True Lies

Pastor Phillips’ Sermon
Sunday, May 22, 2011

[Video] The young man was left by the people of Me. They joined him and followed wherever he be. “Sir, please tell us about a lie. Can it be told in truth? Is it ever alright?” “Lying hurts you and it hurts others, too. Told to deceive, mislead and believe. Trust breaks down quickly between you and me and never rebuilds at the same rate of speed. This I tell you, speak out of love, speak out of truth, speak to another as you want done to you.”

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

The end of the world came yesterday. Wasn’t that something? Huge promotion, all over the country, banners, signs, people being interviewed, articles being written. “May 21, 2011, 6:00 p.m.” Or 5:00 p.m. depending on which time zone you’re in. I couldn’t believe it. It happens again and again. It happened in the 1800’s. A gentleman has predicted this before and it didn’t happen. It was a lie.

You might say, “That’s a little harsh. He’s just trying to calculate something really important and, as Christians, we should all be trying to figure that out.” But, no. When you present your guess as a fact, that’s a lie. It’s your guess. It’s your opinion. It’s not a fact. And so the day came and went and we’re still here. Like I said earlier, maybe they didn’t want Lutherans, I don’t know, but I think he was wrong.

To be sure, Jesus is coming back and all Christians look forward to that time. We’ve been told about that since we were small, that the Lord will come back. We hear about the ascension, Jesus ascending into heaven and as the disciples were watching Him go, two angels appeared and said, “What are you looking at, men of Jerusalem? The same Jesus who you’ve seen go will return to you in the same way on the clouds of heaven.” We know that’s true but we also know the bible says no man knows the day or the hour. No one knows the day or the hour. Once I heard somebody say, “Yes, but we can predict the year or the month.” It’s silliness.

Honesty is rare in our society. Many times, we hear things that aren’t true. Sometimes we stand before witnesses and make promises and then we break them. Our political candidates debate and offer speeches and then afterward, they’re critiqued on the category called truthfulness. “Seventy-five percent truthfulness.” What? Either they’re telling the truth or they’re not. I don’t want to vote for 80% or 75%. I want 100% truthfulness in the people who we elect to lead our country. Professional athletes lie to Congress about steroid use. We have a problem.

The people of Jesus’ time had the same problem. That’s why He teaches them in the Sermon on the Mount. This is from Matthew 5:33-37, “Again you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made. But I tell you do not swear at all either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by earth, for it is His footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

Now these are pretty strong words for Jesus and who’s His audience on the Sermon on the Mount? Criminals? People who are habitually stepping on the other side of the law? No. He’s talking about the religious leaders, the Pharisees, the scribes and so on, all these people who were trained and dedicated to live lives according to God’s ways and teach everyone else to do the same. And yet, they are the very ones Jesus is condemning with His words.

The people kind of interpreted things the way they thought would be most comfortable. They relied on three Old Testament passages for their teachings. First, Leviticus 19:12, “Do not swear falsely by my name and so proclaim the name of your God, I am the Lord.” Numbers 30:2, “When a man takes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said.” Deuteronomy 23:21, “If you make a vow to the Lord your God, do not be slow to pay, for the Lord your God will certainly demand it of you and you will be guilty of a sin.” God’s intent in these three passages is very clear. First, He says do not swear falsely. Second, He says if you make a vow, don’t break it. Third, He says if you owe somebody, don’t be slow to pay it.

But the ancient people of God and the people of Jesus’ time found what I would call a liar’s loophole. They manipulated these passages to make themselves more comfortable. So “do not swear falsely” was changed slightly to “do not swear falsely by God’s name.” “Don’t break your word” was changed to “Don’t break your word to the Lord.” And finally, “Do not be slow to repay” was changed to “Do not be slow to pay to the Lord.” You see what they’re doing. They’ve giving themselves an out and they devised basically three types of oaths to accommodate their sinful dealings and their sinful workings with other people.

First, there was one category of oath that was absolutely binding, those when you explicitly mentioned God’s name. Okay? “If I promise, in God’s name, to do something for you, I am bound by that.” Second, oaths where you simply refer to God, you don’t say His name but you refer to Him, those oaths are a little less binding and you do need to keep them but, you know, maybe not right now. The third type of oath is those which you don’t even refer to God. You can refer to the Iowa Hawkeyes or whatever you want to use to demonstrate your authenticity and that you’re going to follow through on your conviction and your promise. And since you’re not mentioning God or referring to God, you really don’t even have to keep those oaths.

That’s the way they looked at things, and that’s what Jesus was condemning in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s clear they were dealing with a deceitful heart. You have to ask why would people do this? They must believe that there’s an advantage to being dishonest, right? It wasn’t just the people of Jesus’ time. We see it in our world today.

One day, I looked at the Register last week as I was preparing this message. I searched the Register for articles about times when people have broken their promises or misrepresented themselves and things like that. I found an article about Medicaid fraud where a person has been traveling around presenting himself as some sort of government official, getting people to take a little test and fill out paperwork and then getting them signed by somebody else and submitting them for Medicaid and he made $140,000. He stole it from you and me by lying.

Then there’s the scandal that’s kind of coming to a conclusion, the Iowa film office scandal. We all know about that one and how there’s a guy in Nebraska who supposedly applied for $32 million in tax credit. And then the Iowa Association of School Boards article in there about how they had raised their own salary and nobody was holding anybody accountable.

And then there was a clinic in Newton where people were being overcharged for medical care. On and on it goes.

But it’s not just out there somewhere in a place that doesn’t really affect you directly. We do it, too. We do it, too. Dave Ramsey, the guy who writes the books about financial things, personal finance and things like that, talks about how he dealt with his children in keeping their checking accounts. He taught them early how to balance it and keep it and everything. He said, “If a child of mine bounces a check,” something none of us have ever done, right? “Bounces a check,” he said, “I make them personally go down to the bank and apologize for lying to them or lying to the person they wrote the check to.” It seems a little harsh, doesn’t it? But that’s actually what we’ve done. We said we had money and we didn’t. We wrote it down, “Here.”

Sometimes we sign those tax forms at the bottom of the form, “This information is all true.” Well, sometimes it’s true. Sometimes, we manipulate it a little bit. Sometimes, we fudge on the numbers a little bit because we don’t want to pay so much in taxes.

And then we go through an employment situation. We work with the HR people at a company. They show us the handbook. We read the handbook. We promise to obey the handbook and follow the handbook and do everything in the handbook and then, once we’re hired, we kind of justify why we don’t do what the handbook says.

If you want an eye opener, ask some of the kids you know how much cheating happens in school. Now it’s in the student handbook, “You’re not allowed to cheat. It’s against the rules.” But how many times does one person copy another person’s homework, does one person copy another person’s paper, does one person look down another person’s test results or text test answers to another person on their phone? Just ask your teenager or kids who you know how much cheating they observe in college or high school.

What does God say about all this? What does God say? That’s where the upside thinking comes in. Now this is the way of the world, manipulating, taking advantage, say what you need to say so that you can succeed or win the dare to take advantage of the situation. But that’s not God’s way. God turns that upside down. The second commandment says, “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.” What does this mean? We should fear and love God so we do not curse, swear, use satanic arts, lie or deceive by His name but call upon Him in every trouble, pray, praise and give thanks. That’s upside down thinking in today’s world, isn’t it? That’s upside down thinking.

I guess it’s kind of like lying seems to give us better results, so what advantage is there in telling the truth? Well, I’ll give you an example. My father-in-law and my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law and my brotherinlaw were going on a trip. They stayed at a hotel. My fatherinlaw went to check in and they said, “Well, how many will be staying in the room?” He said, “Two.” Actually, there were four. “Two will be staying in the room but we want separate beds. We like to sleep apart.” So they’re getting everything prepared and they’re about ready to head up to the room and the girl comes up and says, “Hey, I have a great deal for you. I have you a king size bed.” That’s just the beginning of the story. I can’t tell the rest.

Is there an advantage in being dishonest? That’s a small thing but it’s not any different than the things we do from time to time. Is there an advantage in being dishonest? Think about it. If you constantly are looking for how you can turn a situation in your favor, how you can take advantage of the other person and put one over on them, when you’re selling that car that’s hard to sell because it has some problems and you don’t tell all the problems, you just want to get that car out there, when you’re doing this kind of thing as a habit in your life, what kind of people are going to be attracted to you? What kind of people are going to want to be your friends and spend time with you? Probably people who think just like you and are trying to do the same thing and may some day do that to you. I don’t think that’s an advantage.

On the other hand, if you’re somebody who’s always honest and trustworthy, that people can rely on, when you make a promise, you keep it, a man or woman of your word, what kind of people are you going to attract as friends? What kind of people are going to want to spend time with you? The same kind because they value what they see in you and they have it in them, too, themselves. There is great advantage for us to do things the way God has designed them, to be honest, to be trustworthy, to be reliable, to keep our word and keep our promises.

The bible says no matter how many promises God has made, they are all ‘yes’ in Jesus. We serve a God who always keeps His promises and yes, He does give us grace when we fail to keep ours or when we are tempted and we give in to that temptation to manipulate the situation with something that’s not quite true. He does forgive us when we confess, but I pray that God’s Holy Spirit will help you and strengthen you as you battle the way of the world and turn that thinking upside down and think the way God does about all these dealings in all these situations and that you will find the peace and the joy that comes from living according to His way. Amen? Amen.