So giving accurate testimony in a court of law is what the commandment specifically talks about, but since Jesus always looked at the spirit of the law not the letter of the law, we have to ask ourselves what God is really looking for in this commandment. Is God only interested in the truth being told in a courtroom or does he want truth to be told in the living room and the bedroom and the boardroom and the classroom? Clearly I think God is interested in truth being spoken everywhere, so we need to confront the tendency we have to not always tell the truth.
The truth is, no pun intended here, but the truth is that we live in a society where lying abound and because they are all around us and because they often easily flow from within us, we have become desensitized to them. From politics to business to advertising to parenting we are surrounded by lies and we have gotten so accustomed to hearing them and telling them that we don’t even expect people to tell us the truth. In an article called The Great American Lies, Doug Mushro shares his top 10 list:
10. I’ll start my diet tomorrow
9. Money cheerfully refunded
8. Give me your number and the doctor will call you right back
7. One size fits all.
6. This will hurt me more than it will hurt you.
5. It’s not the money, it’s the principle
4. I just need a minute of your time
3. This offer is limited to the first 100 people.
2. We service what we sell.
1. The check is in the mail.
Now we could all add to this list our own personal favorites, but what this list begins to show us is that we hear lies all the time and don’t even think about it – which leads us to fall into the temptation of lying ourselves. When it pervades our culture, it begins to penetrate our hearts. There are so many different ways that we lie, we lie when we exaggerate the truth, omit facts, spin events to make us look good or others look bad, tell half truths, or deny to ourselves what is really going on. Even though this commandment specifically talks about a court of law, it also works to open our eyes to how pervasive and destructive lying is and how we need to ask God to help us become people who speak and embody the truth.
While we may not take lying seriously, we need to understand that God does. Look with me at Proverbs 6:16-19. This is a powerful passage because it outlines 7 things that God simply can not tolerate and 2 of those 7 things are lying: a lying tongue and a lying witness. A lying witness tells us that God is concerned about truth in a court of law, but when he says a lying tongue – God is taking it farther. While God does hate a witness who testifies falsely because it breaks down the legal system which weakens society, God also hates a lying tongue wherever it is. God takes lying seriously and the reason is because God is truth. 1 John 1:5 says God is light and in him there is no darkness at all, so in God there is no deceit and there are no lies so when we lie we separate ourselves from God.
We need to take this commandment seriously and to do that we first need to admit all the ways that we do lie. If there are big lies that we have told that need to be corrected – we need to set the record straight and trust that when we tell the truth - the truth will set us free. Look at John 8:31-33
While this talking about the freedom that comes when we know Jesus, I think we can also take from this that telling the truth will also set us free. If you have ever told a lie you know the bondage that comes with that lie. As soon as the lie is spoken, we literally become slaves to the lie and many times have to continue to lie to protect the first lie that we told. I shared last week about stealing candy, so this week let me tell you about the lie. My sister and I were in Jr. High and since both my parents worked we each had a key to get into the house after-school, but one day we both forgot our keys and ended up locked out. There was a window on the second floor was open and we could easily reach the window from the roof of the garages, so we got out the ladder, climbed on the roof, crawled in the second story window, unlocked the door, put away the ladder and pretended like nothing was wrong.
When my Dad got home from work he noticed that the ladder was not put away exactly the way he always did it and so he wondered who moved it. Now just a note to teenagers here – your parents notice these things. You may think that you have put something back exactly as it was after you used it, but trust me, parents notice everything so you might as well tell them the truth from the beginning. I wish someone had given my sister and I that advice, but they didn’t so when my Dad asked my Mom about the ladder and she didn’t knowing anything she asked us about it and we lied. Nope, we didn’t get out the ladder, don’t know what happened to it. But once we told that lie we had to keep the lie going as more questions were asked. We became slaves to the lie.
After a while, my Mom decided to go ask our neighbors if they saw anyone using our ladder and I knew that if we didn’t come clean at this point we would be in deeper trouble, so I caught my Mom before she got to the neighbors and told her what we had done. Now here’s the thing, we didn’t get in trouble for using the ladder; we got in trouble for lying and while the punishment wasn’t fun – I have to say that there was freedom in coming clean.
Once a lie is told you have to keep it going, often making up more stories, adding more false details and eventually we become slaves to the lie – when we tell the truth we are set free. There may be consequences to coming clean, but there is also freedom. If there are lies that we need to admit to and confess – we need to do it and trust that in time the truth will set us free. If nothing else, the truth will set us free to go deeper in our relationship with God.
So clearly we need to stop telling flat out lies, that’s easy to see, but there are many more subtle ways we don’t tell the complete truth and we need to guard against these as well. For example, many times we lie by simply only telling part of the truth and I believe that we are particularly prone to this type of lying because it has been part of our world from the very beginning. Once again, let’s go back to the story of creation, the serpent was questioning Eve about their ability to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the serpent said, you will not die if you eat from the tree, which technically was true. When Adam and Eve ate from that tree they didn’t immediately drop over dead? No, so in some sense that serpent was right, but while they didn’t physically die in that moment – they did die spiritually. Their disobedience and sin severed their relationship with God which in time led to their death. So the serpent was lying by telling a half truth, but as we see from Adam and Eve, half truths are just as deadly.
What we see here is that from the very beginning of creation, half truths have been told and the result has been broken relationships with God and with those around us which means that we need to take seriously our tendency to think it is ok to only tell half of the truth. Whether that half truth is omitting some of the facts or spinning the truth to make us look good or others look bad, we need to be careful about half truths. It’s better to be silent or speak the full truth in love than to try and deceive someone by only telling half of the truth.
Denial is another destructive way we lie because it is lying to ourselves. We see the destructive nature of denial when it comes to addictions or problems in our live that we just don’t want to face. As long as we deny that we have problems with alcohol or gambling, we will never get the help that we need to overcome these addictions. As long as we deny that our marriage is in trouble or that our temper gets the best of us, or our family is in crisis – we will never get the help we need to experience the joy and life of healthy relationships. Again, we see that our denial, or lying to ourselves, only leads to bondage – but telling the truth to ourselves while painful, is the only way we can be set free.
Exaggerating is another subtle lie that can become habit forming. We might exaggerate how bad things are to get pity or how good things are out of pride, but both are subtle ways of lying that at the very least we need to guard against. In Matthew 5:37 Jesus says… and in James 5:12 God says… Both these passages show us that exaggeration can lead us away from God.
So we see how bad lying is and maybe we are at a place where we really want to stop, but how do we? The first step in living our lives within the boundary of this commandment is to admit the ways in which we have lied or are prone to lie. We have to identify the problem before we can overcome it, but once we admit it, how do we overcome our tendency to stretch the truth or to outright lie? The answer to telling the truth is to stay close to the one who is the truth. Any landscaper will tell you that the best way to get the weeds out of your yard is to grow healthy grass. The best way to stop lying is to live lives of truth and we do that by staying close to the one who told us that he is the truth – and that is Jesus Christ. The Bible is clear that not only is Jesus the truth but that Satan is the father of lies. In John 8:44 Jesus says this of the devil, when he lies he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. If our words or our life is defined by lies then we need to think about who it is that is giving direction to our words and more importantly who it is that is giving direction to our hearts, and if we want to turn this around we need Jesus who is Truth himself, dwelling within us.
I don’t about you, but these 10 Commandments are causing me to come face to face with the reality of my failure and sin, and this commandment causes us to look at how easy it is to compromise the truth, and while part of the answer isn’t to just stop telling lies, another part is to open our ears and our hearts to hear God’s truth. Can we hear this truth today:
The truth – Jesus Christ – shall set you free.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our sin from us.
God says, I have loved you with an everlasting love.
If God is for us, who can be against us.
It’s hearing and accepting this kind of truth that sets us free, and once we are free and living in the light – the darkness has no choice but to flee. So let us take hold of the truth of God’s forgiveness and grace, and take hold of The Truth – Jesus Christ - and allow God to first and foremost set us free and then direct our heart and our tongues into truth.
