Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Truth

Another really crazy day yesterday, and thank God for His faithfulness because I wouldn’t be able to keep going without His help. Something happened that was over the top in audacity – audacity already means that something is already over the top, and this was even higher – or lower, depending on how you think of things. There’s someone I know who has been lying to my face, accusing me of things I haven’t done, saying they’ve done things they haven’t and twisting the truth beyond all recognition, but today they put something in writing and when I saw it I was shocked. If you just say something that’s a lie, maybe you’re feeling emotionally overwrought and you made a mistake or a had a momentary lapse of memory, but to write something down means that you have to premeditate – you have to really know what you’re saying and that means that if it’s a lie, either you’re really deluded, or really crazy, or you’re just plain lying through your teeth.

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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