Exodus: The Truth About Lying

Morning.

Morning.

How are y'all?

Doing well?

Good.

Good.

You're awake.

Good to see you.

Glad you're here.

So we've been going through the book of Exodus.

If you've been with us, if you've been with us the last few months, that's what we've been doing.

And so in the book of Exodus, eventually you get to this list of rules, these Ten Commandments.

So we've been going through the Ten Commandments.

And what we've been saying, if you've been with us, you remember, but I'll review it, is that these commandments guide us, they guide our society, they give us boundaries, they give us guardrails of what our society should look like.

They give us a it's a guide for what our behavior should look like.

And at the same time, they guide us, they crush us, don't they?

They absolutely crush us.

And that's what we'll be seeing with each commandment.

Is uh you can even go into it thinking uh you think you got a handle on this one, and by the end of really diving into it, you realize you don't.

And it crushes me and it crushes you, and because it does that, it then does the next thing, and that is it points us, it sends us on.

That we can't use law.

So that's what the Ten Commandments are is law.

It's uh a standard of what is right.

So we can't use law, any law, a standard of what is right morally, or maybe even a standard or a law in the world, a standard of what you should be or you want to be.

Um and using that as a as a life philosophy is going to be a life of exhaustion.

Um, but letting it send you on to go, okay, it crushes me.

I need something outside of myself, I need the grace of God to be the place in which I am rooted and rested.

There, there you can have life.

So we get to Exodus 20, verse 16.

Exodus 20:16

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

Don't lie.

Right?

Pretty clear command.

Uh just don't lie.

And it's just so easy to think about this and go, you know, Bernie Madoff, Mark McGuire, Wall Street guys, politicians, just don't lie.

If you just didn't lie, if you just told us the truth, everything would be easier.

It would be so much better.

But this is also for us.

It's also for you, it's also for me.

Um this is what is good and right, this is the way we should guide our speech, our families, our relationships, our work life.

Uh when we don't, things break down.

And yet lies are all around us, aren't they?

Uh we see them in magazines, we see them in movies, we read them, we hear them, we tell them, we receive them, we speak them to each other, we speak them to ourselves, they're everywhere.

So it's not, it's not just it's not just that horrible world out there, and if we could only kind of wall up, like wall off from all of them and like secular world, and then we would be okay.

No, we would just lie to each other is what we would do.

And even doing that would be a lie of some sort.

So to lie is to deceive someone, to purposefully mislead someone down a false path.

And there isn't such thing as truth.

Like, like my truth uh can't be uh your falsehood, and your truth can't be my falsehood.

Even to say that that would be uh a true way of life or is a truth statement which is objective, which is self-defeating, I'll let you go chew on that later.

That's not the point of this sermon.

But there is a such thing as truth, so there is a such thing as a lie, something that's just not true.

And so I was studying this this week and just kind of getting into lying, kind of like the psychology of lying and how it works out in our lives.

Um, it really started to uh cut deeply because as you get into it, um what you see is it's not just how horrible other people are, you just, it's a sobering view of yourself.

Um and so there's gonna be some sobering uh some sobering views of ourselves this morning.

I got some good research to look at, I got some good quotes for us to look at, all of it to expand our thinking on lying, which I think eventually after you're crushed, and I'll make sure I crush you thoroughly here for a little bit, after I crush you thoroughly, there will be relief because hopefully we'll be honest about the fact that we are on an ongoing basis lying to ourselves and to other people on some level.

And that would be good.

To get to a place of honesty about it would be good because then we could do something about it.

I have four points.

If you're a note taker or you like organization, there's four points to work our way through this.

The first is this lying is incredibly convenient.

I mean, it's just sometimes it's just so convenient to keep kind of the social situation moving, just to keep it moving a little bit, right?

I mean, just to just to make it not awkward, just for it not to slow down.

I was in a conversation with a friend, and this was probably a month ago, and it stuck out so much because I lied so thoroughly in this conversation, as he was talking to me, and he was assuming he assumed I knew about something that was going on with some other friends, and I had no idea what he was talking about.

I think he saw it on my face a little bit, and he said, Well, you you knew about that, right?

And I sort of like I just felt like I should know about it, and if I didn't know about it, like that I was sort of being left out on some level, and I just oh yeah, I know what you're talking about, you know, and like it was just so convenient just to keep the social situation moving.

But it's wrong.

Now, what's really perplexing about this, and this will really perplex us, and this is hard to wrestle through, is that sometimes a lie is a recommended way forward.

Right?

I mean, we get into the scriptures in Joshua 8.

I mean, God actually commands deception.

In Exodus 1, we already read that at the beginning.

We looked at the beginning of the book of Exodus, and in the Hebrew midwives, they lie to Pharaoh.

And it actually says that they lied to Pharaoh out of fear of God.

Now, this isn't the norm, and I don't pretend to be God to consider when we can lie and when we can't, but on some level, this is kind of interesting that there's an advisable lie.

You're like, oh my gosh, I don't even know how to place that.

Now, theologian Charles Hodge said this: like, if you go out of town and you're like putting timers or you're like turning your light on, certain lights on, you're trying to deceive robbers.

Do you understand that?

That that's what you're that's what you're doing.

You are deceiving robbers when you do that.

Like, especially if you're using the timer.

I mean, you are really going at like I was thinking about this, like I used to do the timer thing.

I I even did when we lived in Grant Park, um, like I talked about last week, you know, we had a little bit more theft there.

And so I even had a radio I'd put on a timer.

I had the radio on the timer, I had some lights on timers.

I mean, we were really lying to the robbers as much as possible.

And Charles Hobb, theologian, he said that was an advisable lie.

So there are advisable lies, that's kind of perplexing.

Um, and if you have a problem with that, then I'm kind of wondering uh how you, as maybe a parent or maybe somebody who communicates with children, um, how you do around Christmas time.

I'm also wondering if your wife gets cancer and she asks you if she's still beautiful.

And you your definition of beautiful is pretty expansive, and and you can you're thinking yes, like like you are a beautiful person, but she you know she's not asking you that.

She's asking like if if her body's still beautiful, and you say yes.

Or like, what if you're a doctor and and somebody's in the last month of their life, and you know it's gonna be just horrific for this family, the amount of pain, and you say, We're gonna get through this and we're gonna make it, and it's not gonna be that bad.

I'm pretty sure I was lied to several times this week when I got some waffle fries and a chicken sandwich from um a girl, and there's a counter, and I bought it, and then she said to me, I said, Thank you, and she said, My pleasure.

And I'm going, no, I'm pretty sure you want to be at home watching Netflix.

I'm pretty sure, pretty sure this is not your pleasure, handing this over and saying that statement for the hundredth time today.

Pretty sure that is a lie.

So you can lie in more than one way, right?

It has something to do with the good of the other person, has something to do with the situation, but here's the thing it's still a lie, and it's still wrong.

And it still has an effect.

And it's still really tricky because we have the ability to lie to ourselves, so it's a little bit of this like gateway drug on some level.

Now, Robert Feldman, uh, he's a professor and interim, interim dean at the University of Massachusetts.

He wrote this book called The Liar in Your Life.

And so he comments on all these social white lies that we just do all the time.

Um, you know, like, no, I'd love to stay.

It's closing time, I'd love to stay and help you out.

I don't want to go home.

It's five o'clock.

I don't want to.

Oh, thanks for asking.

Your screaming child doesn't bother me at all.

Not at all.

Love it.

Sounds beautiful.

So, in an interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation, we get this quote from him about these little white lies.

He says this the little white lies do matter.

So, this is a researcher on lying and deception.

The little white lies do matter.

In part, it's because these lies can very easily lead to other lies and bigger lies.

And the other thing is, it leads to a kind of lack of authenticity in our everyday life.

We don't really know where we stand.

We don't really ever get a good sense of who we are and what our strengths and weaknesses are as people if people are constantly not telling us the truth.

So lying is just really convenient, but it's still a lie and it still has effects.

Number two, lying makes us feel powerful.

So Poe Bronson, he writes about the work of Dr.

Nancy Darling.

She's at Penn State.

Another reason there's all these researchers on lying out there, you never know it until you get into it.

And so Dr.

Darling works at Penn State, and in a New York magazine article, Learning to Lie, she talks about all her research shows how much we start to lie about age two.

Age three is when we begin in on this.

Like if you have a two-year-old or a three-year-old, it's not cute, by the way.

It's lying, is what it is.

And they know, they do know what they're doing.

Because they're doing it to avoid punishment or they're doing it to gain reward.

It's still the same thing that we do now.

And we and we lie to feel more powerful than somebody else.

We can create a false reality and feel more powerful than somebody else.

And I'm watching this work itself out with my girls, preschool and elementary school age, and then at the same time, I'm watching this play out like these stories and what how how they're interacting, and and how you know every once in a while we catch something, and or something with friendships on the playground, and you're watching this and you're like, this is like I I haven't really improved that much in 25 years.

Like, I'm still doing this on some level.

I am personally still doing this on some level.

Right?

It it it's it still goes on, whether it's in the playground or classroom or the boardroom or the gym or in your family or your spouse or a friend or an acquaintance.

It it's it can be it can be like how the fish just gets a little bit bigger each time you tell the story.

Right?

You just embellish a little bit.

If we jump back to Professor Feldman, his research shows that we're more likely to lie, this is very interesting, we're more likely to lie online than in person.

See, because online is we have this great liberty for identity formation and curation with the least amount of friction.

And this is really sad because this is what it means.

It means if we're left to ourselves, to the easiest scenario, we will lie to make ourselves look better.

And we will lie to m to feel better about ourselves.

And that's point number three is we lie because we want to impress someone.

So another researcher out of Cornell University, Jeffrey Hancock, he found out that we lie a lot, but we don't lie at the same rate.

So um depending on the medium, uh we lie differently.

So uh so phone, I am, email, Facebook, all these different avenues, uh i the there's a change in the amount of deception occurs relative to the face-to-face interaction or relative to uh if it's um if it's like recorded.

Like email we don't like to lie over email, it turns out.

We we don't like to lie face to face.

So we don't like to lie anywhere where it's possible we get caught.

Now we will lie a lot more frequently over the phone and on IM or text.

We just feel like we can get away with it.

See, we are so insecure, we use lying to shore up our inner sense of inadequacy when we think we can get away with it.

We lie we lie to appear put together and competent, we lie to be likable or maintain an image.

Dr.

Feldman says this, the second quote, which is in your handout.

If we consider self-presentation as a creative process, we can see how it can easily slide into deception.

Every interaction involves decisions about which attributes to emphasize and which to minimize, which impulses to follow and which to ignore.

So we're all doing this all the time.

At some point, we may not be choosing among our actual traits and our sincere reactions.

We may simply fabricate the traits and reactions to the social situation calls for, or that we think it calls for.

In other words, we might lie.

I mean, this is the Eden story, right?

Beginning of Genesis.

Adam and Eve don't eat of the tree in the middle of the garden, and they eat of the tree in the middle of the garden, and God comes back into the garden, and what is their reaction?

Is to deceive him.

They hide.

He finds them, right?

Which is the great beginning for us to see grace toward us.

He finds them, and what do they do?

They they lie.

They lie.

And they've discovered this power of creating a false reality, even though it's in front of the very one who knows all realities and that they're already lying.

Years ago, I was I was skiing.

Me and a group of friends, we had we had ended up in a in a house, and I don't even know who owned the house as a friend of a friend, and we ended up getting some bunk beds in this house down in the basement, but it was a free place to stay, and so we were skiing there, and uh one afternoon we were skiing and it was mid-afternoon, and I was tired, it was probably 2 30 or 3, and it was at the top of the mountain, and I just wanted to get down, I was done for the day, and uh a big snowstorm came through.

Uh and it wasn't like horrible, you're gonna die or anything like that, but it was it was enough where I my you know visibility was maybe six feet out or so, and um and you know if you just skied down through you're gonna get through it because I was up high, you're gonna get through it, you're gonna be fine, and you know, there's no drop-offs, nothing dangerous here.

But you had to get through it, but but you I couldn't tell the difference between the ground and like where the ground ended and the sky began.

And I'm I have a real fragile system going on with my eyes and my brain.

I got nauseous right away that I couldn't tell the difference between this, and it was like the inability of my eyes and my brain to distinguish the difference between what was real and what was false was literally making me sick as I move forward through it.

This is that's our experience.

When you can't distinguish between what is true and what is false, it literally makes you sick.

It literally creates in you a narrative and a lens of seeing yourself and the world and other people that is incredibly, incredibly nauseating and sick and difficult.

And this leads us to point number four.

And that's that lies are not just words.

Lies are stories we take into our existence.

When I was young, I know you won't believe this, but I was incredibly scrawny.

Hard to believe.

Uh and I I heard I just I heard all the jokes.

You know, and some people were mean with them, uh, and and some people thought older people thought they were being endearing.

And it wasn't endearing.

It was it was hurtful.

You know, we're gonna put some meat on your bones.

I mean, I heard all of it.

If you turn sideways, you're gonna disappear, you know, and I heard the names, I heard all of it.

And so I learned to cope, and how I learned to cope was if you hit me once, I'm gonna hit you about five times.

And so I'm gonna be ready at any point.

You know, verbally, I will be ready at any point.

I will take you down, and you will feel ashamed that you ever came near me.

And I got very, very good at that.

I became very funny because of that.

And then, as well, if you were gonna doubt my abilities, I was gonna make sure that that was never challenged.

And so if we ever step foot on a basketball court, I was gonna make sure that I could take care of you, and if we step foot into a classroom, I was gonna make sure I could take care of you as well.

And all of this, it was it sort of created this lie inside of me, which was creating a narrative, and that was this, and it's still something I struggle with today.

And it's that I'm okay as long as I achieve the next thing.

And those people, those people that said those things, they will affirm me.

And see, a process forms, doesn't it?

You know this.

I don't know what lie you've heard or what you're hearing, but a process forms.

And I put it in the handout so you could see it.

A lie is taken in, a false narrative to live with is accepted, and a toxic, a toxic perspective to see yourself and people and the world is formed.

This is this is how lies work.

This is how they embed themselves.

They're not just words, they're stories that we begin to exist with.

Uh I read this this week uh in a Brene Brown book, Rising Strong Social Scientist, my my favorite social scientist, apparently.

She's quite popular right now.

Here's a great uh paragraph from her about lying to ourselves.

She calls it conspiracy thinking.

Conspiracy thinking is all about fear-based self-protection and our intolerance for uncertainty.

When we depend on self-protecting narratives often enough, they become our default stories.

And we must not forget that storytelling is a powerful integration tool.

We start weaving these hidden false stories into our lives, and they eventually distort who we are and how we relate to others.

When unconscious storytelling becomes our default, we often keep tripping over the same issue, staying down when we fall, and having different versions of the same problems in our relationships.

We've got the story on repeat.

See, the lie is toxic, it creates a false story, a false narrative, and it creates a false lens of which you see yourself, you see your spouse, you see your friend, you see your children, you see your neighbor, you see your co-workers.

And then out of that you'll lie.

You see that?

You say you believe a lie, and out of believing a lie, you will tell a lie.

Isn't that what happened in the garden?

Isn't that interesting?

Right?

Eve is told a lie, she acts on that lie, and then out of that she goes and begins to lie.

And like I said, I don't know what lie you hear, right?

I mean, there's it can be a million different versions.

It can be that you just didn't end up as beautiful as you thought you were gonna be.

Or you're not as beautiful as you once were, or you're just not as successful as you thought you were gonna be, or you should be more successful than you actually are.

You should be over that mistake by now, or that grief by now.

Or maybe you're like me, and it's just that lie that you just need something else.

At the Golden Globes this year, Jim Carrey was it was announced.

Uh he was welcomed out, and they they said, uh two-time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey.

And apparently that just sort of hit him funny because he walks out and he kind of ad-libs his speech.

And it was something like, you know, I am two-time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey.

When I wake up in the morning, I am two-time Golden Globe winner of Jim Carrey.

When I have lunch, I'm two-time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey.

When I go to sleep at night, I am two-time Golden Globe.

He kind of goes on and on.

And one day, my greatest dream of all is that someday I might be three time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey.

Then I will I will receive everything that I thought I needed and I will discover it's not enough.

And like everybody, it's something like that.

I just kind of Ran on there, but everybody, you know, died laughing because what does everybody know?

That is completely true.

That it's a lie to think that we have to get another trophy and that that next trophy will do it is a lie that creates a narrative, that creates a perspective, and out of that we will go and lie as well.

So, what this means is it means that we we have to constantly sort through truth and falsehood.

And so I think it just sort of looks like this because like our lives are just filled with thoughts.

So we're receiving a thought, we're reading a magazine, a book, we're watching a show, we're in a conversation, somebody says something, a parent says something to us, we hear something at work, or we're just we're talking, we you know, the person who talks to you the most is yourself, or you're just talking to yourself.

And so there's all these thoughts, and you're constantly having to go, falsehood, truth, falsehood, falsehood, truth, falsehood.

Truth, truth, falsehood, truth.

And you go through your day, don't you?

That that that's that's it's the practice of sorting, it's the practice of discernment.

And it's incredibly tiring.

I mean, how tiring is that?

I mean, it's incredibly, but it's all tiring.

It's tiring to not do that.

To not do that, and to just sort of arbitrarily receive the information taking in, and then receiving some wise as truth, and letting it create a narrative and letting it create a lens, that's incredibly exhausting to your life.

It's all tiring.

At least the practice of sorting, the practice of discernment, at least that, and going to the scriptures and wise friends and asking the Spirit to reveal stuff to you, at least that is a good tiring.

At least that is putting you toward the way of truth.

So a better process can be formed, and this is in your handout, that truth is taken in.

Or a lie is called out, which leads to a life-giving narrative to live with, which is accepted, which leads to a healthy perspective to see yourself, people, and the world that is formed.

Now, we're not good at telling the truth.

I mean, that's what all this has been about.

That we're just not good at not lying.

And when we lie, what it shows us is it shows us that we still really believe that the law can make us happy, that the law can make us right with God, that living up to a particular set of moral standards or living up to a certain set of standards of this world, if only I can get here, if only I can get there, if only I can get that, then I'll be okay, then everything will be alright with God, then everything will be okay with myself, then everything's gonna be okay.

And it's the way of the law versus the way of God's grace to us to say, I'm not perfect.

I do hide, I do lie, and that the way forward is not gonna be me living up perfectly to all of this.

It's me admitting that I fall short of this, and I need help.

I need outside help.

We need help to know what is true and what is not.

I mean, we need to go to the Lord constantly in this process of sorting and discernment.

Yeah, I grew up in a culture where it's talking constantly about, you know, have your quiet time every day, have your quiet time every day.

And in some regard, that created a certain legalism within me, but but there's there's a really good thing to that, and it's called this.

Are you constantly putting truth into your life?

Right?

Are you letting the scriptures speak to you?

You're letting truth speak to you.

And that we're letting that get into us and we're resting in that.

So we need help.

We need help.

We need help to know what is true.

We also need help being righteous because we're not good at not lying.

And it's not going to come from our effort because the more we even try to not lie and try to be good ourselves, and in itself is its own kind of form of lying and living up to the law that you think you can do and you can't.

And the law shows us we need a righteousness and security from outside of us.

It points us.

This is how, do you see, do you see how this points us to our need?

All of this?

The fact that we're lying at age two, the fact that we're still lying, and I've been a Christian for 25 years, I'm still lying.

That I can't get myself any better.

I need an outside source of righteousness.

And this points us to Jesus, that He is the perfect truth teller.

Not just my example, but my substitute.

And He is the truth that we need for our lives, that we are provided for, accepted and loved.

See, we need something more than this law or performance-oriented practice.

We need something more so we can be honest about the lies we do tell ourselves, the lies we do believe, the lies that we do live within.

And in this unconditional love, there's nothing more for you to do but for you to rest in what God did for you, and out of that comes great relief and transformation.

So, my brothers and sisters, may you find yourself needing to lie less in order to feel in control or impressive or powerful.

May you learn the great secret.

You already have everything you need.

So be free in the grace of God, allow the truth to shine into the darkest places in your heart, and breathe deeply of his great love for you.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that you put up with us, and that you have great grace and mercy to us, and that you are so patient toward us as we are so apt to believe things that are not true, to create stories for our lives that are not true, and then to go and lie, to be powerful, to be convenient, to impress someone, to justify ourselves before you, or to feel justified, or to be justified in front of somebody else, when the truth is we already have everything we need.

That we could find contentment and rest in your son's work for us.

Would you help us?

Would you help us with that?

It would change everything for us.

Would you help us to go deeper into that great news and that great reality?

That He is the great truth teller and the truth for our lives.

God, we welcome your light to shine deeply into our hearts as there's lies that we tell ourselves, that are creating these lies that we tell somebody else.

But would you help go into the root, into the heart?

And as we feel the pain, would you help us to speak these lies, to write these, to tell someone, to process them so that we can call out the lie and live in a narrative that is laced with your grace, and that we might see ourselves as you see us and live in a way that you see us and see others in this world.

We pray this is all in Jesus' name.

Amen.