"An Honest Heart"

    Dear Friends in Christ,       

   In recent years we have been witnesses of the very subtle and gradual demise of something that is absolutely essential to the well-being of any society.  In fact, I contend that no society can survive long without it.  This slow death has been so subtle and so gradual that many have not even noticed it.  But the evidence of it has become so clear and unmistakable that many people are now asking how it could have happened without our notice.  And what exactly is it that I’m talking about?  I’m talking about the truth.  In recent years we have been eyewitnesses to the slow but certain demise of the truth.  We’ve seen it in baseball players who have perjured themselves in the courtroom as they have lied about the performance-enhancing drugs they once took.  We’ve seen it in politicians who promise us the moon while campaigning for public office only to renege on those promises once they get into office.  We’ve even seen this demise of the truth reach the highest office in our land for who among us will ever forget the infamous Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal that haunted the White House back in the late ‘90’s.  I mean it got so bad at one point that the very definitions of common, everyday words like “sex” and “is” were being debated at the highest levels of our judicial system and many of those who spoke on behalf of the President were spending their days and their press conferences doing what could only be described as damage control.  In fact, we’ve even developed a term in our culture to describe this twisting and misrepresentation of the truth.  We call it spin. 

   But baseball players and politicians and former presidents are not the only ones who have given ample evidence of the death of truth in our society.  According to a survey conducted by Psychology Today, apparently a great many Americans have jumped on this bandwagon and allowed themselves to get caught up in the devil’s spidery web of dishonesty and deceit.  For example, this survey revealed that more people have cheated on their spouse than on their tax returns or expense accounts.  And speaking of tax returns, more than half of the people surveyed said that if their tax returns were audited, they would probably owe the IRS money.  About 1 in 3 admitted to deceiving a best friend about something within the past year and 96% of those said they felt guilty about it.  And nearly half predicted that if they scratched another car in the parking lot, they would drive away without leaving a note – even though 89% of them agreed that would be immoral.

   So it’s pretty obvious that we have a real crisis of truth going on in America today, don’t we?  Which makes the question that Pilate asks in our text for today, “What is truth?” a very appropriate one to consider this morning as we explore the theme “An Honest Heart.”  May God richly bless our study of the truth today and instill his truth within us as we focus our attention upon the One who once referred to himself as “the way, the truth, and the life,” and that of course would be our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

   Now some 7 centuries before Jesus came into our world, a prophet by the name of Isaiah had foretold that when the Messiah came, no deceit would be found in his mouth.  And oh how true that was of Jesus for he was staunchly and steadfastly honest, even when he was being questioned by the members of the Jewish Council the night before he was put to death.  I suppose he could have very easily denied any claims to be the Messiah and the Son of God, and perhaps gotten himself off the hook, but when Caiaphas the high priest placed him under oath and demanded, “Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God,” Jesus truthfully replied, “Yes, it is as you say,” knowing full well that by those words he was in essence sealing his own death sentence.

   So not once did Jesus stretch the truth.  Not once did he shade the truth.  Not once did he embellish the truth.  And not once did he avoid the truth.  He simply told the truth.  No deceit, no dishonesty was ever found in his mouth.

   And my friends, if God has his way with us, the same will hold true for you and me.  So using Jesus as our model, as we’ve been doing throughout my current sermon series on the heart, let’s spend some time this morning taking a good close look at what it means to have an honest and truthful heart.

  And the 1^st point that I want to make is that God takes the truth very seriously.  From Genesis to Revelation, the theme is the same: God loves the truth and hates deceit.  Now if you think that word “hate” is a pretty strong word to use in reference to God, then you haven’t been reading your Bible.  In Prov. 6:16-19, for example, we’re told: “There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.”  Notice that lying is mentioned twice in that list of things God hates.  Elsewhere in Prov. 12:22 we’re told: “The LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in men who are truthful.”  And in Ps. 5:6 David writes in reference to God: “You destroy those who tell lies; bloodthirsty and deceitful men the LORD abhors.”

   So it’s pretty obvious from these and many other passages just like them that God takes a strong and unmistakable stand against lying.  But why?  What’s really so bad about telling a little lie every now and then?  Isn’t that the way most people think these days?  So what’s the big deal?  Well, here we need to understand that untruthfulness, dishonesty, and deceit are qualities that are polar opposites of God’s character.  In fact, Heb. 6:18 tells us that “it is impossible for God to lie.”  Did you catch that, my friends?  It’s not that God chooses not to lie or that he tries not to lie.  According to that verse, he cannot lie.  Or to put it another way, he is the absolute epitome of truthfulness.

   And that’s great news for us for what that means is that when God makes a promise, he keeps it.  When he makes a statement, he means it.  Like 2 Tim. 2:13 says: Even “if we are not faithful, God will still be faithful, because he cannot be false to himself.”

   Now, contrast that with Satan who is just the opposite.  While God finds it impossible to not tell the truth, Satan finds it impossible to tell the truth.  In fact, in John 8:44 Jesus goes so far as to say that Satan is “a liar and the father of lies,” and that when he lies, he’s just speaking his native language.  Just like when we open our mouths and English comes out, when Satan opens his mouth, lies come out.  He is the original designer of deceit, the father of falsehoods, the deviser of dishonesty.  And how sad it is that we who know better so often and so willingly choose to listen to and follow his lies and deceit rather than paying heed to the One who always speaks the truth.  Now why do you suppose that is?

   Well, I’m sure that there are any number of reasons for that, but one of the main reasons that I can think of is that if we’re honest with ourselves (which is a good thing to be, especially in a sermon on honesty and truthfulness), we’ll have to admit that we don’t always like the truth.  In our Gospel lesson before we heard Jesus say, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”  But we have a different standard that we’ve come to live by in our culture and it goes like this: “You shall know the truth and truth shall make you squirm.”  And the reason the truth makes us squirm is because we learn from early childhood on is that the truth has consequences.

   For example, remember when your Mom would walk into the room where you were arguing with your little brother and she’d ask, “Did you hit your baby brother?” you knew that if you said you did, there was going to be a price to pay.  So we learned quickly how to shade the truth and color the truth lest we found ourselves on the receiving end of those consequences.

   “Did I hit my baby brother, you’re asking, Mother?  Well, it depends on how you define the word hit.  I mean, yes, I did make contact with him, but would a jury in a court of law consider that contact to be an actual hit?  I don’t know because everything is relative.”

   Or another thing that we do to avoid the consequences of the truth is we pass the buck.  We push the blame off onto someone or something else.  “Did I hit my baby brother?  Well, yes, I’ll have to admit that I did.  But you need to understand, Mom, that it wasn’t my fault.  For you see, I was born with aggressive chromosomes, which, I might add, I inherited from you.  So I have a natural bent toward hitting.  And besides, Mom, if you hadn’t allowed me to watch all those violent programs and cartoons on television when I was younger, those aggressive chromosomes might have never been aroused within me.  So even though I did hit my brother, I hope you can see that it’s not my fault.  In fact, it’s really your fault, Mom, because I’m just a victim of nature and of your poor parenting skills.”

   Now obviously I did those examples tongue in cheek, but they sound pretty familiar, don’t they?  For we have become a society of victims, a society of people who refuse to accept responsibility for our wrong and sinful actions, a society that colors the truth or completely avoids the truth so that we don’t have to deal with the consequences of the truth.

   But there’s a real problem with that line of thinking and that is that the negative consequences of not telling the truth far outweigh the ones that go along with telling the truth.  We see a good example of this in the early church.  In Acts 5 we are introduced to a married couple whose names were Ananias and Sapphira.  They sold a piece of property and gave half the money to the church, which would have been great except for one thing.  They lied to Peter and the other apostles, claiming that they gave all the proceeds from that sale to the church.  Their sin then was not that they held back some of the money for themselves, but that they lied about it.  They misrepresented the truth.  And do you know what happened as a result of their deceit?  God struck both of them dead.

   Now some of you may be thinking, “Well, I’m sure glad God doesn’t do that anymore when people lie because if he did, I wouldn’t be here.”  But you know what?  I’m not so sure that still doesn’t happen.  It seems that the wages of sin and deceit are still death.  Oh, maybe not the death of the body, but how about the death of a marriage?  There’s no way that a marriage can survive long if it is built on a foundation of lies.  Like one author has put it: “Falsehoods are termites in the trunk of the family tree.”  Then lying can also lead to the death of a conscience.  Have you ever noticed how once we’ve told one lie, we have to keep telling others to cover it up, and the more we tell, the easier it becomes?  And the less it bothers our God-given conscience.

   The telling of lies can also result in the death of a career or reputation.  I don’t know how many pastors I’ve known over the years who have lost both when they began to weave a web of lies around an extramarital affair they were having, only to have that web eventually collapse beneath the weight of the truth.

   But perhaps worst of all, the practice of deceit and dishonesty can also lead to the death of our faith for faith and falsehood cannot co-exist together.  They are complete opposites of one another.  And if we insist on living a life of lies, then we in essence have turned our back on the faith for that faith is founded upon the truth, namely, the truth of God’s Word and God’s Son.

   So what do we do if we’ve been living a life of lies lately?  Can we ever be forgiven by God?  The good news for today is that yes we can for he makes it abundantly clear to us in I John 1 that the blood of Jesus, his Son, is able to cleanse us not just of some sin or many sins but of all sin.  And that would include the sin of lying.  But in order for that forgiveness to be ours, there must be repentance.  There must be a change of heart, a turning away from our untruthfulness.  And that may require having to do something that isn’t always easy.  It may require having to face the music.  That’s an interesting figure of speech.  Do you have any idea where it came from?  I just recently found out, so let me share it with you.

   Many years ago a man conned his way into the orchestra of the emperor of China even though he couldn’t play a single note on a single instrument.  Whenever the group practiced or performed, he would hold his flute to his lips, pretending to play, but not making a sound.  Now you might wonder why he did that.  Well, he received a modest salary for being in this orchestra and enjoyed a comfortable living.  But then came the day when the emperor requested a solo from each musician.  Needless to say, the imposter got nervous.  He pretended to be sick, but the royal physician was not fooled.  So on the day he was to perform his solo, guess what he did.  He took some poison and killed himself.  The explanation for his suicide led to that phrase that found its way into the English language: “He refused to face the music.”

   So what about you, my friends?  If you are currently weaving a web of lies in your life and haven’t done so already, might I suggest that it’s time to face the music.  It’s time to understand that God will never bless a strategy, a relationship, a career, a life that is founded upon lies.  Somebody once said: “The ripple of today’s lie is tomorrow’s wave and next year’s flood.”  It’s time to close the floodgates.  It’s time to stop the ripples.  It’s time to be just like Jesus and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.                 

   Amen.