I looked up that expression, and the definition on the
website http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com
reads, “To lie boldly. To tell someone something that you know is
completely false.” My question always is why do people lie? I can understand if
it’s a life or death situation - it's still wrong, but it's understandable - but over something trivial? But the devil is
the father of lies (John 8:44), and I guess what happens is that he gets it
into someone’s head that they need to lie and makes them think it is a matter
of survival, and once they lie, they’re off to the races as another idiomatic expression
goes. One lie leads to another, and then another and then another, and it just keeps going, building lies upon lies upon lies.
Someone else who has been dealing with the same person in a
very similar situation said to me the other day, “I don’t understand why we can’t
just sit down and have a normal and pleasant conversation.” Everything with
this person has to be such a big argument – there’s always something to prove.
And if you’re trying to prove something by basing it on a lie – I don’t think I
need to tell anyone who is reading this what that leads to. Eventually the
truth has a way of coming out, and when it does, the house of cards you built
on your lies may destroy you as it falls down all around you. At the very least, whatever you have been trying to build will not last, and with all the time that was wasted by building with lies, something much stronger and lasting could have been created with a foundation of truth.
God considers lies to be a sin. That may seem strange to
some people because what’s in a lie? So I say I have some experience or a
degree I don’t have, or I say that I’ve done such and such or that I know so
and so. How could that hurt anyone? But the problem is that it’s never just one
lie. They always start to pile on top of each other. Say for example that I
tell someone that I went to an event on Friday at 2pm when I really stayed
home. Then someone else who was at the event is talking to someone I know and
that other person says that I was there too, but the person who was there didn’t
see me. So they ask me where I was sitting, and then what am I going to do?
Admit the truth? I’ll look like I lied. So I have to lie again and say
something like where were you sitting? I didn’t see you! They’ll tell me and I’ll
say I was across the room, but I wasn’t there so I don’t know that the people
who set up the event that day had a big tent on that side of the room and no
one was sitting there. So then I’m stumbling around trying to figure out how I
can pretend I was there all because I didn’t tell the truth to begin with.
So the question comes back again, why do people lie? I
remember when I was a teenager and I went to a chamber music camp in the summer.
I used to play viola and there was this boy who was in one of my quartets. The
way the place was organized, people of all different ages played chamber music
together, depending on their abilities. This boy was probably about 10 or 11,
and I was maybe 16 or 17, and there were people much older in the quartet too.
Every time we’d talk about anything that had to do with a person, the boy would
say, “He was my grandfather.” We started calling him the boy with a hundred
grandfathers. We started to throw out names at random, sometimes of people who
were historical figures who were long gone, and still, “He was my grandfather.”
I can understand a 10 year old boy wanting to impress a group of semi and full
adults, but it still is a question to me of why bother? If your whole life is
based on a lie then what do you have?
I’ve known people over the years who said they’d done things
they hadn’t, and put things on their resumes in ways that made them sound like
they’d worked places they hadn’t or had credentials they didn’t. And I know
that once upon a time I wanted to impress people too. But something happens
when the Holy Spirit comes to live inside of you – it’s not that you suddenly
become someone so great that you don’t have to impress other people, it’s
because you start to become so comfortable with who God made you to be that you
don’t need to impress anyone else. The only one whose opinion matters is God.
If I make a mistake and mess something up, if I forget something or I don’t do
something the right way, I don’t need to feel bad about it or lie about it to pretend it didn't happen, I can bring my mess
before the Lord and ask for His help which He is always willing to give.
But I’ll be honest and say that even as early as last year I
thought I could judge someone else based on my own idea that I was somehow doing
something better than they were. In the work that I do, the way we teach is
very personal, and sometimes in the past I could look at what someone else was
doing and think that I was doing so much more. But that is foolish pride and
arrogance, and although it’s not lying, it is living a lie. There is nothing
that I am that is any better than anyone else – the only thing that gives me
any goodness, any skill, any intelligence, any strength, any grace, any beauty, any love or anything else
that is desirable to have is the power that is in work within me thanks to the unmerited and undeserved blessing given to me by the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the Lord
of Heaven and Earth.
Ephesians 3:14-21 is one of the most beautiful prayers I
know. It’s something that we can pray for ourselves and for others, and something
that helps us to know the power that is available to us in Christ:
“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every
family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of His glorious
riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being,
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you,
being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the
Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of
Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled
to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do
immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at
work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout
all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
When we are filled with all the fullness of God, when we
know that love that surpasses all knowledge, when we know that He is able
to do more than we can ever ask or imagine – when we know that He can do all of
that according to His power that is at work within us – when we understand that
His glorious riches are our inheritance, and we know that we can call Him our Father,
when we know all that and more that the Holy Spirit reveals to us, then we don’t
have to pretend we have a grandfather we don’t have, we don’t have to pretend
that we are someone we’re not, we don’t have to prove anything to anyone,
because His truth is all we need. Why do people lie? Because they don’t know
that they don’t have to.
Blessings,
Jannie Susan
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