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Liar Liar Pants on Fire
9th out of 10 in Series
Realizing Revival by Following The Rules
November 29, 1998
Rev. Charles S. Mims
The Holy Bible, King James Version
Exodus 20:16
16Thou shalt not bear false witness against
thy neighbour.
A minister wound up the services one morning by saying, "Next Sunday I am going to preach on the subject of LIARS. And in this connection, I would like you all to read the 17th chapter of Mark."
The next Sunday, the preacher rose to begin, and said, "Now, all of you who have done as I requested and read the 17th chapter of Mark, please raise your hands."
Nearly every hand in the congregation went up. "Very good," said the preacher. "You are precisely the people I wish to speak to this morning. There IS no 17th chapter of Mark!"
I would imagine that each one of us would say, if asked, that honesty was an important quality. We would stand up and affirm the need to tell the truth, we would say things like "Honesty is the best policy," and "The truth is always best." I would also imagine that for each of us here this morning it could be said that we were honest people. Are we always honest? Do we always speak the truth? The question for us this morning is "Are our pants on fire?"
Have we sacrificed integrity and basic truthfulness for political correctness? Do we try so hard to be inoffensive to a worldly people that we tone down the truth? Are we honest with ourselves and God about even the small things? These are some questions we should be looking at this morning as we dive headlong into a study of the 9th Commandment.
The 9th Commandment deals primarily with perjury. It is dealing with a lie told under oath with the intent to harm someone else. This is indeed a serious form of dishonesty, and this morning we are going to look at perjury, but also we will focus upon the whole area of dishonesty. There are ways in which you and I might be lying without even recognizing it.
I was told one time in High School by a social worker of some sort that studies showed the average person told 280 lies a day. That's an awful lot of deceit for us, don’t you think? Now, I really have no way of validating that statement, but it should cause us to stop and think for a minute. If it is true, then apparently there are ways for us to lie without being intentionally deceptive. What then, is lying?
What is Lying?
Well preacher, that's easy enough to answer. Lying is telling a lie. Ok then, lets look at the word lie then. What does it mean to lie? The Merriam-Webster online dictionary describes a lie in this fashion:
Main Entry: 3lie
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): lied; ly·ing /'lI-i[ng]/
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English lEogan; akin to Old High German liogan to lie, Old Church Slavonic lugati
Date: before 12th century
intransitive senses
1 : to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive
2 : to create a false or misleading impression
transitive senses : to bring about by telling lies <lied his way out of trouble>
synonyms LIE, PREVARICATE, EQUIVOCATE, PALTER, FIB mean to tell an untruth. LIE is the blunt term, imputing dishonesty <lied about where he had been>. PREVARICATE softens the bluntness of LIE by implying quibbling or confusing the issue <during the hearings the witness did his best to prevaricate>. EQUIVOCATE implies using words having more than one sense so as to seem to say one thing but intend another <equivocated endlessly in an attempt to mislead her inquisitors>. PALTER implies making unreliable statements of fact or intention or insincere promises <a swindler paltering with his investors>. FIB applies to a telling of a trivial untruth <fibbed about the price of the new suit>.
Now, according to the dictionary the word lie comes from an Old English word, and that is the earliest it is traced back. I submit to you this morning that lying has a much earlier origin. We've all heard the saying, perhaps even said it our selves, "the devil made me do it." Now, when someone says to us that the devil made them do it, we snicker a bit and say yeah buddy, whatever you say. However, there is a bit of truth to the statement. The devil is the originator of deception. The Bible calls Satan the father of deception.
The Holy Bible, King James Version
John 8:44
44Ye are of your
father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was
a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth,
because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he
speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
This does not relieve us of the responsibility for our own deceptions, but it does give us insight into where they came from. We cannot use the devil as an excuse to be dishonest. We lie for many different reasons. We lie for convenience sake. Sometimes it seems that it is just easier to lie than tell the truth. We lie for vengeance, we lie to protect our job, our home, our family. We lie to be boastful, we lie because we want others to think we are something we are not. We lie because we are sinful people. None of these reasons to lie excuse the action. If we are to be children of the Truth, then we must walk in truthfulness.
How Do We Lie?
The most obvious way we lie is blatant deception. We all know about this kind of lie. It's the kind of lie when a person gets in our faces, looks us straight in the eye, maybe even wags their finger in our faces, and deceives us, knowing full well the truth. This is perhaps the lie we have the hardest time understanding. Somehow it simply offends us when someone can lie to us in this fashion. It becomes even more serious when viewed in the context of this morning's text. The 9th Commandment deals with a malicious lie intended to cause harm to another person. This commandment specifically deals with lying in a legal context. Listen to me this morning. Lying is wrong, but to commit perjury compounds the lie because you are harming another. Committing perjury is an extremely serious offense against God, and against our fellow man.
We also lie by ommission. If we are selling our home, and we list on the advertisment that it is in excellent condition we better be telling the truth. If we know that the roof leaks during heavy rains, or that the stove is on its way out, and we neglect to tell the buyer this we have lied. We have misrepresented the truth to them, and have ruined our witness because we have lacked integrity.
We lie by insinuation when we allow an untruth to go unchallenged. If we know something being said or taught is not true, we have an obligation to bring it out into the open. If we allow lies to remain lies, we are participating in the lie.
We lie when we spread rumors. This is perhaps one of the most insidious lies. Sometimes we don't even realize we are lying when we do it. Just because we do not know it is a lie however, doesn't make it any less dishonest. We must check the facts before we tell someone something we heard. Not only that, we must really decide whether we need to be sharing it anyway, but that is another sermon.
The town gossip was talking with her pastor and she half heartedly said she would like to make amends for the stories she had spread through town. The pastor said he knew a way she could do it. He instructed her to pick two handfuls of ripe dandelions and walk through the town holding them high letting the wind carry the seeds. Upon completion of her task she returned to the pastor and reported that she was done. He then told her to retrace her steps and gather up all the seeds she had strewn through town. Aghast, the woman replied that it was impossible. There was no way she could pick up all of those seeds. The pastor looked her squarely in the eye and said it would be easier to gather the seeds of those plants than the seeds of her gossip and lies.
Pastors must be careful with their illustrations. We must be sure that we don't claim someone else's story as our own. We must also be sure that what we are saying in our sermons are the absolute truth.
We also lie when we engage in vain flattery. When we tell someone a lie in order to gain favor in their eyes somehow this is a lie. That doesn't mean we must be rude to people. If Sister Smith asked you if you liked her peacock feather hat you needn't tell her it is atrocious. But, at the same time, we shouldn't tell sister Smith her hat is beautiful just because we want some of her fabulous pecan pie.
Honesty is not always the best policy. Truth must be married to love; honesty must be intertwined with kindness.
- Carole Mayhall, Marriage Partnership, Vol. 11, no. 2.
There are numerous other ways in which we lie, and each and every lie we tell is devestating.
The Effects of Lying
Lying is insidious. It works its way into the social fabric of our lives and wreaks great havoc. Time Magazine once wrote an article questioning whether we are a nation of liars. In 1993 the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ran a help-wanted ad for electricians with expertise at using Sontag Connectors. It got 170 responses from people claiming extensive use of these connectors even though there is no such connector. It was made up because the Port Authority wanted to find out how many applicants lie on their resume'.
When we begin to accept lies and even to EXPECT lies, we are tearing away at the very foundations of common decency. There is always a price to be paid for lying, and the price is always exorbitant. Someone always gets hurt when we tell a lie.
Honesty is the bedrock foundation of our justice system. Our whole legal system is predicated on the idea that when you raise your right hand and take an oath, every word out of your mouth will be the truth. No matter what the subject is, and no matter how uncomfortable that truth may make you.
There is a good reason that perjury is a felony. There absolutely must be extreme consequences for lying under oath. To do anything less undermines the very fabric of the legal system. We need to keep this in mind when dealing with our political leaders. We must expect them to be honest, and when they are caught lying we must punish them. If we allow a leader--any leader--to lie in a court of law with impunity, we are saying in effect "It's ok to lie if you are doing it to save yourself embarrassment." And when we do that, we are telling every petty thief, and every child abuser, and every murderer, and every sexual harasser, and every rapist that it is ok for them to lie as well.
President Nixon left office in disgrace because he lied. George Bush lied to the American people when he said 'Read My Lips, No New Taxes' and was voted out of office because of it. Where are we today? I'll tell you where we are, we are at the very verge of allowing a liar to get away with perjury because we are too weak kneed to stand up and call a liar a liar. It's easier for us to make jokes about it, and shove it aside than it is to deal with it.
We as a nation too often lack integrity, which might be described, in a loose and colloquial way, as the courage of one's convictions.
We, the people of the United States, who a little over 200 years ago ordained and established the Constitution, have a serious problem: too many of us nowadays neither mean what we say nor say what we mean. Moreover, we hardly expect anybody else to mean what they say either.
- Stephen L. Carter in Integrity. Christianity Today, Vol. 40, no. 12.
Do we find our pants on fire today? Are we guilty of lying? I think perhaps we are, but there is hope. We can gain victory over the great deceiver if we but try. We must learn the truth, and tell it. Before we open our mouths, we must first decide if it is true, then decide whether we should tell it or not. We must teach our children to tell the truth. We must tell the truth. Jesus is the Truth, the Way, and the Life. Are we living the Truth? People watch what we do more than they listen to what we say.
A deacon sent in his apologies for the Sunday morning service, claiming that he was ill with flu. One of the members, however, said he had seen the deacon on his way to a ball game.
After the service, the minister went to visit the deacon, "Brother," he said, "I have information that you were not sick at all this morning, but went to watch a ball game."
The deacon protested: "That's a vicious lie! And I'll show you my FISH to prove it!"
Do we have the fish to prove it? Let's take the time to commit to God today a new life. A life unencumbered by deceit. Will you change today?
copyright 1998 by Rev. Charles S. Mims