The Battle Between Truth and Lies

The text that I want to use this morning is from Deuteronomy chapter 5 verse 20. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. Well what is this about? You come to the Ten Commandments and you find that it's filled with very powerful and heavy things. It starts out talking about God and His greatness. It talks about the significance of the family and how they have authority in the parents and in the country that you're in and the church that you're in. All these positions of authority and how to respond to them. It talks about the family and the importance of holding it together and being faithful to each other in that family setting. It talks about murder and how you treat other people and build relationships with them. And then it comes to this one and it sounds like it's sort of an insignificant thing. If you go to court, be sure that you testify to the truth. Most of us never go to court and we would assume that a person who got there would tell the right story. And so it seems like it's sort of insignificant compared to all the other important passages that we've already seen in the Ten Commandments. But there is really more to us than this because what God is talking about is something much, much bigger. I want to read a passage from John chapter 14. Here we see sort of a part of a big picture that God is trying to get to us because in this passage, he's talking about one of the two great forces in this world that's at work in our lives. Every day, you have two great spiritual powers at work inside of you, struggling for control of your mind and your behavior. Jesus describes this in himself. He's talking about his own disciples, telling him he's going to go to, he's going to die and after he's gone, he's going to be ahead of them and they could go wherever he's going to go. And they protest. They don't understand this. And they say, we don't know where you're going. How can we know the way? Jesus answered, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. What Jesus wanted to say, what Jesus said was, there are three things about me that ought to assure you that when I'm gone, I will be able to take you to heaven where I'm going to go. First, he said, I am the way. He meant by that, when I live, my lifestyle shows you how you should live. As if every day of your life was one step closer to heaven. So if you'll follow in my footsteps and do the things I do, Jesus said, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. Now he's saying, when you follow me, I want to assure you, I am the way to heaven. And if you act like me and you think like me, step by step, you'll get closer. Does it mean your works earn heaven? No. It means if you trust that my way is proper, there's where the word trust comes in, or faith. If you have faith that what I tell you is right, and you do that, and you live the way I say you should, you're trusting me, then step by step, you'll be able to get there. I am the way, the truth. This word truth is an important word about Jesus. In the beginning of John's gospel, he said, Jesus came and he was full of grace and truth. John finds this word truth to be a very critical message. Forty times in the gospel of John, Jesus uses the word truth as characteristic not only of Jesus, but of God and of the scriptures. Truth. Now, the word truth is simple to us. It means what is certain, what is reliable, what you can always count on. You know that it's right. Jesus says of himself, I am the truth. I am the way, the truth, and the life. John said he was full of grace that is treating us better than we deserve, and he was full of truth so that his words bring truth to us. In a world of things that you can't count on, there is one thing you can, it's Christ. I wonder if any of you have seen the ads on television for the election this year. Anybody seen those? They had your TV on and you didn't see them? One ad says, I've done a great job for the church schools. The next ad said, I failed, this guy failed schools. Where's the truth? We live in a world where uncertainty is always there for us. You can't depend on what the advertisers tell you. You can't depend on what people say to you. You can't depend on this world telling you what's real and true. And even if you think you have discovered something that's true, wait a couple of years and another article or story will come out telling you how what you used to believe was the right thing to eat is now poison to you. We just can't always count on the world that we live in to tell us what is real, reliable, and true. The Bible indicates to us that there is one place in which truth reigns. God is true. Jesus is the truth. Everything he says to us, you can bet your life in this world and forever that it's right. Everything. Jesus holds up before us the issue of the fact he is reliable. He is certain. And whatever he tells us, you can count on. This is not necessarily true for everybody in the world, and certainly we face another powerful struggle in someone who is not really reliable. Jesus was speaking to the Pharisees and his religious leaders of his day, and they were dead set against Jesus. They didn't believe what he had to say was the truth. They were always critical of him and trying to kill him. Jesus was talking to them about the truth that God had sent him to proclaim, and they discounted that altogether. Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. He assumes that if God is their father, they would do what their father told him. So if God was your father in charge of what you do and think, you would love me. I have not come on my own, but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don't you believe me? He who belongs to God hears me. Here's what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God. Jesus exposes to us that there is another force at work in your life, and it's the force of Satan, the father of lies. He's the one who created the first lie in this world. Here there's a reference to what took place in the Garden of Eden. God built a place for people. He put them there. He said, this is where you'll have everything that you need. Let me tell you, there's one thing you can do that will destroy your life. That's rebel against me. I tell you, this tree is a test here. Don't eat anything off this tree, because if you rebel against me and you eat that, you will die. We don't know how long Adam and Eve lived without being concerned about doing this, but the father of lies came to them. He didn't say to them, go eat that fruit on that tree. He didn't say to them, don't pay any attention to God. What he did was he planted in their mind the idea that God was a liar. He told you not to eat of that tree, for it would destroy your life. He's not telling you the truth. Now, he didn't straight out tell him that God was a liar, but what he said was, surely God wouldn't kill you, after all, he made you, he loves you, he cares for you, look at all he's done for you. He wouldn't kill you. There must be some misunderstanding here. And then he began to say to them, you know, I think there's something to this tree. If you were to eat that fruit, you would know something that you never knew before. You would grow. You would have a new experience. You would actually be like God, because this tree he probably eats from. So if you ate the tree, you would become more like God. There are so many advantages to eating this tree. You get to have experiences God have, you get to be able to know things that you never knew before. After all, look at it, the fruit looks good, looks like it would taste good. They chose to do it. The father of lies, the first lie told in the world was from the devil to Adam and Eve. That's what the Bible is talking about. There is a powerful force in this world, in all of our lives. It is the force of the lie that Satan brings to us. It's as old as the first chapters of the Bible and as fresh as this morning for us. It's not that lying is a choice that we necessarily make. I don't know if anybody gets up in the morning and says, I think I'll go out today and lie. But what happens to us is we get caught in situations where we feel uncomfortable telling the truth. Always the lie is a way of manipulating or controlling the world around us to bring it to our own result. Adam and Eve ate of the fruit to be able to get something for themselves that they thought would be beneficial to them. We will be like God, we will know more, we will experience things in the world. Every lie we tell is a way by which we try to manipulate the world in which we live. We want someone else to think well of us or not to think badly of us so we don't tell the truth. We want to have an advantage in a business deal so we don't necessarily tell the truth. We want someone to vote for us so we don't necessarily tell the truth. We tell what we want to say to people to get them to believe something that we don't necessarily think is the right thing, but it will reflect good for us so the people who are around us hear what we have to say and they do what we want them to do. It's a way by which we try to manipulate the world around us to our advantage. Now, think of this. If God is in charge of the world and he wants us to tell the truth, and we see that telling the truth is going to lead to negative consequences, we try to change the course of history by telling something that's not true. We had four boys. There was always things that took place in our house that we didn't want. There would be things that would be broken, we'd be gone for a while, they would be in the house by themselves, come back, and something would be broken. Usually it's something with Carol's and she would bring them in and say, Look at what I found here. This is broken. Who did it? Not me. Not me. Not me. Not me. All four of them. Not me. I was gone. Carol was gone. We don't have a dog. We don't have a cat. Who in the world could have done it? We had a next-door neighbor who lived behind us and a good friend of ours, and when we would finish with this quartet of no's, we would say, Well, I know Al came over here while we were gone and broke this, so that's how it happened to be broken. But we knew for sure that one of them broke it and one of them lied. What happens whenever you lie is not only do people not know the truth, but when they discover that you've lied, they suddenly understand that you're not reliable. I've heard of parents that say, My children never lie to me. They surely had different children than I had. Or when they get to be 25 and 30 years old and you have them home for Christmas and Thanksgiving and they start telling all the things they did, you will discover they lied to you. It just comes out a little later. Because all of us are caught in a situation like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. We don't want to tell the truth when it reflects on us in a negative way. And so we say what we want people to hear so that they will react to us in the way we want them to react to us. It is our effort to try to shape the world from our human point of view, instead of trusting God that if we told the truth, He would take care of us in that circumstance. It is a failure of belief in God, a failure to trust God, a failure to depend on the fact that telling the truth is essential to our character and our nature. So God is talking to us about these two powerful forces at work in the world. The force of truth, where God says to us, You should tell the truth. And where Satan says to us, No, there is a real advantage to you to doing something other than the truth. And we listen to these voices inside of our head, and we make choices about what we're going to do. To tell the truth means that you say what you mean, and what you say you are going to do, you actually do. Now, I know that all of us are guilty of lying at some time in our lives, and if you say you're not, you are lying now, so we do. And it's true that Christians sometimes do this too. I'm sure that every praying person here sometime or other has met someone, they told you a problem they were going through, and you said, I'm going to pray for you, and you never remembered to do it. We didn't mean to say that, and not do it, but we really didn't take seriously doing it. Now, what the Bible tells us about God is that he is the truth, and when he controls our minds and our hearts, he helps us to be able to say things so that they're true. What we say we're going to do, he gives us the wisdom and ability to get that done. What he says that we should say, he tells us, say this, and I'll take care of you, whatever the consequences. What the Bible is trying to get across to us is that there is a powerful force in this world that is always true, and always does and says the truth. There's another powerful force in this world that lies. It always shades everything so that you never know what the real thing is. And God is the backer of truth, and Satan is the backer of the lie. And all this battle is going on in our minds. And so when you say to God, I give my life to you, I want you to take control of my mind and my will and my emotions, and I'm going to live in obedience to you, you've made a vow to God. We do this by a person coming and standing in the baptistry and saying, Jesus Christ is now the ruler of my life. I've given myself to him. And we lower that person in the water to show that their old life of letting the father of lies control them is over, and their new life is started allowing the father of truth to control them. We now go into the world to represent God. In a world of lies, we are the one place in which truth is spoken, and it's real. So God wants us as little bitty spots of light all over the world, wherever we are, to shine with the radiance of the father. And one of the characteristics is everything the father says can be counted on, and it's true. So his call to us is, you tell the truth. Remember that whatever comes along, in whatever circumstances you find yourself, there is one thing I ask of you, reflect the truth in me in your own life. What God wants from all of us is the people to be people who reflect who God is, his character and his nature. Now it means that whenever children come to know Christ, they have a new responsibility. They have to own up to the things that they've done, to say, I know, I shouldn't have done that, I'm sorry, I disobeyed you, and accept the consequences for it. It means as adults, whenever we say something that we shouldn't say, we own up to it. Whenever we say something that we're going to do, that we actually do it. Because our life reflects the character of Christ, the way, the truth, and the life. Adam and Eve never were allowed to live out their life in the Garden of Eden. They lost the life God wanted to give them. Each one of us are set in the place in which God comes into our lives and says, now I'm going to teach you to live the way I want you to live. Here are the things I want you to do, you do them. Here are the things I don't want you to do, you don't do them. Here is the way I want you to act, always tell the truth. So in this passage in Deuteronomy when he says, when you're before the courts, you tell the truth. Now what tempts a person in court is, I've talked to the guy I'm going to testify against and he said to me, you know, I didn't mean to do what I did, if you'll say you don't know what happened, I'll give you some money, or I'll get you into my business, or I'll hire you to work for me. I will provide you some benefit if you will just not tell the truth. And so the person is brought to court and the charges are given and the person's come to testify and he says, I don't remember what happened. I'm not going to say it didn't happen, but I don't remember what happened, that's my lie today. And the court cannot convict the person. And the guy gets the benefit of his lie. He thinks for a moment that his benefit is going to last and it's going to be good, but what happens is, God always knows what we've done. There's a passage in Deuteronomy that God says to his people, the situation was that the people of Israel were supposed to all go in the land of promise. Two and a half of the tribes, Reuben, Gad, and a half tribe of Manasseh, wanted to stay on the east side where there was good land for their grazing, build their homes, their crops and all that there. And Moses said, no, you can't do that because we've all agreed to go in and fight the battle and win this land that God has given us. They said, we will go and we'll lead every charge in the battle. And when the war's over, can we come back then and have the land that's here? Well, it'd be impossible for Moses to look at every person in all the battle and make sure that all these tribes were there. So he said to them, yes, that's acceptable to me, but remember this, God keeps watch over you, and whenever you don't tell the truth, God knows it, and he will bring his own punishment to you. Be sure your sin will find you out. See this is the key ingredient in understanding why it's important to tell the truth, because there is no secret sin. We don't care if you're the only one in the world who knows it, God knows it too. There is no secret sin, and the consequence or judgment for every sin will happen sooner or later. What happens to us in this process of Satan deceiving us is he takes advantage of the grace and kindness of God, and so we lie, and nothing happens to us. My four boys, they all say, I didn't do it. You know what we're going to do? We're going to watch those four boys to see which one of them is likely to do the same thing again. If they were playing too rough in the house and knocked the lamp over and broke it, we're going to watch them to see what they do, because we know one of them, if not all of them, are guilty. And we watch. When God has the benefit of knowing even what we're thinking, he knows immediately when we lie. He knows that we're not willing to accept the consequences of our behavior. We think that we can avoid judgment and punishment for what we've done. So we avoid that by not telling the truth. But God knows what happens to us. Now the distance between the lie and the consequence that God brings may be a long, long time. Some of you have known people who get in trouble. Either they lie or they steal or they do things that are bad. This man that stole all the money from people by investing it was very successful and well respected on Wall Street for many, many years. He was on the board of the trading organizations. Everyone thought he was one of the best investors in the world. But sooner or later, he got caught. He's in prison. One of his sons died of cancer. His other son killed himself. The consequences of his lie became front-page news. No one respects him now. His name is a joke. His own family does not want to be called by his name. They don't want to even be known as being related to him. So he did all this to make a great name for himself and a fortune, and now he's in prison and his family all turns their back on him. And his friends think of him as the worst person they've ever known. The distance between your lie and the judgment of God can sometimes be hours, days, and even years, but no sin ever goes unpunished. It is either forgiven or it's punished. God does not erase any of those things. So his standard for us is never lie. Always tell the truth, because if you don't, I will know it and the consequences of your failure to tell the truth will bring powerful results to your life, for sin is deadly. So what the Bible is talking about in this commandment is that we are to look at things differently than the rest of the world sees them. We're to see that every opportunity where we have a chance to tell what's true or what's not true is a great battle between Satan and God in our minds, in our hearts, and in our lives. What he wants us to believe is if we tell the truth, God will work things out to our benefit. If we lie, he will give us an opportunity to repent and make it right, and if we don't, then the consequences of that rebellion against him are inevitable for us. So when you stand in a position where you have an opportunity to tell the truth or not to tell the truth, always tell the truth. What Jesus did when he interpreted this passage, this Ten Commandments in the New Testament, was he made it a little bit different, because he was talking about what he wanted to do when we faced decisions of telling the truth. He was talking to his disciples about the cost of following him and what he wanted them to do. He was describing for them the consequences that would come to them. You are to be in situations, he said, where you're going to be making choices. When you make the choices, I want you to be sure that there is not anyone in the world who would ever think for a moment that you're not telling the truth. I want you to be able to make sure that people know that what you said is right. Again, you have heard that it was said to people long ago, do not break your oath. That is, when you promise something or make a vow about something, you keep it. But keep your oaths you've made to the Lord. That's the ancient wisdom. When you make a promise to God, you keep the promise. When you say, I swear to tell the truth, this is the honest truth, make sure that you don't break the ones made to the Lord. Now the sort of side view of this is, if I'm making a promise to you, it doesn't matter so much. But if I make one to God, then I better keep that one. There was a way by which people could say, I don't want to lie to God, but if I lie to you, it's okay, I can get by with that. But I tell you, do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it's God's throne, or by earth, for it's his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot even make one hair white or black. Simply let your yes be yes, and your no be no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one. What I want from you, he said, is that when you say you will do something, that you do it. If you say you're not going to do something, you don't do it. If you have to say to someone, I will do that, and I swear to God I'll do it, then you've already stepped over the boundaries. Because people who know you ought to know you well enough that if you say yes, then yes is what it's going to be. That's my demand of you. Don't color or shade your answers. Say what is right and true. Why? Because God is God of the truth. And if he controls your mind, and if he controls your life, then you will trust him. But if I say yes, I'll get in trouble. Trust me. I will lead you through the trouble. Trust me more than the voice of Satan who says, if you tell this, you're going to get in trouble, and that'll be a disaster, and then your life will be ruined. Trust me, God says. If you tell the truth, you may get in trouble, but out of that trouble, good will come. This is hard. It is hard to trust God when Satan tells us there is a better way to do this. You won't be hurt. It's the same story in the Garden of Eden every day with every one of us. God wants us to know that when someone looks at us and says, what are you going to do, that whatever we say is what we do. If they say to us, did you do this, we say yes or no, and they know that it's the truth regardless of the consequence. It allows us in this world to live in a community of people that we know you can trust. And when you come to the place where you're ready to get married, and you're married to someone you know who's devoted to tell the truth, when they say, I promise faithfulness to you from now until the day I die, you can count on that. Whenever you do a deal with somebody, even though it doesn't work out the way they thought it would, you know that they're going to keep that side of the deal no matter what. Heaven is a place where no one lies. That's one of the great things about it. It'll be a place where every single person there does exactly what they say and always tells the truth. Our life in this world is practice. To be able to believe that if you live as God tells you to live, you will always find life in its fullness. I am the way, I am the truth that leads to life in its fullness. Now when God asks you to begin this journey of truthfulness, he's asking you to take great risks, to believe that if you tell the truth, God will take care of you. He wants you to believe that if you don't tell the truth, there is disaster somewhere ahead of you, and that living under the Lord and Father of truth brings life, and living under the Lord and Father of lies brings disaster. This is what it means to have faith in Christ. Do you trust me enough to be truthful? Would you bow your heads please for a moment? We all know people that have such great difficulties telling the truth because they're afraid it'll make them look weak, it'll make them look bad, it'll cause them to look less than they want to look. And when we discover we're around people like that, we're always embarrassed for them. I wonder how God looks at us. Maybe no one else sees it, but he does. God does not judge us, but he knows us for who we are, and he wants to help us be people of the truth. Is there an area in your life in which you know that you need to be more the person who says yes, and means yes, and does yes, or the person who knows you should say no, and you do know, and know is what you do? If you're having trouble with those choices, what needs to happen is you need to have a confidence that no matter what you do, if you tell the truth, God will make things better for you in the long run. Without that trust in God, none of us would dare tell the truth all the time. This is where your faith in God is so critical. Lord, I believe if I give you my life, it will become better, no matter what I've done. I want you to ask God, is there a place in my life in which I need to be more truthful? And I want you to ask God to give you strength to trust him to be truthful in that area. Opportunity will come this week to do that. Father, help us have faith in you, not the word faith, but the real confidence that living in obedience to you will bring us life. Refusing to obey you will destroy our lives. Now I ask for each of us, Father, as you've convicted us, told us what we need to do, that we have courage to do that. And maybe in this moment, God has revealed to you a need that you have, maybe about truthfulness and maybe about other parts of your life. And you feel you need to make a promise to God, maybe to become a part of this church, maybe to accept responsibility God's been asking you to do, maybe to keep a promise you've made to God a long time ago. This is God's time to talk to you. He may want you to come and share that with me or someone else who's here at the front. And if you know that's what he wants, you do it today. This is God's time to say, here's what I'm telling you. Do you trust me enough to do what I've asked? As our pianist plays, you do what God has told you is right. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Would you stand, please, for a moment to pray? I placed on the bulletin board outside a schedule of our Kansas-Nebraska convention, which is in Hutchinson. If you want to drive over to see some of the events, you'll have a chance to see what's going to be done. Tonight in our church business meeting, we're going to be discussing things in our church life and begin planning for next year and get some idea of what God is doing in all the different parts of our church life. I think we're making some progress in our building process, so we'll be able to fill you in on that, what's taking place. So we ask you to come and be part of what we're doing tonight at 6 o'clock. So, Father, Father of truth, teach us to be children of the truth, that the world might know what it means to find someone who's like you. In the name of Christ, we ask you to guide our minds, our hearts, our mouths, and our choices. Amen. Amen.