The Value Of Honesty

Building Lasting Values

“The Value of Honesty”

{Audio File: https://mega.nz/#!HFUD2KBZ!dCadBK5y0wIiCke0wRht--H6eOLQwViCSVjpp2KKLSg}

We’ve been doing a series on Building Lasting Values in our lives, or looking at those values that we need as Christians to build our lives upon. Today, we’ll be looking at the value of honesty, or the truth about honesty.

The Bible has a lot of instruction on honesty, about those who were honest, and those who were less than honest, and what happened to both. The most radical example is found in the New Testament when a husband and wife, Ananias and Sapphira, were found to be lying to the Holy Spirit. As a result God struck them down and they died.

Personally I’m really glad that God doesn’t use that same technique about our lies, because if He did this place would be completely empty and I’d be all alone.

One survey said that 91 percent of all Americans lie regularly, but I found myself doubting that survey, because I wasn’t sure if they were of the 9 percent who tell the truth, or of the 91 percent who lie.

But think about how many opportunities there are in our day to be dishonest. Between all of our interactions with others, especially on the Internet, sociologists say that we hear and see 300 lies every day. Actually it is only 200, but I wanted to show you how easy it is to lie.

Here are just a couple of the great American lies that all of us have heard at one time or another.

• The check is in the mail

• The doctor will be right with you

• One size fits all

• This hurts me more than it hurts you

While dishonesty has many different faces, it has one common result, strangulation. Dishonesty strangles the life right out of us. So, why do we continue in it?

One reason is because dishonesty is promoted in our culture. Our culture endorses, embraces and practices untruth so consistently that we’ve come to expect people to be dishonest. We expect a degree of untruthfulness in the ads we watch or listen to.

Back in the late 80’s the Isuzu car manufacturer created a character who they promoted as a liar to sell their cars. His name was Joe Isuzu. In one ad he said, “This car gets 900 miles to the gallon and if you act now you can buy it for 9 dollars.” All the time he’s saying this there is flashing on the TV screen, “He’s lying.” At other times he said that the car had more seats than the Astrodome, or that he used his Isuzu pickup truck to carry a 2,000-pound cheeseburger. Once he said that if he was lying may lightning strike his mother, and up on the screen appears “Good luck, Mom!” And he would always end with “You have my word on it.”

Well, their honesty about their dishonesty made sales rise 20 percent.

The unfortunate part of all of this is that we have come to expect a degree of untruthfulness from business. In one survey 7 out of 10 business people said that they compromised their values to conform to company standards.

We also expect a degree of dishonesty in our education system. A survey of college students showed that 63 percent of humanity majors, 68 percent of science majors, 74 percent engineering majors, and 87 percent of business majors admitted to cheating. They didn’t even bother interviewing political science majors. I wonder if that is telling us something.

And so, from the White House all the way down to the schoolhouse, truth is in trouble, and it isn’t reserved for one age group.

One 12-year-old boy who won first price at a county fair for his 11,000-pound bull was stripped of his prize when it was found out that he had filled the bull with air. How a person fills a bull with air is unknown to me, but that’s what he did.

In Florida an armored truck overturned leaving $300,000 in cash laying on the street, and the news showed a bunch of senior citizens picking it up and trying to run away from the police. And while that is a sad testimony, it must have been hilarious to watch.

I think that it is safe to say that dishonesty is everywhere. And the main reason it is so prevalent in our culture is because it is a part of our sinful nature.

Dr. Leonard Keeler, who invented the lie detector, interviewed 25,000 people and came to the conclusion that people are basically dishonest. This, however, shouldn’t come as a surprise, because the Bible tells us the same thing.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” (Jeremiah 17:9 NKJV)

So, dishonesty is in our culture because it is in our nature. But also it is a part of a much larger spiritual structure. In other words, it’s bigger than us. There is a cosmic struggle that’s going. It’s light verses darkness, good versus evil, Satan verses God, and truth verses lies. The Bible tells us that God is truth, while Satan is the liar and the father of all lies.