girl, who doesn’t know any more about cooking than a jackrabbit, and never helped her mother a day in her life. She is not a beauty by any means and has a gait like a duck. The groom is an up-to-date loafer. He has been living off the old folks at home all his life and is now worth nothing. It will be a hard life.” (Source Unknown) Needless to say the people preferred when he soft - pedaled the truth for them and distorted it to make it kinder and gentler. We change the truth, we water it down, because we don’t want to have to face up to it.
There is a movie called “A Few Good Men,” that you may have heard of. The main characters are played by Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. Cruise plays a military lawyer who is interrogating the character played by Nicholson. Cruise isn’t getting the answers that he needs and he finally yells out, “I Want The Truth!” And Nicholson shouts back at him, “You Can’t Handle The Truth!” And sometimes we don’t share the truth because we don’t think people can handle it either. However, someone once said, “The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.” (Herbert Agar, Leadership, Vol. 17, no. 2, www.sermoncentral.com, Illustrations]
Jesus, however, never made the truth more palatable by taking the sting out of it. A. W. Tozer once wrote that Jesus, “told his hearers the whole truth and let them make up their minds. He might grieve over the retreating form of an inquirer who could not face up to the truth, but he never ran after him to try to win him with rosy promises. He would have men follow him, knowing the cost, or he would let them go their own ways.” We need to do no less. We do not do our families, our friends, our neighbors, nor the stranger, any good by watering down, or compromising, the truth God has revealed. Truth is what Jesus taught, it is what must be believed, and it is what we are responsible for passing on.
Thirdly, Truth is what Jesus Lived. In John 14:6 Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Jesus lived out the truth in His life - in everything He did and in everything He said. In fact in John 10:37 Jesus says, “Do not believe me unless I do what my Father [meaning God the Father] does.” The truth of what He taught was irrevocably tied to the truth of what He lived. The way in which you and I live will never change the truth of God’s word. But the way in which we live will color other people’s perceptions of the truth of God’s word. The author, Mark Twain, was turned away from Christianity because he saw elders in the church acting as hypocrites. They would speak the truths of Scripture on Sundays, but live the lies of the flesh the rest of the week. His perception of the truth of God’s word was colored by the hypocrisy of God’s people. On the other hand people have observed the close correlation between the truths taught in Scripture, and the way in which a believer lives their life, and the truth of God’s word has been validated in their eyes. Truth is what Jesus lived. Truth is what we should seek to live as well.
Fourthly, Truth is what Sets People Free. In verse 8, of John 17, we read that Jesus said, “For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me.” They are the ones who have been set free. Someone once said that, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” (Source Unknown) It is very true that we often turn a blind eye to the truth - people simply don’t want to hear the truth today unless it coincides with their own sense of fairness and their own feelings. Scripture tells us that John the Baptist preached against Herod’s sexual immorality. Herod didn’t want to hear the truth of his sin and so he threw John into prison. But he remained a slave to that sin and it led him in ways which he did not want to go.
But in John 8:31-32 Jesus says that “If you hold to my teaching, .... 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” A lie never sets anyone free. It keeps them in bondage. But in turning to the truth given by God, taught by Jesus, lived in His flesh, and accepting it, and believing it, we in turn find freedom. Not freedom to sin but freedom to follow God. In the truth of the Gospel we find hope and life and the love of God. We find freedom from slavery to sin, freedom from guilt and shame, and the freedom to both forgive those who have hurt us and to be forgiven by God.
Fifthly, Truth is what Gives Life. You can not be born again spiritually into the kingdom of God apart from the truth that is God’s. Those that Jesus is praying for in our passage this morning are those who have heard the word of truth, who have accepted it, believed it, and obeyed it for they are the ones who have been given life eternal. And Jesus purposefully describes them as separate from those who have not believed, those whom He called the “world,” because those in the world are those, according to 2 Thessalonians, who, “perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved ... and so ... all will be condemned who have not believed the truth.” [2 Thessalonians 2:10-12] Friends, hold fast to the truth because that’s where life will be found.
Sixthly, Truth is Narrow. In verse 14 Jesus prays saying those who have believed the word of truth are “not of the world any more than [He] is of the world.” There is something distinct about them that separates them from everyone else. And in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus speaks those familiar words saying,“13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” [Matthew 7:13-14] And in the Gospel of John, ““I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.” [John 10:7-9]. Truth is narrow. Jesus alone is the way, the truth, and the life.
It is a fair thing to say that all roads lead to heaven. It feels right to the human heart that nice people should enter into heaven regardless of what faith they follow or what they believe about God - but neither what seems fair, nor what feels right, is, in this instance, the truth. The truth is that the way is narrow and it does matter in whom you believe and what you believe about God. In the 10th chapter of the book of Romans we read, “if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” Truth is narrow.
Abraham Lincoln was arguing with a man one day about the issue of truth. In an attempt to make his point he asked the man this question: “How many legs does a cow have?” “Four, of course,” came the disgusted reply. “That’s right,” said Lincoln. “Now suppose you call the cow’s tail a leg; how many legs would the cow have?” “Five, of course,” the man replied confidently. Lincoln responded by saying, “That’s where you’re wrong. Calling a cow’s tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg!” And so it is with truth. We have great freedom to believe anything we want in these days but merely believing something to be true does not make it true. Calling something truth, that is not truth, does not change its nature. Truth is narrow. Make sure you are walking the right path.
Seventhly, Truth is Protection. In verses 11 and 15 Jesus prays that God would protect the believers. Protection from what? From the evil one - the one who has come to cheat and steal and to devour the unwary. And what is his weapon? It is the lie, the half truth, the heresy. He is the Father of Lies and his lies lead people to their destruction. Again and again Scripture tells us to be on our guard, be vigilant, keep a good watch out for that which is evil. We are to keep our eyes peeled for that which masquerades as truth but which in reality is a lie. But the problem is this. People today say, “There is no truth.” Many have given up the belief in truth in favor of an enlightened philosophy of tolerance which accepts all view points and have thereby forfeited their ability to discern what is of God and what is evil. Apart from that standard of truth given us by God we have nothing, apart from our own standards of fairness and feeling, by which to discern good and evil. And when that type of thinking creeps into the church it is like a cancer. It spreads and it erodes the protection afforded by the truth until there is just as little truth inside the church as there is in the world.
Eighth, Truth is Hope. Verses 20 and 21 offer us hope through the truth. Jesus prays for those who will believe in the message of truth that believers speak. He prays for them knowing that the truth of God, is the Gospel of God, is the power of God for the salvation of all those who believe. And therefore we can hope. Hope that the truth will touch and fill those we love, those for whom we weep, those for whom we are moved to despair, by the hardness of their hearts. Jesus’ word is that some will believe and the truth will live in them. Many non-believers have predicted the death of the church. All have been proved wrong. When Hungary was taken over by the Communists decades ago, Christians were brutally persecuted. One of the leading figures in that persecution confidently predicted that within 20 years the last traces of Christianity would be stamped out. Today it is the Communists which have fallen and Christianity which has emerged stronger than ever in that country. Scripture promises that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the church. And so there is hope. Hope that the people of God will reclaim the truth of God.
And while there is much more, that truth is, time has not permitted a deeper look at it’s nature today. Let me conclude with a ninth and final point. Truth is how God’s Followers Are Defined. So often we define ourselves as Christians by what we are not, or by what we do not, do. We might say that as Christians we don’t cheat, lie or steal. We don’t seek to harm others. We might say we don’t drink, smoke or do drugs or engage in sexually immoral behaviors. But it is odd to define something by what it is not. We need to start defining ourselves by what we are and by what we do. Verses 6-8 lay it out for us. Christians are those who have received, accepted, believed, and obeyed the truth given by God. They are those who seek to honor God with their minds, bodies, and hearts, who seek to love God with all they are and who seek to love their neighbors as they love themselves.
What a difference in the practical aspects of how we describe ourselves as Christians. There is a world of difference in saying, “Because I am a Christian I do not seek to harm others,” and saying, “Because I am a Christian I am actively seeking to love others.” A world of difference in saying, “Because I am a Christian I don’t drink or smoke or do drugs,” and saying, “Because I am a Christian I strive to honor God with my body.” When we define ourselves by what we are not, we are defining ourselves by the lowest common denominator. And that is less then inspiring but it is also less than the truth. In Christ we are far more, than what we are not. We are children of God, we have been adopted into his family, we are brothers and sisters with Jesus Christ, we are redeemed, we have hope that the world does not have, we have peace that surpasses understanding, we have access to the throne of God, we are forgiven, we are made righteous by God, and so it goes, for this is the truth regarding those for whom Jesus prayed. We are defined by God’s truth – not the world’s – and in the final analysis His truth is the only one that will matter.
Friends, let’s be clear about the truth and proclaim it shamelessly. To do any less merely clouds the issue and has led to the powerlessness that we see in so many Christian’s lives today. Clarity is essential because the Father of Lies will be all too happy to twist and distort to his own purposes a truth proclaimed in vague terms or with the sting taken out of it.
There is a short story with which I’ll conclude the message this morning that illustrates, in a humourous way, the danger of being unclear about the truth.
It seems there was a nice little old lady who was slightly incontinent who was planning a week's vacation at a particular campground. Never having been there she wanted to make sure of the facilities first. Uppermost in her mind of course were the toilet facilities. But she was fearful that others might learn of her urinary control problems and she could not bring herself to write "toilet" in her letter. After considerable thought, she settled on the phrase "bathroom commode,” instead, but when she wrote that down it still sounded too suspicious, so she wrote the letter to the campground and referred to the bathroom commode as the "BC." "Does the campground have its own BC?" is what she actually wrote.
The campground owner was baffled by the initials so he showed the letter around to several campers, but they could not decipher it either. Finally the owner figured she must be referring to the location of the local Baptist Church, so he sat down and wrote a letter in reply, saying:
“Dear Madam, I regret very much the delay in answering your letter, but I now take pleasure in informing you that a "BC" is located nine miles north of the campground and is capable of seating 250 people at one time. I admit it is quite a distance away if you are in the habit of going regularly, but no doubt you will be pleased to know that a great number of people take their lunches along and make a day of it. They usually arrive early and stay late.
The last time my wife and I went was six years ago, and it was so crowded we had to stand up the whole time we were there. I would like to say it pains me very much not to be able to go more regularly but it is surely no lack of desire on my part. As we grow older it seems to be more of an effort, particularly in cold weather. If you do decide to come down to our campground, perhaps I could go with you the first time, sit with you and introduce you to all the other folks. Remember, this is a friendly community.” (Source Unknown)
Folks let us not be unclear or uncertain of the truth. Let us be diligent in the study and application of God’s word that we may know the truth and be certain of these things just as Jesus has prayed for us. For the truth will set you free and the consequences of failing to know, or failing to clearly share the truth, are eternal.
Let’s pray …
