The Big Ten: Little White Lies
We have reached our ninth commandment
today. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Don’t falsely
accuse someone, don’t give a false testimony about someone, don’t falsely
slander someone’s good name. Most often, this is narrowed down and simplified
to the basic commandment: Do not lie, which I think really gets at the spirit
of the commandment.
Lying has become a part of our culture, a part of the
way we communicate. How many of you in here watch the TV show “The Office?” I
was watching the other night and a character named Kelly said something that I
thought was really telling of how lying has just become a part of how we talk
to each other. She said, “Daryl Philbin is the most complicated man I have ever
met. I mean, who says exactly what they are thinking? What kind of game is
that?”
Little white lies have become a part
of basic conversation between two people. Think about it. You’re at the store
and you run into a classmate from when you were in high school. You says things
like, “Hey! Good to see you! You look great! We should have lunch sometime.
Sorry I can’t talk, I’m in a hurry. I’ll call you later.” How many lies did you
just tell? You know you didn’t really want to run into that person, they don’t
look that great, you’ll never call them to have lunch, and you are not in that
big of a hurry, you just don’t want to talk to that person.
And I hear the excuse all the time,
“But I have to tell little white lies or I’ll hurt their feelings.” No, no,
that isn’t why you tell little white lies. You tell little white lies for your
own convenience. You tell little white lies because it seems like the easy way
out for you, right? Lying to someone never does them any good.
I’ve made a top ten list of the top
ten lies that are told in
10. I
just need 5 minutes of your time.
9.
One size fits all
8.
This offer is limited to the first 100 people who call in
7.
Your luggage isn’t lost, it’s just misplaced
6.
I’ll start my diet tomorrow
5.
This will hurt me more than it hurts you
4.
Your table will be ready in just a few minutes
3.
Leave your resume and we’ll keep it on file
2.
Open wide, this won’t hurt a bit
1.
The check is in the mail
We’ve all been confronted with these
lies, or have told them ourselves. We’ve let lies like this take over our daily
conversation and our way of life. We always lie to our kids, right? It’s just
easier. Because they ask questions like, “Where do babies come from?” and “How
does a magnet work?” or guys you are looking under the hood of your car, trying
to find where you add more oil, and your kid peeks over and points to a part
and says, “Daddy, what does that part do?” And you have no idea what that part
even is. It is so much easier in these situations to just lie and get them to
drop it, right? We constantly lie to our kids. And yet nobody likes to be lied
to. When you are looking for a friend or a soul mate, what is one of your
highest priorities with them? Trustworthiness, right? You don’t want to be too
close to someone who is going to lie to you. You want to be able to trust them.
I think it’s kind of sad how we really
admire people who are straight-forward and honest, like those are rare
qualities. You know this skepticism about honesty and what is the truth isn’t
just a plague of this society or this period in history. When the Greek and
later the Roman empires developed, and people became more educated and the
great philosophers emerged, they all began to seek after one thing: the truth.
That was the life quest of philosophers like Aristotle and Socrates and Plato.
What is truth? The line had become so blurred and deception and lying had
become so mainstream that it took the greatest of minds to seek out what truth
even is.
One of my favorite discussions in the
Bible occurs between a product and student of these philosophers named Pontius
Pilate, and Jesus. Pilate is asked to sentence Jesus, so Pilate pulls Jesus
aside into his chambers and begins to question him. Pilate says, “Are you the
King of the Jews?” And Jesus gives a slightly sarcastic reply, “Do you ask this
on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate says, “Am I a Jew? Your
own people and religious leaders handed you over to me. What did you do?”
Jesus’ reply is, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Pilate says, “Ah, so you
are a king?”
And here’s where it gets really
interesting. Jesus says, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and
for this I came into the world, to testify to the TRUTH. Everyone who belongs
to the TRUTH listens to my voice.” To which Pilate replies, “What is truth?”
Here’s why I love this so much.
Because here Jesus is proving his Lordship not just for the poor and the widow
and the orphan, but also over the elitists and the philosophers. What have
philosophers been seeking after? The greatest minds in all of the world? Truth.
They all want to know what the truth is, because it has become so distorted
that it is nearly impossible to find. And here comes Jesus and he says, “If you
want to know the truth, you listen to my voice.” In other words, this ideal,
this thing that the greatest philosophers in the world have been seeking after,
this truth, lies in the teachings of Jesus.
Jesus had emphasized this earlier in
the book of John in chapter 8 verses 31-32, when he says, “If you continue in
my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth
will make you free.” Here again he is equating the truth with his word, with
his teachings. But he also extends a promise about hearing the truth: the truth
will make you free.
Now when I first started attending
Now their intention and the way I
always read it was from an academic standpoint. Kind of like those “The More
You Know” commercials. The more you know, the more free you become, the better
you see the world. But I think Jesus was speaking of something way beyond that,
and in much more simple terms. The truth makes you free, as opposed to
deception. Living in a world of deception and lies apart from Jesus is to live
in a world that is hindered and enslaving. When we live in deception, we become
a slave to our lies. Have you ever found yourself there? Like you’ve woven this
web of lies and you’ve become ensnared yourself?
The sadly ironic thing about lying is,
almost every lie starts with the idea that telling or living this lie will make
my life easier than the truth would, and in every case, the lie becomes way
more of a hindrance than the truth would have. Because you lie, and then you
tell more lies to cover up the first lie, and then you end up having to keep
people quiet who know the truth, and the whole thing just snowballs.
There’s this story about…does anyone
remember Dr. Bob Harris? He was a really popular weatherman in the late 1970s,
especially in the
And you know even when you don’t get
caught in a lie, sometimes the damage it does on the inside, the stress and
guilt of living a lie becomes to much to handle. It can just eat away at your
heart, and it puts you on edge or into depression and it can just ruin your
life. So when Jesus says, “if you continue in my word, you are truly my
disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will MAKE YOUR FREE,” it
takes on a whole new meaning. Remember that these commandments are all intended
to show God’s love for us, and this is how: do not lie, because deception is
enslaving. In the truth, Jesus makes you free.
Living a life of truth is so freeing.
Not having to remember, “Now what did I tell this person? Where did I tell my
wife I was going? What did I tell my husband I spent the money on?” Just living
an honest, truthful life is so freeing! I think it is important to make a
couple of correlations at this point. Jesus said if you hear his word you will
know the truth, and the truth will make you free. But what does Jesus say that
the truth is? We have to look no further than John 14:6 where Jesus says, “I am
the way, the TRUTH, and the life.” Jesus
himself is the truth. Truth is in his very essence, so everything that he says
must be true.
So the next correlation to make is
this: if the truth makes you free, and Jesus is the truth, then Jesus is the
one who makes you free. And if you have Jesus in you, if you are striving to
live like Jesus, then what must also be a part of your life? The truth! OK, are
you following along here? Jesus has no part with deception, so if you want to
be like Jesus, you can’t have a part with deception. There’s no room for that.
Jesus is calling us to honesty, truthfulness, and integrity. Why? Because he’s
a party pooper? Because he is overly-demanding? Because he’s strict? No! Why
does he want us to be in the truth? Because the truth will make us…FREE! Have
you followed me here? Jesus says the truth will make you free. Jesus said the
truth comes from listening to his voice. Jesus says that he IS the truth. Jesus
calls us to live in the truth and become like him: honest and trustworthy, why?
So we can live in the freedom that comes from the truth of Jesus Christ.
So when we lie – even the little white
ones – we enslave ourselves to deception. We are no longer living in the truth
so we are no longer free. These little white lies do more than just harm
others, even though we think it is helping them. They do more than just harm
us, even when we think it is the easier road. They also enslave us to sin. They
enslave us to deception. Freedom…freedom is found in the truth. Don’t know how
to find the truth? Don’t know what the truth is? Jesus says, “Hey, it’s right
here in my words.” If you can’t find the truth, then you need to get yourself
one of them Bibles with the red letters. The red letters that mark the words of
Christ. The truth lies in the red letters. And freedom comes from the truth.
And the reason we can have hope for
freedom comes from the sacrifice that Christ made for us on the cross, 2000
years ago.
Pastor
Dan Metzger
Van
Buren United