Branch Rickey use to coach the University of Michigan baseball team before he became manager
of the Dodgers. One day they were playing Brown University, and the Brown catcher, Walter Snell,
hit what might have been a three bagger, but he stretched it into a home run. The first baseman,
however, noticed that he didn't touch first base. Soon the whole team was a howling gang of
protesters, and the empire didn't know what to do. Branch Rickey said, "This is easy to settle. Ask
Walter Snell. I've known him for 10 years, and he is an honest man." The empire called Snell over
and asked him if he touched first. He hung his head for a moment, and then said, "No, I didn't touch
first." It cost Brown the game and made Walter feel humiliated. Telling the truth can be costly.
Reuben Donnelley had a mother who used to tell him stories about the ermine. They were so
spotless with their white fur that hunters would try to drive them toward the mud because they knew
the ermine would suffer itself to be captured before it would soil its pure garment. She told him that
her dreams were that he would be a man of honor and truth in the business world when he became a
man. Reuben became a stockbroker on Wall Street, and he made a lot of money, but then he went
broke and was forced into bankruptcy. He paid off hundreds of his investors 27 cents on the dollar.
Many of them were poor people and they lost good money because of his bad judgment. Reuben
then invented the classified telephone directory and made a fortune in a very few years. One day he
sat down and wrote out checks to all those who had lost money because of his mistakes. He had no
legal obligation to do so, but he felt a moral obligation. It cost him to be honest and to honor his
debts.
Let me share one more illustration from ancient history. Regulus was a prisoner of the
Carthaginians. They sent him to Rome with a convoy of ambassadors to sue for peace. If peace was
not granted, he was to return. He took an oath and swore that he would come back. When he
appeared in Rome he urged the senators to persevere in the war. This meant he would have to return
and be the prisoner of the enemy. The senators tried to persuade him that he did not have to keep his
word to the enemy. He replied, "Have you resolved to dishonor me? I am not ignorant that death and torture are preparing for me, but what are these to the shame of an infamous action, or the
wounds of a guilty mind?" He returned to Carthage and died under torture. Keeping your word can
be costly.
These three historical illustrations make it clear that being honest is not easy, and often it is very
expensive. It may cost honor, wealth, or even life itself, and yet men pay these high prices because
they are aware that dishonesty is even more costly. Dishonesty puts you out of kilter with the whole
universe. Guilt makes millions feel they are going against the grain of life, and it is a struggle to get
they know not where. David went that futile path also, but like the Prodigal Son, he finally came to
himself, faced up to his sin and folly honestly, and returned to God. In verse 13 he says he will teach
transgressors God's ways, and when he does sinners will return to God. Teaching men the ways of
God is a powerful means of evangelism. Many men never turn to God because they do not
understand His ways of mercy, love and forgiveness. They do not understand what He wants of
them. David learned the hard way, and he records it for all men to learn without first being fools.
The truth he learned, which we want to focus upon, is that in verse 6 where he says, "Surely you
desire truth in the inner parts." David learned the major lesson of life that God has built it so that
there is no way to be happy without honesty in the inner man. It seems to be a simple enough truth,
but the fact is, very few, even among Christians, realize the full implications of God's demands for
honesty. Once a man begins to deceive himself and fails to be honest about his own sin and
weakness, he soon becomes hypocritical and hardened so that he is almost useless as a servant of
Christ. We will come back to the believer, but we need to point out first that the unbeliever who is
dishonest about his sinful nature, and who refuses to admit his need for a Savior, can go one of two
ways, and both are a foretaste of hell itself.
Some go the way of guilt and suffer a plague worse than the bubonic, which is the plague of
conscience. They do not believe in the laws of God, but they have a voice within that does, and it
does not let them rest. A little girl heard her father tell her mother he couldn't go with them to
grandmothers because he had to work on his invoice. Not knowing what an invoice was, she put her
own interpretation on it, and she told her grandma that daddy couldn't come because he was having
trouble with his conscience. While conscience is an invoice, and sometimes it lists all the judgments
one deserves for his sin. James Magner in Mental Health In A Mad World wrote, "One of the surest
tests of mental health is a devotion to and keenness for truth." Telling the truth even if it hurts is
better than medicine and vitamins, but when men refuse to be honest about their sin they get sick.
When Macbeth sees the pitiful state into which a sense of guilt has plunged his wife because of
their murder, he turns to his court physician and pleads, "Cure her of that. Canst thou not minister
to a mind disease'd, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the
brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff which
weighs upon the heart?" The doctor replies, "This disease is beyond my practice..." There is only
one who can handle such cases of the conscience, and His cure demands honesty and truth in the
inward parts. There must be admission and confession of one's sin. Masses refused to be honest,
and the result is a world of the mentally and morally sick.
The other path that many take is the path where they so sear their conscience and harden it that
it hardly bothers them at all. They reject all standards, and right and wrong have no meaning
because there is no God for them. God is rejected so that life is every man for himself. Life is a
ballgame with no rules and no empire. It sounds exciting as they plan all they can do in a world of
total freedom. But after a while they discover that a baseball game with no bases, a football game
without goals, a basketball game without a hoop, and a life without God is meaningless. Their
dishonesty leads them to a road that goes nowhere. Gertrude Stein describes the intellectuals she
met in Paris "As belonging to nothing, and mastered by no great loyalty. They had no gods to
serve." T. S. Elliot describes the frustration situation of those with feelings of futility:
The stained time ridden faces,
Distracted from distraction by distraction,
Filled with fancies and empty meaning,
Tumid apathy with no concentration,
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind.
Dr. Carl Jung in Modern Man In Search For A Soul says that it doesn't make any difference if
his patients are rich or poor, social lights or nobodies, he hears them all say, "If I only knew that my
life had some meaning and purpose, then there would be no silly story about my nerves!" It is not
my intention to over-simplify, but the fact is, the cure for both those plagued by conscience and those
cursed by emptiness and meaninglessness is to be found in honesty and truth in the inward parts.
Truth within leads directly to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He alone can cleanse
the conscience and fill the life with meaning.
It is surprising how often the Scriptures link the mercy of God with the truth of God. They go
together, for it is only when we see His truth and acknowledge it as fitting us that we can expect to
experience His mercy. That is the way David came to call upon God for mercy, and this is the
logical pattern for all.
Psa. 25:10 says, "All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth..."
Psa. 61:7 refers to David as king-"He shall abide before God forever; O prepare mercy and truth,
which may preserve him."
Psa. 20:28 says, "Mercy and truth preserve the king."
Psa. 16:6 says, "By mercy and truth iniquity is cleanse."
Truth and mercy go together to preserve and cleanse, and in Psa. 85 where there is a plea for
God to forgive Israel, and where there is great praise for His bringing them back from captivity, we
read this description of what salvation is in verses 10 and 11, "Mercy and truth are met together;
righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall spring out of the earth, and
righteousness shall look down from heaven." All of this gives us a picture of how God and man are
reconciled. God is not reconciled with sin in the sinner, but with truth in the sinner. The truth in
man meets the mercy of God, and when they meet there is a kiss of peace that cleanses from sin and
brings about reconciliation. Truth within, or inner honesty, is no mere minor requirement of God. It
is essential for both salvation and sanctification.
Dishonesty will hinder the work of God in the soul of any man, whether they be believer or
unbeliever. Honesty, therefore, or facing up to the full truth about ourselves in relation to God and
the world, is a subject we cannot afford to neglect. Billy Graham preaches on honesty frequently. In
fact, he does so more than any other preacher of which I am aware. I won't repeat his proof that we
are living in an age of chiselry in which dishonesty has invaded every level of our society, but he
does prove it, and he gives evidence that Christians are also guilty.
We sometimes even use the devil's tools in the service of the Lord. We use trickery and
dishonest witness in order to impress non-Christians. If we are honest with ourselves, we will not
use deceptive methods, but simply be true to what we are. It is so easy to honor God with the lips
when our hearts are from Him. Our hearts are far from God when we pretend to be what we are not.
David probably pretended to be happy in the Lord that whole year in which he was miserable. He
didn't want to give a bad impression to the people, and so he justified hypocrisy on the basis that it
was for the sake of others. He looked like a real worshiper at the temple, and no doubt spoke
eloquently of the Lord. He possibly even wrote some songs for worship, but then he would go home
and reveal in the privacy of his own family how rotten he could be. His guilt would make him a
bear in private, but the mask would go on as soon as he entered public life.
Since total honesty is a perfection that waits for the new heaven and new earth, all of us wear
some masks, and are to some degree hypocrites, but the goal of the Christian is to lessen that degree
more and more by learning to be more honest with themselves. I enjoy a Christian who does not
pretend to have passed up Paul in the Christian race. Some give you the impression they have
arrived, and they do not need to press on like Paul had to do. This lack of honesty will keep them
back from reaching the goal. The honest Christian is easy to be with. You don't feel uncomfortable
because they are real. If they do something stupid, they admit it is stupid. If they have areas of their
life where they fall short, they do not pretend otherwise. They can be honest with you because they
are honest with themselves. They are not so anxious to impress others that they will deny their faults
and needs. Such a Christian will go far in Christ-likeness, for he will strive to be true in his inward
parts. He will not settle for self-deception.
The saying is, there is an exception to every rule, and that is true if you recognize that it is true
of that rule as well, which means there are rules with no exceptions, and one of them is the rule of
absolute honesty before God. There can never be a case where it is right to be dishonest with God,
but what about dishonesty with men? Christians debate the issue of whether it is ever right to lie.
What if you could save a life by doing so? There are numerous situations in life where deception
seems to be the wise thing to do. This is certainly the case in sports. Deceiving your opponent is the
key to winning. Some think it is all right to be dishonest if you are honest about it. It is like the
store with the ad that said, "Why go somewhere else to be cheated when you can come here?" That
sounds quite clever, and being clever is not necessarily dishonest. And old gentleman said to the
honest boy who returned the ten dollars he had lost, "I know you are an honest boy but it was a ten
dollar bill I lost and not ten ones." "I know mister," said the lad, "But the last time I found a big bill
the owner didn't have any change." The little guy was self-serving, no doubt, but not dishonest.
Cleverness, however, can be a great tool for dishonesty. David was very clever in the way he
went about his cover up of his sin. You recall how he gave Uriah a leave from battle to be with his
wife Bathsheba. He thought that would get him off the hook, and Uriah would think he was the
father of the child. When that failed he arranged for him to be killed by enemy soldiers. How much
closer to the perfect murder can you get? Who could suspect anything when it was the enemy who
killed him? David was clever, but it was all devoted to defying the law of God. No amount of
cleverness, however successful, can be acceptable when it violates the revealed will of God.
Even if deceit gets a man into the kingdom of God, he will be saved, but the deceiver will be
judged for his sin of dishonesty. God desires truth in the inward parts, and we can only attain the
heights by staying on the level. We must level with God and man. The one place where every one
of us can be an expert is in personal honesty. We cannot know a fraction of the ocean of facts on
anything, but we can be honest about what we really feel. If I think the earth is flat, as many
Christians once did, I am not evil just because I am wrong. Being wrong is no sin, for if that was the
case, every time you missed a question on a test you would be sinning. Being wrong is only a sin if
you are so proud that you feel you are infallible, and then demand that others be wrong with you.
That is what many Christians did to those who refused to believe the world was flat.
True honesty is always humble. Take a look at yourself and you will look at others differently
says the songwriter. The honest man is a humble man who looks at others with greater
understanding. He understands their struggle with sin, and even their love of sin. There is
compassion for others in the heart of the honest Christian, for they know that accept for the grace of
God they would be as bad as any sinner. Jeremiah said that the heart is deceitful above all things
and desperately wicked. That is why the hardest battle we have in pleasing God is in letting truth
reign in our inward parts.
As important as honesty is, it is not the Gospel. Being honest cannot save us, and it might even
destroy us. The Prodigal came home honesty confessing that he was not worthy to be called his
father's son. His honesty was not what led to the great banquet prepared for him. His honesty alone
led him only to the servant's quarters. He said to his father that he was not good and that he should
be made a mere servant. The servant with the one talent was being honest with himself. He said he
was no good at business and so he faced his limitations and did nothing. His honesty was severely
rebuked, for self-honesty can be a curse. Honesty with self reveals that we are weak and sinful.
Honesty with self leads men to despair. Honesty is only a great virtue when we are honest about
Christ as well. Paul was honest with self when he said, "I am the chief of sinners," but he was honest
about Christ when he said, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." Honesty, which
sees self as an empty vessel is only a blessing when one is also honest about the power of Christ to
fill that vessel with the water of life. Truth in the inward parts means that self is humbled and Christ
is exalted. When a person combines these two they are being honest to self and honest to God
