Truth Be Told
Introduction
Mike & Harry are sitting at a bar. They get into a heated argument. Mike grabs Harry around the throat and starts to choke him. As Harry fights back, he throws Mike off him, and Mike smashes up the side of his face on a chair. An ambulance is called, and when all is said and done, Mike loses the sight in his right eye.
Well, Mike decides to sue Harry for damages. Since Mike was trying to choke the life out of Harry at the time of the incident, he fears that may have an adverse affect on his case. SO, he gets a couple of his buddies (we’ll call them Bert & Ernie) who were in the bar that night to say that Harry punched Mike in the face and that’s how he lost his sight.
In the course of the trial, other eyewitnesses are brought forward who give evidence that contradicts Bert & Ernie. The CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATORS get their DNA tests and their other tricks, which all tend to disprove Mike’s story (as well As Bert & Ernie’s) version. Harry is cleared of all criminal and civil charges.
We know that Mike is probably in deep trouble now, but what about Bert & Ernie, who lied for Mike? In our legal system, there would be some potentially serious consequences for committing perjury. But no matter how stiff their sentence might be, it wouldn’t be as serious as the Old Testament Law would’ve required.
Deuteronomy 19 says that if a witness was proven to be lying, then the Law commanded to “do to him as he intended to do to his brother”
In my little story, if Harry had been convicted of causing Mike’s injury, the punishment would be that he would lose his eye. “Eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth, right?” By lying in court, Bert & Ernie were trying to knock Harry’s eye out with their words.
And so the same law applied to them, “Eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth.”
God hates false witnesses because He hates injustice.
The wording of this commandment focuses particularly on a court of Law – but it isn’t restricted to the courts.
The Bigger issue in this commandment is truthfulness.
Dr. Scott Peck became well-known for his book, The Road Less Traveled. His second book was called, “People of the Lie,” and it detailed how, at the very core of evil, there is always lying.
Evil people lie to others in order to accomplish their plans
Evil people lie to themselves in order to rationalize their behavior.
It is no coincidence that Jesus calls Satan, “a liar and the father of all lies.”
By contrast, Jesus said, “I AM THE TRUTH.”
The Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Truth.
A few weeks ago, Tom did a children’s sermon where he quoted the old Lay’s Potato Chip commercial: “You can’t eat just one.” Lies are like that. It may be kind of hard to tell that first lie. But once you’ve told it, it’s really hard to tell just that one. Because once you start lying, you pretty much have to keep it up with other lies.
I read a story this week about a woman who introduced her 35-yr-old daughter as being only 24. The girl asked why she’d done it and the mother said, “Well, I realized that I’ve been lying about my age for so long, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d have to lie about your age, too!”
It’s one thing to say you’re 49 when your daughter is in her 20’s, but if you say you’re 49 when your daughter is 35 – well, having a child at age 14 isn’t generally something people brag about!
Sir Walter Scott got it right when he said, “O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
We live in a day when truth is considered as obsolete (and almost as unpleasant) an outhouse. James Emery White, in a book called You Can Experience an Authentic Life, cites these statistics:
91% of all Americans confessed that they regularly lied.
79% had given out false phone numbers or invented new identities when meeting strangers on airplanes.
20% said they couldn’t get through even one day without going along with a previously manufactured lie.
White goes on to say this:
Now here’s what I found most intriguing about the study: People no longer seem to care about lying. We accept it. It doesn’t bother us. We don’t get upset anymore when someone exaggerates, falsifies, fabricates, or misrepresents the truth. We live in a day when we’ve been bombarded with erased tapes, tampered evidence, illicit cover-ups, padded resumes, and exaggerated ads, to the point that we’ve pretty much given up on truth being a viable enterprise.
The study found that in the past, people thought lying was wrong. Now, almost half of all Americans say it isn’t.
Superman claimed that he did his Superhero-thing for the sake of “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”
The question is, are truth and justice still a part of the American Way?
And more to the point, are truth and justice hallmarks of how we as Christians interact with others?
As Christians, we are to be truth-seekers and truth-speakers.
Even if you never saw the movie “A Few Good Men,” you’re probably familiar with one scene.
Tom Cruise plays a military lawyer and is interrogating tough-guy Jack Nicholson.
Cruise is getting nowhere and finally yells, “I WANT THE TRUTH!”
And Jack Nicholson shouts back. “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!"
Truth is difficult stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to handle.
As someone has said, The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
How do we become the people of truth that God wants us to be?
First we need to be Truth-seekers
We need to KNOW THE TRUTH. We’re probably all familiar with Jesus’ words, “I am the Way the Truth and the Life.” But think about that for a minute: “THE TRUTH” is not a set of information. THE TRUTH is a PERSON.
THE TRUTH is revealed in Jesus Christ. We can’t know the truth without knowing Jesus Christ. We can’t know Jesus Christ unless we live in relationship to Him and obey him. And we can’t know Him apart from the revelation about Him found in Scripture. And that doesn’t mean just read the Red Letters in your bible.
Because the whole Bible is, in one way or another, about Jesus. We can’t be Truth-Seekers unless we know Christ and are continually growing in our knowledge of Him.
But it’s not enough to know Jesus and know the words of the Bible. There are people who know the Bible, who say they’ve been Christians forever, but they’ve never been honest enough ABOUT THEMSELVES to APPLY those truths to their lives.
And all of us have “blind spots” – areas of our lives with big signs that say “Nothing wrong here!” When everybody we know can see exactly what’s wrong in there. We don’t want truth to touch those areas. We like our sin and we don’t want anybody messing with it.
But don’t seek the truth of Scripture if you don’t want it to mess up your life! We need to be willing to SPEAK THE TRUTH – to ourselves first! You will NEVER speak truthfully to anybody else if you don’t/can’t speak it to yourself. We don’t like that much.
The Prophet Jeremiah speaks for all of us when he says, “The heart is deceitful above all things! Who can know it?”
Did you ever have somebody make a comment and you just can’t get it out of your head? A man named Dan made one of those comments for me. He served as a mentor for me while I was involved in volunteer ministry in my church.
I barely remember the circumstances now, but it was one of those situations where it seemed like the kindest thing to do would be to be dishonest with someone. When I say it so blatantly, it sounds bad, doesn’t it? But we do that ALL the time.
“I don’t want to tell her how she hurt my feelings, BUT…” Or how about, “I’m not going to make a fuss, BUT…” Those statements usually mean, “I don’t have the guts to deal with conflict, so I’m going to talk behind somebody’s back instead of talking to them face-to-face.” Often it means, “It would be uncomfortable to have an honest conversation with him, and frankly I don’t love him enough to make myself uncomfortable, so – I’m going to talk behind his back instead of talking to him face-to-face.”
It was a situation where confronting somebody with the truth would’ve been hard, uncomfortable and probably futile. And just in passing, Dan said, “People need the truth more than they need anything else.” Think about that for a minute. Do you believe that people need the truth more than they need anything else? Do you believe that people need you to be honest more than they need you to be nice? I didn’t! That’s why his statement kind of slapped me in the face. Because biblically, I think it’s absolutely true. But I knew I didn’t really believe it. And I certainly didn’t LIVE like I believed it. I mean, truth can be very messy! It can make all kinds of trouble. If Jesus hadn’t been so darned honest, he probably wouldn’t have gotten himself killed.
Somebody’s said, Before the truth can set you free, it’ll make you mad!” But People need the truth in order to come to repentance. People need the truth to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. And before they can repent and be saved, they have to recognize the truth of their own sinfulness. People really do need the truth more than they need anything else.
But Christians can act like, once we’re saved, we don’t need to deal with that ugly stuff anymore.
In Ephesians 4:15, Paul says “speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.” NIV
So what happens if we refuse to speak the truth in love? We don’t grow up. We stay spiritual babies. And spiritual baby” is a pretty accurate term to describe the average American Christian. (You know, I hate saying stuff like that!)
Psychologist Chris Thurman says, "Truth is the road map for negotiating the difficult challenges of life. Without it we get lost and we develop emotional problems that tell us we’re lost. We often settle for half-truths or no truth at all because they are usually easier. But truth is the only road to emotional health. There is no other path."
Thurman says Truth is the only path to emotional health
God says Truth is the only way to grow up.
I think the two statements are pretty much the same
God wants us to “grow up” in “all things” through Christ. But that takes painful dosages of truth applied to our own sin. People really do need the truth more than they need anything else.
We need to be truth-seekers and truth speakers.
We need to speak the truth to ourselves and to one another.
We need to listen when others speak the truth to us.
THE TRUTH should never be wielded like a club.
Paul says, “Speak the truth IN LOVE.”
Probably every one of us tends to fall in one of two categories: We’re either a truth basher Or a truth-avoider; A bully or a doormat
Either we come in swinging and “slam” somebody with what we consider “the truth.” OR we avoid speaking the truth at all.
In BOTH instances, what’s lacking is LOVE.
A lack of truth-telling is destructive to relationships
The less honest you are, the further apart you will be
Conclusion
Blaise Pascal observed, “Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
You & I really do need the truth more than we need anything else. And if we are going to be Jesus-followers, we must also be truth-seekers and truth speakers.
