10 Keys To Successful Living
9 – Speak The Truth
Ex 20.16

What is the first line of the Ten Commandments? …

I was at a preaching conference for pastors just over a week ago and the speaker asked that question of a room full of pastors. Someone called out “You shall have no other gods before me” and the speaker said “no.” The room fell silent. Clearly, everybody there (about 100 pastors) thought that the Ten Commandments started with a command. Finally someone called out, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.^”

Throughout this series I have been saying that the Ten Commandments are not laws that we have to observe in order to keep God off our backs. Rather they are descriptions of how people will live their lives when they are in relationship with God. God is the one who took the initiative in reaching out and saving the Israelites, just as he is the one who takes the initiative in reaching out and drawing us to himself. The commandments are a way of shaping our response to our saviour.

I keep harping on at this because, as that experience at the pastors’ conference showed, it isn’t something that comes easily to us. Even a room full of pastors got the question wrong, because it’s so easy to slip into the idea that God initiates his relationship with us on the basis of a bunch of laws that we have to keep. In fact, he comes to us in grace to save us, before he seeks to shape us into his likeness.

How do we speak?

I’m starting off here this morning because, of all the commandments, the ninth commandment is the one that looks most like it belongs in a legal document. Ex 20.16 says, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” Now, that statement sounds like it belongs in a courtroom. And the language is, in fact, the language of the courtroom.

Since I became pastor here at Wentworth, I have spent more time in courtrooms than I ever did in the rest of my life put together. In fact, until a couple of years ago, I had never set foot inside a courtroom. But, since coming to Wentworth, I have been in family court and criminal court a number of times.

(Let me hasten to add that in each case I was there accompanying someone else who had to appear before the court!)

For those of you whose only experience of court, like mine until recently, was from television, let me assure you, it isn’t nearly as exciting as it’s made out to be. You spend most of your time waiting, and waiting, and waiting. And the court session itself, when it finally gets started, is hardly scintillating. It’s all talk. None of the theatrics that you get on TV, at least not in my limited experience. It’s all talk.

And that’s what this commandment is about; it’s about talking. It’s about our speech. What do we say? Why do we say it? How do we say it?

What do we say?

“What do we say?” would seem to be the easiest question to answer.

The word translated as “testimony” has in it the idea of repeating something, which is precisely what a witness does in a court case. The witness is asked questions about what happened and they tell their story. In fact they usually tell their story a number of times; to a police officer, to a lawyer, to the court. And one of the practical reasons for having the witness tell their story a number of times is to make sure that it’s always the same story; to make sure it isn’t “false testimony.” That word translated “false” also means “lying, deceiving, or fraudulent.” False testimony is a story that isn’t true to what actually happened.  

When I was growing up in Scotland, if my mother thought I was lying about something, she would ask me, “Are you telling stories?” The reality is that we all tell stories, all the time. Some are true, some aren’t. Which ones are lies?

It’s quite possible to say things that aren’t true and still not be lying. And I’m not even talking about the kind of made up stories that we pay to hear, the stories in books or movies or TV shows. It’s perfectly possible to tell untrue things about real people and events and not be lying.

You see, the essence of a lie is the intent to deceive. If we say or do something that is intended to deceive another person, then we’re lying. That rules out unintentionally telling someone something that isn’t true—when we give misinformation, misspeak, or give outdated information. We do this all the time. We tell someone something that is true to the best of our knowledge, but we find out later that it wasn’t true. What do we say to them? “I’m sorry, but I lied to you.” No; we were mistaken, but since there was no intent to deceive, it’s not really a lie. The essence of a lie is in the intent to deceive.

Why do we say it?

But this command goes beyond just the intent to deceive. It says, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.”  It isn’t just about telling the truth in some kind of abstract way, as if our speech exists in a vacuum. It’s also about not harming other people.

One of the recurring issues I have had to deal with as a pastor in this neighbourhood is the question of who to believe. My experience has been that one of the main ways that people deal with conflict with one another is by spreading lies about each other. The number of time I’ve been told that so-and-so is dealing crack, or something similar, when the real issue is that the person talking to me is mad at them and wants to turn me against them and hurt them. So I’ve come to a position that when someone tells me something about themselves I believe them, unless I have evidence to the contrary. If they tell me something about someone else I hold that information very lightly, because my experience has been that the majority of the time when people tell me something about someone else, it has been false testimony.

But those people who have lied to me about their neighbours are aware of something that we often forget. That lying destroys relationships. Matt talked about this last week, and I talked about it the week before; the fact that a number of these commandments are intended to make us into people who are trustworthy; people who keep their promises, people who respect other people’s property, and people who can be trusted to tell the truth.

Lying destroys relationships by destroying the trust that they need to survive. We even have proverbs and fables about it. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” That proverb recognises that when someone lies to us we tend to draw back from believing them the second time. The story of the boy who cried wolf is another example of the realisation that our words can destroy trust.

[Dr. Laura Schlessinger, in her book on the Ten Commandments, tells of a time she caught her six-year-old son in a lie. She’d given him the standard lecture many times before, so this time she tried something different. She told him that, for one week, he wouldn’t know whether she was lying or telling the truth. Her boy wasn’t very bothered by this prospect, initially. The next day while driving him to school, she told him that she would take him for a treat after school that day. After school while they were driving home, her son reminded her of his promise of a treat. She turned to him and said simply, “I lied.” You can imagine the boy’s reaction—he cried, yelled, and told her that this was “not nice and no fair.”

After two days of sporadic lying, he got the message.]

You simply can’t sustain a relationship in the face of consistent lying, because you never know whether or not to trust what the other person is saying. Lying destroys relationships.

But that doesn’t mean that we always have to tell all the truth that we know. People often hurt others with insensitive and callous remarks. And when they are called on it, they say, “I didn’t lie, I just told them the truth. There was nothing untrue in what I said. Sometimes the truth hurts. I can’t help that.”

People love to confuse honesty with rudeness. Just because something is true doesn’t always mean it needs to be said. Someone put it this way, “Honesty means that everything you say must be true, not that everything that is true must be said.” Of course, what is considered rude is different in different cultures. Marilyn and I were married in the Netherlands. While we were away on our honeymoon I grew a moustache. The first time we went to visit my Dutch family, my Dutch mum came to the door and, before she said anything else, said, “Je heb een snor gegroeit. Ik vind het niet leuk.” “You’ve grown a moustache. I don’t like it.” That’s perfectly acceptable in Dutch. It isn’t in English.

“How do you like my outfit?” someone might ask. The truth might be that it is that you think it’s hideous. That’s probably not the best response, even if you’re Dutch. Some people might answer, “It’s beautiful.” That’s a bare-faced lie. “It’s not quite my style,” or “It really doesn’t do anything for me,” might work better.

Sometimes secrets need to be kept, so the whole truth shouldn’t be shared. Sometimes the truth hurts unnecessarily, so it ought to remain unsaid. And sometimes, a truth simply isn’t worth speaking at all. Don’t misunderstand me; we’re not to lie for the sake of convenience, but that doesn’t mean every true fact that enters into our minds needs to be broadcast to everyone.

How do we say it?

But what if the truth needs to be spoken, even if it is hard? What if it’s going to hurt someone?

In John 1.14 Jesus is described this way, The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Those two words “grace and truth” are the New Testament parallels of “love and faithfulness” in the Old Testament. They describe the very core of who God is. Not what he is, all powerful, all present, eternal, all those things, but who he is. They are the words he chose to use when he revealed himself to Moses, The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

For some Christians the most important verse in the Bible is “God is love.” Others choose to focus on texts like Jesus’ statement that he is “the way, the truth, and the life.” The first type has a tendency to be soft on sin, always extending more grace, never wanting to hurt anybody. The second type errs in the other direction, only too ready to point out to where people (often including themselves) fall short of God’s standards. If we are going to be true to God’s character we need to be both; committed to speaking the truth, and committed to doing it in a way that causes no more pain than is absolutely necessary.

It’s not always easy to say the true thing

That’s not always easy. Admittedly, most of the time it’s relatively straight forward to apply this commandment. We can ask ourselves those three questions:

“Is what I’m saying true?” If it isn’t true, then we shouldn’t be saying it.

“Is it my intent to do this person harm?” Even if it is true, is it my intention to help this person or hurt them? Does it need to be said?

If it is true and it does need to be said, then the question is, “How can I say it in a way that does least injury to this person?”

Most of the time, those three questions will serve us well. But sometimes it’s a little more complicated. Here’s a little case study.

When I worked in Pakistan my visa said various things at different times. At one time I was a project manager. At another time I was a student. At another time I was an Information Technology Consultant. I did do all those things, but they weren’t the whole story. They left out the huge chunk of my time that was devoted to helping the young Afghan church establish itself. I used to struggle with whether I was lying by leaving that information out of my applications, knowing full well that if I put it in I would never get a visa.

And that question wasn’t just related to information about myself. If an Afghan asked me if another Afghan was a Christian, what was I supposed to say? If they were a Christian and I said “no,” then I was lying. If I said “yes,” it would get them into a lot of trouble; perhaps even cost them their life. Was my clear conscience worth the price of their life?

I remember going to ask my friend about this. He was the Resident Agent in Charge for the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Peshawar. He was a Christian, and he had worked undercover, so I figured he would know something about the challenges of making value decisions about deceiving people.

I was doing a computer contract for the DEA at the time, designing a database to track drug seizures along the Afghan border (part of living up to my visa) so I dropped into his office and started asking him about this question. I hadn’t even finished the question when he interrupted me and suggested that we go somewhere else and have coffee. As he was saying this he got up from his seat, picked up a small square of paper, put it down on his glass topped desk in front of me and wrote, “This is not a good place to be discussing this.”

I felt like I had just stepped into a spy movie. It turned out that they swept the office for bugs at the beginning of every week and removed them all. By the end of the week they were all back again. Both the Pakistani Government and the drug dealers were bugging his office. (Some of the people in government were drug dealers.) Nobody trusted anybody else. A graphic example of what happens when everybody lies to everybody else.

In the end, I decided it was OK to deceive people who were asking too many questions about my Afghan brothers. Why did I decide to lie to them? Because, in this case, grace outweighed truth. My obligation to safeguard their lives trumped my obligation to tell the truth. Truth is not just some abstract idea out there, it’s a living choice in the midst of a relationship with real people.

The command says, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” The intent is to safeguard people from malicious accusations, to safeguard their reputation. Most of the time that means telling the truth. It means defending other people, even your enemies, when someone says something about them that you know to be untrue. It might be easier to remain silent and let the accusation stand, but we can’t do that and remain true to what God calls us to in this passage of scripture.

Sometimes not giving false testimony means not saying anything at all, because if you were to say something, even if it were true, it would only make a bad situation worse and perhaps hurt people more.

Very rarely, usually when it involves someone else’s life, it may be permissible to lie.

By the way, I did eventually come up with a response to my dilemma in Pakistan. I decided that I would not lie to save my own skin, but I also would not tell the truth if it meant putting one of my brothers or sisters at risk. I then prayed fervently that I would never have to make those decisions with a gun to my head (or any other part of my anatomy for that matter.) God was gracious and I never did have to face that question.

Hopefully you’ll never have to face that kind of dilemma. But we all face this question on a daily basis as we interact with those around us. Will our words be words of truth that build others up, or will they be words that tear others down? By God’s grace, let us be people of truth.