Ten Lies That Shatter Lives (9):
"Little Lies Don't Hurt"




A Sermon On:

Exodus 20: 16

Heidelberg Catechism Q/A 112





PREPARED BY

KEN GEHRELS

PASTOR

CALVIN CHRISTIAN REFORMED CHURCH

NEPEAN, ONTARIO


"What a tangled web we weave. We all practice to deceive."
That was a headline of a New York Times article of 2 years ago. Maybe you'd be shocked to hear, and maybe you wouldn't, that it reported "91% confess that they regularly don't tell the truth. 20% admit they can't get through a day without conscious, premeditated white lies."
[quoted in Schlessinger The Ten Commandments p.268]

According to the report we are becoming a society in which "people are more accepting than ever before of exaggerations, falsifications, fabrications, misstatements, misrepresentations, gloss-overs, equivocations, trims and truth colouring."

Do you think this article is telling the truth?

Check the opinion surveys. Maybe check your own attitudes:
Politicians, lawyers, lobbyists and activists, journalists, advertisers...
Do you accept everything they say at face value? Or do you look for the spin they're putting on their words?

Not that everyone, or even the majority of people in these professions are suspect - but the caricature is there. Smoke.
And behind the smoke is a fire..... Of false witness.
Lying.

Something rather prevalent through our entire society. And something that contributes to the lack of trust that we have for each other. A poll done a few years ago of college students showed they they trust their grandparents' generation the most (79%), parents' generation next (68%), and their own generation the least (a measly 25%). [Schlessinger p.270]

As Lewis Smedes says in Mere Morality, "Ours is a huckstering, show-bizzy world, jangling with hype, hullabaloo and hooey, bull, baloney and bamboozlement."
The way things are today, we find ourselves having to doubt rather than believe; question rather than trust; hedge our bet as best we can because of the risk that we'll get burned - 'cause we're afraid that someone's not quite shooting straight with us.

We could simply shrug our shoulders and chalk it all up as part of the game. "Say what you need to get the job done. Paint the picture - whatever the case - to swing things your way. It's OK. Little lies don't hurt."
In that kind of a world comes the call of Commandment #9, the life-building truth of God's Word - "You shall not give false testimony."
Or - as our Catechism rephrases it, "No twisting words, gossiping, slandering.... speak the truth."

Deceit, lying, mistruths of any sort - stay far away from them.

What is it to lie?
It is to attempt to deceive the other person. And that can be done with true words held back, true words spoken in a certain way, outright false words, looks, actions....
anything, really, that aims to pull one over on another person.
THAT is lying.
THAT is what God prohibits.

And like we said, it happens all the time, in big and little ways.

Lying.....
When we feel threatened by someone,
or feel a need to get one up on another
or want to get even with them, we quickly close our eyes to this commandment.
And out come the half-truths, the callous slander, or even selective words that may be true.....
basically anything to make the other person look bad.

And I could say, "Hey, I did not disobey the law" when I share some true but extremely unsavoury detail of my neighbour's life in order to push her reputation down. I could say that, but the Living God who sees beyond my little smile and the innocent mask I've pulled over my face - God would see that in my heart I'm going, "YES!" and singing a note of glee because she's been knocked down a peg or two; bopped a space or two back in the pecking order.

It's horrendous stuff, you know.
Murder, really.
I've contributed to the destruction of that person's reputation. Poison has come out of my mouth. And those broken pieces that lay scattered on the floor where I've dropped them - those pieces can never be put back together again.

Devilish stuff - and SO easy to spread.
Like milkweed puff in a wind - gossip, slander, twisted or hurtful true words can scatter incredibly quickly. They sow and multiply themselves in many different places. And once scattered, they can never be taken back again.
You speak words that hurt another. Perhaps you speak them very innocently. But they get out. And in a few days you realize the horrid thing that has happened. Now what? Can you pull the words back? Who did you all say them to? And who received them after that? How far did they travel?
Boy, can words travel fast. You know that.

And even IF you were able to find everyone and say, "Remember what you heard from me? It's not true. Ignore it."
- even if you were able to say that, often the verbal tar and feathers remain stuck to the other person. People will continue to look at the person accused and somewhere deep in the back of their mind a hint of doubt has been sowed. It's never the same after that.
Ever.

Scary thing is that in our society today we've become so desensitized to it all. And then the old line, "but everyone else is doing it" settles into our mind, seducing us along as participants in this sordid game.

It can start so easily, with those little white lies:
Mary tells Joe she has to babysit Friday night to avoid telling him she doesn't want to go out with him.
Harry tells the boss he was caught behind a snow plow on the way to work to cover the fact that he forgot to set the alarm and slept in.
Pastor Andrews fills out a job reference letter for a parishioner, polishing the sister's halo to a glow somewhat brighter than reality.
[J.Roeda, Decisions]

These little things quickly develop into an easy habit - a matter of convenience that allows us to be sloppy rather than deal with complex or potentially painful situations.
We forget that even these seemingly innocent lies
There are times, I suppose, and all of us could find an example or two, where a lie seems to be defensible. Some of you probably have such an example on the tip of your tongue right now.
But really, how often do we face this kind of moment?
Honestly, when we start quibbling about the outer edges and extreme examples like this, wouldn't we have to say that we're really trying to avoid the heart of the issue.
Namely this - we live in an age when, as Lewis Smedes says, "deceit threatens every area of our society." Truth is scarce. Lies come a dime a dozen. All used to reinforce our own position or pull us up the ladder.
And it is easy, oh so easy, to get sucked in by this and end up a player in the game.

And how would that fit into the life of someone carrying the name "Christian?"
How does that square with striving to be a follower of Jesus, the one who referred to Himself as "the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life"?
- the One who said, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free."
- the Son of the God whom Deuteronomy 32:4 calls "the Faithful God, never false, true and upright..."

The way of Jesus is the way without deception. It is the way that tells the honest truth about things eternal, and also about things of the here and now.

Live the truth.
Love the truth.
Support and promote the truth.

Listen to God's Word of Truth from 1 Corinthians 13:6,7 -
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
The foundation of God-honouring love - that's what we want to build our lives on.

Meaning that we're called not only to avoid spreading gossip and slander, innuendo and rumour, half truths and distortions. We've also got a God-given responsibility to stop this kind of poison when it flows our way. When a juicy tidbit, even one disguised as a "prayer request" comes along, don't be party to it. Don't listen. Stop the speaker. Call them on it. Once in your brain, verbal dirt is awfully hard to get out.
As far as speaking about other people occur, a very simple but good test is to try and picture Jesus right beside us as we're speaking or taking in the talk. Now try and imagine yourself looking in His face. What do you see? Joy and a nod of approval over the way you built up and protected the reputation of the other?
Or is He frowning?
Could there be.... is there.... a tear in His eye over your violations of that person's integrity and value in the eyes of God?

Treating people as valuable creations of God.
Looking out for their well-being.
Means we need to be careful about what we ought NOT say. But also about what sort of truth words we DO say.
Sensitivity.
Right?

Mary doesn't have to tell Joe that "she would spend the entire evening picking lint off her socks rather than go out with him." [Roeda, Decisions]
The wife doesn't have to bulldoze over her boring husband, telling him he is a clod.
The parishioner doesn't have to tell the pastor how tedious his sermon was every time it was a boring blend of trivia and platitude.
Truth-telling comes in a setting of respect and loving sensitivity.
The Bible says in Proverbs 10.19: "When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but the prudent are restrained in speech."

Ephesians 4.25 says, "Therefore, putting away falsehood, let everyone speak the truth with his neighbour, for we are members one of another."
Members - linked together in the covenant bond of Jesus Christ.
We belong to each other.

BUT - if we run around telling cheap tales, swapping tinged tidbits, and dropping juicy morsels or hints about each other, the rudder of the tongue, as James 3 puts it, will steer our covenant community towards a shoal of Satanic shipwreck.
The evil one would love nothing more than to see the Community of Christ decay into a pack; to see the society degenerate into a gang. [Smedes]


That's why the Lord had to deal so severely with Annanias and Saphira in the early days of the Church. They twist the truth, hold some information back, and slip a little white lie in as they make a huge contribution to the Church. But their distortions, their lies to the Church leaders and hence to God himself, threaten to destroy the trust, the bond, the unity, the very fabric of the Church.
And so they are punished with death.

Death -
because that's what gossip and slander and lies and cheap tales are all about.
They destroy.
People.
And whole communities.

We serve the Lord of Life.
He has come to heal the hurting, to bind up the wounded, to restore the damaged.
Would anything less than loving truth-telling contribute to that or get in the way, serve as a roadblock, to the work of Christ?

May the Holy Spirit, who came down on the Church in "tongues of fires", set His divine seal over our tongues, that they would steer us towards each other and towards our Lord, rather than destructively steering us away from Him.

Let me close by reading a few words of scripture. We give God the last Word.
I'll read from the paraphrase called The Message. James 3:
A bit in the mouth of a horse controls the whole horse. A small rudder on a huge ship in the hands of a skilled captain sets a course in the face of the strongest winds. A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything - or destroy it!

It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it, smoke right from the pit of hell.

This is scary: You can tame a tiger, but you can't tame a tongue - it's never been done. The tongue runs wild, a wanton killer. With our tongues we bless God our Father;; with the same tongues we curse the very men and women he made in his image. Curses and blessings out of the same mouth!
My friends, this can't go on. A spring doesn't gush fresh water one day and brackish the next, does it? Apple trees don't bear strawberries, do they? Raspberry bushes don't bear apples, do they? You're not going to dip into a polluted mud hole and get a cup of clear, cool water, are you?

Do you want to be counted wise, to build a reputation for wisdom? Here's what you do: Live well, live wisely, live humbly. It's the way you live, not the way you talk, that counts. Mean-spirited ambition isn't wisdom. Boasting that you are wise isn't wisdom. Twisting the truth to make yourselves sound wise isn't wisdom. It's the furthest thing from wisdom - it's animal cunning, devilish conniving. Whenever you're trying to look better than others or get the better of others, things fall apart and everyone ends up at the others throats.

Real wisdom, God's wisdom, begins with a holy life and is characterized by getting along with others. It is gentle and reasonable, overflowing with mercy and blessings, not hot one day and cold the next, not two-faced. You can develop a healthy, robust community that lives right with God and enjoy its results only if you do the hard work of getting along with each other, treating each other with dignity and honour.