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BLOWING YOURSELF UP WITH LIES

There’s an old story about a preacher who made an announcement one weekend at church. “Everybody listen up,” he said. “Next week I’m going to share a message on lying, and it would help if all of you would do me the favor of reading through Mark 17 before the service. Just to kind of lay the foundation. All right? It’ll only take you a few minutes — Mark 17.”

The next weekend he stepped up to the pulpit, took out his notes, adjusted the microphone, and asked them: “Did all of you remember to read Mark 17? Show of hands.” Well, just about every hand in the church went up, and the pastor seemed to take a little mental count. “Very interesting,” he said. “Just about all of you. By the way, just so you’ll know, the Gospel of Mark has only 16 chapters in it. There is no Mark 17.” There was a long pause, and then he said: “All right, I’ll proceed now with my sermon on lying.”

Have you ever gotten yourself stuck like that? You don’t plan to tell a lie, but someone puts you on the spot. “Did you do such-and-such?” And it’s just easier to fake it, to say, “Sure. Yes. You bet” . . . than to admit failure. Especially in a group setting where every other hand is up.

Former presidential candidate George McGovern tells an embarrassing story on himself. Back in 1972, during his ill-fated run for the presidency against Richard Nixon, he was shaking hands and kissing babies in a crowded ballroom one evening. And a man came up whose face was kind of familiar. Unfortunately, Senator McGovern couldn’t for the life of him recall the guy’s name. So he did the same thing many of us are tempted to do: he faked it. You know how that goes: “Hey, how ya doin’? Great to see you again! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

And the man took the bait. “Doing all right, George. I wouldn’t miss this chance to see you again. I’m proud of you, man. How’s the campaign?” Etc. And then candidate McGovern, still trying to pull the man’s name out of the thin conversational air without giving himself away, went to the old standby: “How’s your wife?” Sometimes that works. And the guy said, “Oh, I lost her.”

Well, you don’t get to be the senior senator from South Dakota by not being a good actor, and McGovern immediately put on a sympathetic face. “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “I’m so sorry; you know, with all this confusion of campaigning, and flying around, and all the mail . . . I just forgot. I’d heard that she passed away. What a shame.”

And the man looked very confused? “What? Passed away? No, I just lost her in this crowd. I can’t find her anywhere!”

Well, friend, sometimes when you lie, you end up not moving to the White House. Other times when you cover up the truth, you actually have to move OUT of the White House. But even to the rest of us who have no intention of relocating to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this book of Ephesians has something to say to us as well about telling the truth. We’ve studied in recent weeks the clarion call of Paul, where he writes in verses 22 and 24:

“Put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires.” And then this: “Put ON the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”

And it’s interesting what Paul lists as Task #1 when a Christian seeks “true righteousness and holiness.” Notice verse 25:

“Therefore each of you must put OFF falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body.”

“Put away lying,” says the King James. We’ve been dipping into the Message paraphrase, and Eugene Peterson expresses it like this:

“What this adds up to, then, is this: no more lies, NO MORE PRETENSES.”

Why is it that even we who are Christians lie to one another? It’s a major violation of the Ten Commandments, of course, a serious sin. Why do it do it? Because it’s easy? Because we’ve failed to do something we should, and now we’re covering up? It’s true that lying is often a second sin, designed to cover up the reality that we’re taking a perk we don’t deserve, or doing something we know is wrong, or pretending that we’ve accomplished things we never did. There was a TV commercial on recently, where a man is driving this gorgeous, high-performance sports car along a snowy mountain road, and he’s mumbling to himself a bunch of fabricated excuses for why he’s not at work with the rest of the team. Maybe you’ve seen it. “I have a really bad toothache,” he mumbles to himself, rehearsing. “I bit into some wax fruit.” And so on. Again, why is he lying, and practicing lying? Because he should be at work — and he knows it.
Let’s think here about two injured parties when we lie. First of all, friend, we hurt ourselves. We noticed in the Adventist commentary for Ephesians 4 this important piece of counsel:

“Deceit brings its own disintegration of soul to the deceiver, often hurting him more than the deceived. How can those who are followers of the One who is the truth do anything but hold to the utmost integrity in all things? In the life of the Christian there is no place for taking advantage of another in a business transaction, for the coloring of stories told, for the conveying of false impressions by innuendo, for the making of promises without the intention of keeping them, for the relaying of rumors and gossip.”

It’s easy, isn’t it, to get to the point where every story you tell gets bigger than it really is. Adventures grow bolder, the fish you catch get bigger, aches and pains multiply, mosquitos maul and eviscerate you instead of just giving you a little bite. And as the Bible scholars here note, who gets hurt? You do! Your word is cheapened; once you have lost your integrity, even your friends stop believing you. They know you lie, and soon they slough off your every word and you forfeit your influence. Mark Twain once remarked about people who exaggerate their hurts and tragedies:

“Eighty percent of people won’t believe you; the other 20 will think you deserve it.”

But let’s go back to Ephesians 4:25 and pick up an important second point. Here it is again:

“Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, FOR WE ARE ALL MEMBERS OF ONE BODY.”

In other words, when we lie and conduct ourselves without integrity, we are acting against our own body — the Body of Christ! It’s actually a form of spiritual self-mutilation when we deceive fellow believers! No wonder Paul writes so seriously about the sin of bearing false witness to someone else in the church.

Let me read to you a paragraph out of the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, which was authored by Dr. Francis Foulkes — the Ephesians section, that is. Notice:

“We are members one of another. For his argument against falsehood, Paul does not simply appeal to the moral law that his readers knew well. Rather he insists that Christians break the bonds of love and fellowship by which they have come to be bound, when they try to deceive one another. They belong together as members of the one body, and so must be completely honest one with another.” Then Dr. Foulkes quotes from the philosopher Chrystostom: “‘If the eye sees a serpent, does it deceive the foot? if the tongue tastes what is bitter, does it deceive the stomach?’ Lying is a gross hindrance to the proper functioning of the body. When members are open and perfectly truthful one with another, the body will work in harmony and therefore efficiently. Without openness and truth, there can only be disunity, disorder and trouble.”

That’s painful to read, isn’t it? A Christian company once went through a time of scandal, where one of the officers was caught lying. And for several weeks, there was turmoil and pain and gossip in the parking lot. Then, just when they seemed to turn a bit of a corner, a second falsehood hit the group like the proverbial ton of bricks. One of the support team emerged from a meeting where this now obvious pattern of deception had been discussed . . . and saw two secretaries standing in the hallway, their faces pale. “They looked like they’d both been hit in the stomach,” he said later to his wife. So the family itself was being hurt, and ironically, this leader who had colored the truth hurt himself worst of all because he lost the confidence of people whose assistance and support he needed. Back to that Adventist commentary for Ephesians, and the team of writers say this:

“Lying tends to break down the unity of brotherhood; deceit sets one member against another. There can be no true union between man and man except on the basis of complete confidence.”

Would it be hard to simply tell the truth — the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Every single time? It sure would. We’d have to live more godly lives before we’d dare try it. We’d have to trust God, get our identity, our self-worth from Him instead of from the things we pretend we’ve done. Paul himself confesses that it would be like putting on a whole new self.

Even if we never run for president, friend, God still invites us to try it. He says so in His Word . . . just not in Mark chapter 17.