SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/8/2019
10:23 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “From Lying to Speaking the Truth”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ephesians
4:25
Message
of the verses: “Therefore, laying
aside falsehood, speak truth, each one of you, with his neighbor, for we are
members of one another.”
I mentioned that we want to talk
about Christians for a bit in this SD, and Christians should have no part of
any kind of lying, for they are to be characterized by “laying aside falsehood,”
and the reason for this is that falsehood is incompatible with the believer’s
new nature and unacceptable to his new Lord Jesus Christ. John MacArthur writes “Apotithemi, from which laying aside is derived has to do with
discarding, stripping off, casting away, and the like. It is the word Luke used of the Jewish leaders
in Jerusalem who, as they were stoning Stephen, ‘laid aside their robes at the
feet of a young man named Saul’ (Acts 7:58).
They laid aside their outer garments so they could more freely do their
wicked work. The Christians lays ‘aside
falsehood’ so he can be free to do the righteous work of the Lord.”
Let us look at Zechariah 8:16 “’These are the things which you should do: speak the truth
to one another; judge with truth and judgment for peace in your gates.” These seem to be the words that Paul is
quoting here in verse 25. What Paul is
doing is going from the negative prohibition on to the positive command as he
writes “speak truth, each one of you, with his neighbors.” MacArthur adds “Christ is Himself ‘the way,
and the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6); the Holy Spirit is ‘the Spirit of
truth’ (v. 17); and God’s Word is truth (17:17). When a person becomes a believer he steps out
of the domain of ‘falsehood’ into the domain of ‘truth,’ and every form of
lying therefore is utterly inconsistent with his new self.”
We should
realize that telling the truth is not necessarily telling everything that we
know. Truthfulness is not in conflict
with keeping a confidence of other things that are legitimate secrets. We as believers should always tell the truth,
and should not purposely withhold information in order to deceive and mislead,
for that is a form of lying.
Truthfulness does not demand our telling everything we know with no
regard for its impact, and neither does it demand that we unburden all our ill
feelings, doubts, and hatreds on the ones that we dislike—in the kind of pseudo-honesty that is promoted by
Freudian psychology and other such philosophies. MacArthur writes “Our concern as Christians should
be for God to deal with our wrong feelings and remove them, not to wantonly
express them in some inept attempt at self-justification or in the misguided
expectation that simply expressing them will somehow make them go away or will
mend relationships they have caused to be broken. To readily admit as Paul did
that we are not prefect or free of sin (Rom. 7:15-25; Phil. 4:12-14; etc.) is
one thing; to broadcast detailed accounts of our sin is quite another.”
I wish to
quote from my commentary on Ephesians written by Warren Wiersbe as he writes
concerning lying that is from verse 25. “A
lie is a statement that is contrary to fact, spoken with the intent to
deceive. If I tell you it is noon, and
then discover that my watch is wrong, I did not tell a cover that my watch is
wrong, I did not tell a lie. But if I
gave you the wrong time so you would be late to a meeting and I would benefit
from it, that would be a lie. Satan is a
liar (John 8:44); and he wants us to believe that God is a liar. ‘Yea, hath God said?’ (Gen. 3:1). Whenever we speak truth, the Spirit of God
works, but whenever we tell a lie, Satan goes to work. We like to believe that we help people by
lying to them, but such is not the case.
We may not see the sad consequences immediately, but ultimately they
will come. ‘Ye know that no lie is of
the truth’ (1 John 2:21). Hell is
prepared for ‘whosoever loveth and maketh a lie’ (Rev. 22:15). This does not mean that anybody who ever told
a lie will go to hell, but rather that those whose lives are controlled by lies—they
love lies and they make lies—are lost forever.
The Christian’s life is controlled by truth.
“Note the
reason Paul gave for telling the truth:
We belong to each other in Christ.
He urged us to build the body in love (Eph. 4:16) and he urged us to
build the body in truth. ‘Speaking the
truth in love’ (Eph. 4:15). As ‘members
one of another’ we affect each other, and we cannot build each other apart from
truth. The first sin that was judged in
the early church was the sin of lying (Acts. 5:1-11).”
John
MacArthur concludes this section with the following: “The church cannot function properly if its ‘members’
shade the truth with ‘one another’ or fail to work together honestly and
lovingly. We cannot effectively minister
to each other or with each other if we do not speak ‘the truth in love’ (Eph.
4:15), especially among our fellow believers.”
I hope
that these last two SD’s on the subject of lying have been helpful to everyone
who has read, or will read them.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: I have always had a sensitive conscience
since I have become a believer, and so if I sometimes stretch the truth a bit
then my conscience will let me know that perhaps I lied. That is not ever my desire to do that.
My
Steps of Faith for Today: “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone
among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to
think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of
faith” (Rom. 12:3).
Today’s quotation comes from Thomas Carlyle: “Silence is the element in which great things
fashion themselves.”
5/8/2019 11:07 AM
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