Back in 1997 a Jim Carey movie came out called Liar, Liar. Carey plays the title role. He is an attorney, a very successful attorney. But the movie opens with his little boy at school on the day when the children are giving reports on what their fathers do, and his son announces, “My daddy’s a liar.” His teacher doesn’t know what to do with that, but as the little boy explains, the teacher says, “No, you mean he’s a lawyer.”
But as the movie develops you see that his Daddy really is a liar. He specializes on getting crooks out of trouble by helping them lie to the court. He blocks his secretary from getting a much deserved raise by lying to her. He has an office affair with one of the partners of the firm in hopes of getting a promotion, even though he despises her.
He can be very charming. When he’s with his son he’s very warm and a lot of fun. He flatters all sorts of people with totally dishonest, empty flattery. And he is making a lot of money for this firm of crooked lawyers.
But the tragedy is that he keeps promising his son that he’ll be there for him, to pick him up after school, to play baseball, for his birthday party, but he never fulfills his promises. He always gets involved with a case at work and doesn’t even bother to call. Any words that came out of his mouth were worthless. And the next day he would always try to cover it up with a lie. As the movie starts, his wife has already divorced him, maybe a year before, and is on the verge of marrying another man and moving to another city far away. And his son is broken hearted because he loves this Dad in spite of all the lies. And even though it was his son’s birthday, and even though he had promised to be there and his son was really looking forward to it, when the time came, he didn’t show. So when his mother brought out the birthday cake and he blew out the candles and made his birthday wish, his son wished that for just one day, just 24 hours, his father would be totally incapable of telling a lie. And his wish came true.
And that led to 24 hours of total chaos for Jim Carey, as only Jim Carey can do. When he opened his mouth for what had always been empty flattery before, the words that came out were exactly what he felt towards people in his heart. And he got slapped on the face. His secretary, who had always covered for him when he lied to others, walked out on him when she heard the truth about how he had lied to her to avoid giving her a raise. He had prepared for a big case, the case that would probably earn him a partnership in the firm, depending on nothing but lies. Two of his superiors came to watch. But on this day he couldn’t lie. One by one his dishonest tactics fell apart because he couldn’t lie. And in desperation he had to come up with an honest argument to win the case. And he did it, in the nick of time. He could be an effective lawyer and be honest at the same time.
And during this 24 hours, when total honesty forced him to be accountable for his behavior, no excuses allowed, the chaos forced him to recognize what he was doing to his son. He was changed. He couldn’t lie to others. He couldn’t lie to himself.
And the movie closes with another birthday party, a year later, and he’s there with his family, where he belongs, and his ex-wife is starting to trust him again and love him again and it’s a happy ending. It was just 24 hours of the strict discipline of telling the truth that forced him to recognize the truth about himself, and made it possible for him to become a new person.
How do churches grow? We’ve looked at a number of key ingredients for a growing church in the past weeks. Churches grow by setting their targets on maturity in Christ, on helping people become real disciples. Churches grow by equipping their members for effective ministry. Churches grow by understanding that they are a living body, in which each member works to build up the other members. Churches grow when there are strong ligaments of loving relationships that bind them close to each other. And finally, today, churches grow by speaking the truth in love.
Please stand for the reading of God’s word, Ephesians 4:11-16.
11 The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. 14 We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. 15 But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.
Why do we talk about speaking the truth in love in the church? Didn’t all our mothers teach us to tell the truth? Well, I know we all try. But there are many times when it is hard to speak out the truth.
Many Christians find it hard to talk about their faith. There is something in our culture that frowns on talking about religion, especially when it means a lot to you. And so we all too often keep our mouths shut and don’t speak out the truth we know about God.
I’ll bet everyone here has had moments when God touched them. And everyone here has learned important things from the Bible. But probably a lot of us have trouble putting it into words. And, parents and grandparents, your children need to hear their Christian heritage, what God has done for their families.
We all need to hear encouragements, reports of what God is doing. Someone in this church may be having a day when they feel God has abandoned them. Does that happen? And maybe they are just incapable of hearing God’s voice or feeling his presence. So God may give someone else a word that will touch them. And they need for you to speak out the truth of what you have experienced about God.
Maybe someone is having trouble standing up for what they know is right and true at work. And they are feeling very alone. But if you share how God is moving in your life, that may be just the encouragement they need. We are all built up and encouraged when we hear stories of answered prayer, when we share lessons we have learned from the Bible. We need to speak out the good things that God does in our life. That’s the loving thing to do to share them. We are the body of Christ, his hands and his mouth for one another. And when we clam up and refuse to serve each other by speaking out the truth God has given us, the whole body fails.
And we get shy and we worry about using the wrong words. We don’t know how to get started. One of the blessings of a calling to be a pastor is that you are forced to think it all through and put it into words.
Who grows the most from any sermon? It’s the one who does the work of studying and putting it into words.
So, I’ve written up a schedule for each of us to take a turn preaching the sermons here, starting next week, so we can all grow. What do you think about that? No, that would be an overdose of a good thing.
But let me suggest that we all need to be in some sort of study group or Sunday School class, where we can practice sharing our experiences of God and learn from each other as we struggle to put our faith into words. The discipline of joining in a discussion with other members of the church will help you learn how to do it. We need to speak the truth about God to our families and to our brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s a way we can bless each other and build each other up.
But there are other times when it is hard to speak the truth. Can you imagine a scene like this every happening?
(At this point Kathy Aram and Marty Linderborg presented a very short drama in which two friends had a conversation, often holding smiling masks in front of their faces, in which they said the ‘right’ things to each other, but whispered asides to the congregation of what they were really thinking inside. In the end one became tired of the dishonesty, admitted some of the life struggles that had been wearing her down as she hid them and their relationship suddenly moved to a deeper level.)
It’s hard to talk about the good things we have experienced about God at church. It can be even harder to talk about the things that are struggles. We’re something over one hundred people in this room. How many are here today carrying loads that really wear you down? Ten percent? Twenty percent of us? Fifty percent? Eighty percent of us? And is it a bit scary to talk it over with someone else? We’re afraid of being criticized, or judged. What will people think of me if I really do tell the truth?
A few weeks ago I talked about the church needing to set its sight on bringing all its members to maturity, another way of saying that we are here to make disciples for Jesus Christ. And I used as an example how I have enjoyed watching our kids developing into mature adults. That was fun and easy.
Churches can so easily come under the influence of an unwritten rule that says always be cheerful at church. Keep your struggles to yourself. You can’t talk about this. You can’t talk about that. Be positive. Keep smiling, no matter what.
But if you set yourself a rule of not talking about what is true in your life, then pretty soon all your talk is false, your relationships are false, and they can start to feel very empty.
And the Bible tells us that we are here to bear one another’s burdens. But if we don’t know what those burdens are, then we can’t be of any help to one another.
Going back to the movie, Jim Carey got really good at bluffing his way through life, with a quick answer, a shameless lie, easy excuses. And it worked for him as a lawyer. But it ruined him as a human being. And you could say that the discipline of being forced to speak nothing but the truth saved his soul.
Honesty saved him. At the head of your bulletins I inserted a verse for us to think about. It’s from the First Epistle of John, chapter 1. Could you open your bulletins and read it with me?
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
God is light. He has bent over backwards for us to see him as he really is. He has revealed himself to us humans over and over again, in more ways than we can count. He wants to be known.
He calls us to walk in the light with each other, to allow nothing hidden, to be totally honest with each other. And what does John say will happen, in the last couple of lines, when we do that? Two things happen.
We will have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
No church is meant to be a museum for the display of perfect saints. The display cases would be empty. Churches are hospitals for sinners. And our healing comes when we bring our scary things into the light and allow God’s love in our brothers and sisters to heal us. Nasty things grow in the dark and damp corners of our homes. But the bright sunlight of God’s Spirit burns away the nasty things and feeds the things that are true.
Now I could invite you to stand up and tell everyone your deepest, darkest secrets. But, of course, we aren’t ready for that. But where can you build a place where it is safe to be totally honest with your brothers and sisters? The answer is, again, in a small group. In a small group you can go together through some structured exercises to build a safe environment. In a small group you can learn to trust each other and learn how to be trustworthy with each other’s pain. In a small group you can learn to speak the truth in love.
Yesterday Kathy, Ed, Maggie and I attended a workshop on small groups. Oscar Carrasco is leading a conference wide training program to help us go back to our Methodist roots in small groups. The speaker told about the research of Dr. Tom Albin, who read a huge number of personal journals and notes of the earliest Methodists to see how so many people came to know Christ so fast and to be molded into effective disciples. One of the questions he asked himself as he studied this amazing move of God’s Spirit, was where did it happen? Wesley was preaching all the time. And he always moved people into small groups as quickly as he could. Which was more effective? Dr. Albin concluded that only about 15% of the early Methodists came to know Christ in preaching services. 85% came to a living experience of Jesus Christ in the small groups.
Have you ever noticed that you can sit through a sermon, say to yourself, “That’s an important thought,” and then you go home and forget all about it? That’s because it’s so easily to just listen passively to a sermon. But in a small group, you naturally join in the conversation and think deeper about how it applies to your life. And when the group is ready you can make promises to check up on each other to be sure you really do follow through. And it’s more likely to stick. John Wesley, the master of setting up small groups once wrote about this. He used the term “close discourse” for personal discussions on how our souls are doing. And this is what he said, “I have found by experience, than one of these has learned more from one hour's close discourse, than from ten years’ public preaching.”
Churches grow through speaking the truth in love. Churches grow when they speak the truth of what God has done in our lives. Churches grow when they speak the truth about the work still to be done. AMEN
