A Father's Compassion

Someone told me something yesterday that really shocked me. It wasn’t so much what they said – the topic was really mundane. What shocked me was that it had to do with someone lying. I know, I know, people lie all the time, but this was a Christian person, or at least someone who says they are, and Christians are not supposed to lie. I know, I know, it’s naïve to think that anyone could go about their whole life and never tell a lie, but Christians are not supposed to lie.

There is scripture after scripture that talks about lying and how awful God thinks it is. Just this morning He was giving me the Book of Hosea, chapter seven straight through to the end. God is so angry with His people in those chapters, and why? Because they lie. He talks about idol worship and worshipping false gods, but interspersed and directly related to those things is lying and deceit. The message is clear that if we are lying we're not listening to or following God.

When God is trying to get me prepared for something, He will give me scripture. Sometimes it’s in my daily Bible reading, sometimes in a sermon I hear or a devotional I read, or it might come to me in several ways or all of the above. When He gave me Hosea in my reading this morning, I thought at first I’d made a mistake and He wanted me to be reading something else. It was so dark and gloomy, but the Holy Spirit kept saying, “Keep reading.” Chapter after chapter of lies and deceit and false oaths mixed with idol worship. I knew He was talking about a person I knew who I have been having a very big challenge with recently. But I couldn’t believe that she was lying. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine, when I had described what was going on, said immediately, “It’s sad that she feels she has to lie,” but I was still holding out hope that maybe she wasn’t really lying, maybe the lines of communication were just bad, maybe she was so stressed out – and she is stressed out – that she really didn’t remember things the way they actually happened.

When the Lord gave me Hosea and the Holy Spirit said, “Keep reading,” I wanted to keep believing that this woman I know is not lying, so I started to ask the Lord if it was me who He was saying He was angry at. Maybe I’d done something that I didn’t realize was a sin, maybe I was being deceitful in some way I hadn’t realized. So I prayed for His help in being honest, and I asked Him to help me only do things that He wanted me to do. I asked Him to search my heart, a prayer from Psalm 139:23-24,”Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

I know I am far from perfect, but lying is something that I have never enjoyed. I don’t really see the point of it unless maybe it’s a life or death situation. The truth always somehow comes out. And since I have been born again, I’ve started to see that not only does God always bring the truth to light, but that He honors us when we are honest. It may be hard sometimes because we want to always look our best and present the best side of ourselves, but if we’re honest and “‘fess up,” He somehow helps make everything turn out all right. That is of course if we haven’t been lying from the start. Once we lie, we have to keep lying and then lie again, and lie again, until we don’t know what the truth is any more because it’s gotten so tied up and twisted together with lies.

The saddest thing about this woman who is lying is that there is no need for it. She’s gotten into such a state of anxiety and fear that she thinks she’s being threatened when she’s not, and so like a wild animal, she’s scratching and clawing at everything around her, and making up stories that suit her need to seem like she’s the only one who’s right and everyone else is terribly, terribly wrong. It’s histrionic behavior at its worst, and because it is the worst, it is causing all kinds of mayhem and chaos, the kind of chaos that comes straight from the pit of hell.

Jesus tells us in John 8:44 that the devil is the father of lies. Just before that, in verse 43 and the beginning of verse 44 He says, “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 desires.” In verse 45 He says, “Because I tell the truth you do not believe me,” and in verse 47, “Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason that you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.” It is important to know that here He is speaking to the religious leaders, people who act like they are following God. Jesus is telling them that their faith is just on the surface, that they are hypocrites because they aren't really listening to or hearing God or following Him because they have chosen to live a lie instead.

A Pastor friend once told me how it can be that a Christian can act like they’re under the power of the devil. I had an experience once with a woman who turned on me in such a way that I saw the devil looking at me through her eyes. It was the most terrifying experience I had ever had up to that point. I’ve had similar experiences since, and though I don’t ever enjoy it, at least now I understand it more. When I asked my Pastor friend how it could be that she could be demon possessed when she was someone who sang in the choir and seemed to love Jesus, he told me that because God is completely just, if anyone has sin in their lives that is a stronghold, meaning that it is a hidden sin that they are not confessing before God, that the devil can have their way in that person’s life and he can move right in with all his demons and have a party. Only when the devil has a party, it's not what we usually think of when we hear party. The kinds of parties he has bring total destruction and chaos.

There are things in all of our lives that are challenges for us. For some it is drugs or alcohol, for some it is lying, for some unforgiveness, anger, hatred, pride – the list goes on and on because we are human and we can feel and experience all kinds of negative things. The difference is made for each of us in whether we choose to go before God with them and ask for His help in overcoming them. We need to recognize that something we are doing or feeling is a sin, and we need to want God to remove it from our lives. But sometimes it’s just too hard to break our habits, and it’s much easier just trying to hide them from the world and from God. That was the case with this woman I saw the devil look out of – I found out a while after that happened that she had been smoking  pot all along and lying about it to everyone. The church I went to, people didn’t condemn you for having addictions – they would help you if you wanted help. But for whatever the reason she wanted to keep smoking pot, and so she sang in the choir and shouted out loud for Jesus, while all the while getting high. She was lying, and so she could belong to the father of lies, even though she had through faith been saved and adopted into the family of God.

The good news about God is that even in the book of Hosea He gives us the opportunity once again for redemption. He always gives us that opportunity. In Hosea 14:1-2 we read, “Return, Israel, to the Lord your God! Your sins have been your downfall! Take words with you and return to the Lord. Say to Him, ‘Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously.” Verse 3 ends with, “For in you the fatherless find compassion.” Verse 4 continues, “I will heal their waywardness and love them freely, for my anger has turned away from them.”  All it takes is recognizing that we’ve been wrong, and deciding to ask for His forgiveness. All it takes is turning our face away from the lies and deceit, and turning to His glory and love.

God is always ready to forgive and heal us. That is why it was so shocking to me to hear that someone I knew who knows the Lord would bother to lie and keep on lying. Day by day it gets worse and worse, until one little lie, the twisting of the truth, becomes the conflagration of the Book of Hosea. It made me realize how close I am to turning away from God every day of my life. The temptation comes and it is only by His grace that we can resist it. If we stop trusting Him for any reason, if we start to think we have to do things on our own, if we have some hidden sin that we may not even have realized was a sin, if we don’t ask Him to seek us and know our hearts, we can find ourselves deep in the mire of the road that leads away from Him. But when we do turn to Him, when we ask Him to seek our hearts and let us know what is in them, no matter how painful it may be to face the truth, He will heal us and love us freely because in Him the fatherless find compassion.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan