We're here to look together at the ninth commandment, which of course is found in Exodus chapter 20 and verse 16, which is you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not lie or to put it positively, be honest, live a life of total integrity. And there are three areas I want to focus on this morning as we seek to understand together the significance of the ninth commandment. Those three things are these. The meaning of the commandment itself. The importance of the commandment. Why this commandment? For the ethic of God's people. So the meaning, the importance, but then also the cultivation of the commandment in our daily lives. So the meaning, the importance, and the cultivation. First, the meaning. There's no doubt that the context in which this commandment was first given in Exodus was primarily connected to the legal process of administering justice. It's about establishing guilt or innocence. Therefore, it's primarily talking about those spheres in which people find themselves giving testimony or bearing witness, the courtroom setting. That's made more obvious to us actually in Exodus chapter 23 verses 1 through 9 when a fuller exposition of the law is given and a fuller exposition of the ninth commandment is given to us. So the commandment primarily forbids perjury, giving false testimony within the context and proceedings of a law court. And what is amazing or what it's aiming to protect is actually the sanctity of truth in the sphere of justice, and therefore the liberty of the individual in society. Because if the law is not based on truth, then the very foundation of life and liberty are undermined. It's why when we're in court, we're asked to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In other words, do not break the ninth commandment. And every time you go to a legal proceeding within a court, that is what is required of you. But if that's the narrower and the primary meaning of the commandment, there's no doubt equally that it has a deeper and wider meaning affecting the whole of life and all of our relationships. It's this commandment which establishes the principle of truthfulness and truth-telling in every context and every relationship. The reason it's primarily applied to the legal system is that society depends on the fact that we will tell the truth. And if people fail to do it, then society begins to crumble and the possibility of liberty becomes decidedly less likely. But what this commandment is insisting upon is that the whole of life and all relationships depend upon integrity as the binding agent that will keep them together. What we're really talking about with this commandment is integrity. And where integrity disappears in all kinds of relationships, these relationships begin to crumble. I mean, all you have to do about it, a lot of you are in business. Just think about if you tried to do business with someone who perpetually and habitually lies and seeks to deceive. It just makes common sense. You won't do business with that person for very long. It affects the political sphere, the professional sphere. But it's not somehow something that's just out there and we can see the effects of it in governments who lie to each other and lie to their people or in big business and professionals that seem to just kind of take that on. It's ubiquitous. They lie to one another all the time. But this commandment comes all the way into the grassroots, all the way into our hearts. Not just the political, not just the professional, but the personal, sphere as well. So this commandment forbids the common vulgar lie, but it also forbids all forms of untruthful speech, which twists the truth so as to obscure it. And in every area of life, God's people are to be known as a people whose integrity is unquestioned. Do you know what the word integrity means? Integrity comes from the word integer. An integer means intact or whole. An integer is a whole number. It means you're not fractioned. It means you're the same person on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, as you are on Sunday. It means you're the same person in one group as you are in another group. Integrity, you're a whole person. You're not fractured. You don't play faces. You're not a hypocrite. And that is what the ninth commandment is after in you and me. How are you with integrity? Are you the same person every day and in every group? In the New Testament, one of the primary evidences of putting off the old man and putting on the new, which Paul talks about in Ephesians four and he talks about it in Colossians three as well. One of the greatest evidences of putting off the old man and putting on the new is that we put off lying and begin telling the truth. That's what Paul says in Ephesians chapter four in verse 25. He says, put off falsehood. Let each one of you speak the truth to his neighbor. Now listen, that has implication and application in all areas of life. It applies in all sorts of ways. It applies to flattering speech, you know, speech that we might say is polite, a polite lie, or a harmless lie, which really comes from an insincere heart without integrity. It'd be saying something like this, oh Sue, you haven't changed a bit these hundred years. Or to say, you know what, I would really love to come, we would just love to be at your party, but we're going to be out of town. Knowing full well you have no plans to be out of town that weekend of that party, but now you have to go make plans because you said you were out of town. A polite lie. A harmless lie. We can lie by exaggeration. You know, the classic, the fish was this big. You know, it was huge, you should have seen it. We can lie by constantly engaging in word inflation. Everything is great. It's amazing. It's inspirational. What a blessing. You know, and we just sort of exaggerate. Now, some of you are gonna say, listen, that's harmless, isn't it? I mean, that's not really a bad lie. It's not really an evil lie, is it? But really, there's no such thing as a harmless lie. If it were harmless, it wouldn't be forbidden. I'm gonna try to adjust this just a little bit. There's no such thing as a harmless lie. Is that all? If I don't say anything, it won't feed back. This device detects when you tell a lie. Well, I was going to say, are you lying to me? Turn it off. It also includes the joking lie. What happens with harmless and polite lies is that it creates cynicism. We don't believe what anybody's saying. If everything is always inspirational and such a blessing and so great and so amazing, or are they really going to be out of town? Or they just don't want to come to my party. You see, there's no such thing as a harmless lie. But the commandment even goes deeper and applies to benevolent lies as well. Lies that you might tell to protect a loved one who has a substance abuse problem. Or it might include a benevolent lie like, you remember Watergate? All the lies to all the little people because they simply wouldn't understand? It includes those kinds of lies as well, they just wouldn't understand so I can't really tell them the truth. It includes lying by way of silence. One person put it this way. You have Mr. A, Mr. B, and Mr. C. We know that Mr. X didn't rob the bank. We go to Mr. A. Mr. A, did Mr. X rob the bank? Yes, Mr. X robbed the bank. Mr. B, did Mr. X rob the bank? Well, I did see him that night at the scene of the crime. Mr. C, did Mr. X rob the bank? I don't want to say anything. You see? Who lied? How many? All three. It includes lies of silence as well. But it also includes malicious speech, slanderous speech, or gossip which twists the truth in order to be hurtful to another, to push them down or steal their reputation, discussing in detail someone's faults, their decisions, their mistakes, their shortcomings. We can lie by shading the truth, This year, we experienced a seasonal downturn, when in actuality, the business received serious loss. We can lie by judging someone too quickly or too rashly. You know, this happens when we treat people as a one-dimensional character. You know what? They lied to me once. They're a liar. They just become this flat person. But if someone says to you, hey, do you ever lie? Well, it's complicated. You instantly become kind of this 3D character. Well, there were extenuating circumstances, you know? Or we can lie by subtraction, by detracting from the truth, telling less than the truth. Or we can be technically accurate. We like that one, don't we? Well, I'm technically accurate. I put all of the pieces of the truth there, but still there was an intention to deceive. And really that's what's at the heart of the ninth commandment, I believe. The intention to deceive. The whole biblical principle is that lying is an assault and an affront on your neighbor. When you lie, even to people out of love, you demean them. You make them dependent on you. You treat them like children. When you lie, you're holding someone else hostage to your dreams, to your desires, to your hopes, to your plans, to the future you want. You're holding them hostage because what you're doing is not giving them the truth, but giving them what you want them to know so that the outcome will be in your favor. And that's not allowing someone to be free. That's holding them under the thumb of your desires and your wants and your hopes and your dreams and your plans. Lies create anxiety, fear, isolation, hiding. Don't lie. Be honest. An honest person represents reality accurately. So I think you can begin to see the meaning of the ninth commandment. But let's look at why it's so important in the lives of God's people. Honesty is hard to find, isn't it? I mean, to be quite honest and quite frank, we can take dishonesty better than we can say adultery. or murder, or stealing. It goes down easier. I was reminded of the Mark Twain story in which he writes this, when I was a boy I was walking along a street when I happened to spot a cart full of watermelons. I was fond of watermelons. So I sneaked up quietly and snitched one. I ran to a nearby alley and sank my teeth into it, but no sooner had I done so, however, when a strange feeling came over me. And without a moment's hesitation, I walked back to the cart and replaced the melon and stole a ripe one instead. You see what I mean? It goes down easier. Not only does it go down easier, but we devour it. when it comes from other people. Are you like that? Proverbs puts it this way, slanderers words are like a tasty pastry. They slide down easily to the inner recesses of the heart. Do you like to hear gossip about other people? Do you like to hear it and kind of dwell on it? That's what the writer of Proverbs is getting at there. But when you study the scriptures, you can quickly see that God's not comfortable with it. He doesn't find it tasty. That's not the way he looks at it and wants to deal with it. In his eyes, it is one of the most important things. In Proverbs 6, it gives a list of seven things that God hates, and three of them are about lying and deception. Says this in chapter 6 in verse 16, six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him, haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans. And that contains the whole idea of falsehood, doesn't it? Feet that make haste to run to evil, A false witness who breathes out lies. A man who sows discord among his brothers. And the commentators think that this has to do with deceiving and spreading rumors. A lying tongue God hates. Why? I think there are at least two reasons. And it begins with the nature of who God is. the nature of who God is. At the beginning of Titus, Paul speaks about God and his promises and said, God who cannot lie, who never lies, promises. Lying would be such a contradiction to the nature and character of God that he is incapable of it. He's a God of truth. And think about it for a second. This is the first way in which we encounter God, isn't it? This is the first way, actually, that we have to come to understand who God is. Because to come to Him and to trust Him, you have to already trust that what He's telling you is the truth. His word is His bond. His yes is His yes, and His no is His no. Every promise and threat, God absolutely fulfills. He never speaks an idle word. And that's the essence. of God's character. In Revelation, his name is the faithful and the true. In Isaiah 65, 16, he's described as the God of truth, the God of amen. You know that word amen in the Old Testament? It's the Old Testament word for truth. It means it is true. True, he is the amen. And Jesus says, amen, amen, I say to you, I tell you the truth. The essence of the character of God in the face of Jesus Christ is that he is the amen, the faithful, the true, the God who cannot lie. So doesn't it stand to reason, therefore, If that is what God is like, as he comes into our hearts by his spirit of truth to recreate us, that he would make men and women who lie into men and women who tell the truth, whose integrity will be in question. So if we say that we know God and live in communion with him, but live as habitual liars, or without integrity, then there's something fundamentally contradictory in us. But there's another reason that God hates it, not just because of his own nature, but because of the nature of sin as well. If God's nature is that he is a speaker of truth, then the essence and the nature of the devil, his essential nature, is that he is a liar from the beginning. And if you think back to how sin entered into the world, how the world now is in the whole mess that it's in, is because of the devil and his lie, the way in which he deceived Eve. The quintessential sin began with the lie of the devil saying, God cannot be good to you if he's withholding something from you. And if you take it, you will not surely die. Will you? You see, just a lie. Just a little bit of deception. And the whole world is set afire with lies. And Eve believed it. And so the world is under the lie And that lie compounds itself and there's dishonesty in all its forms which appear in society and life gradually decays because of it. The world disintegrates and society suffers because of an absence of truth and an increase in dishonesty. There's so much verbal inflation and counterfeit, isn't there? It's just all over the place. It's inside the church, it's outside the church, it's at the highest levels, it's in the grassroots levels of our hearts. It's why we need so many methods to verify what we're saying. It's why we have to sign our name to so many things. Everything has to be documented with invoices and receipts, licenses, custom officials, speed checks, tax inspectors. It's all proof that we need a network of supervision because we compromise the truth very easily. Apparently, we're not inherently trustworthy. That might come as a surprise to some of you, but that's what the Bible's telling us. We aren't inherently trustworthy. Integrity, however, is the binding characteristic of Christian behavior. And what ought to happen is that the grace of God should make it evident that we are men and women of our word. You know, there's this very interesting place in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, listen, do not swear by your own head or by the city. God created your head, he owns the city. Do not swear by those things, don't swear by heaven, don't swear by earth, but let your yes be yes and your no be no. I think a lot of Christians have actually misunderstood that and therefore they're led in their own minds not to take an oath or a vow. We're not here to talk about that, but I think that actually misses the point. This is what Jesus is saying. Some people believe that when you're under oath, when you've taken a vow, then you really do need to tell the truth. But when you're not, it's up for grabs. Jesus says, you're always under oath as a Christian. Don't you realize that? There is no point in your life, no moment, no second when you are not under oath before God. The psalmist in Psalm 15 and 16, when he's talking about an honest man and what that looks like, he says about that honest man that that man has set God ever before him. In other words, you've heard this illustration before. Imagine tomorrow there's a camera that follows you around and records every single word that you say. Not only your words, but your thoughts. And on Tuesday, it's broadcast to the entire world. That's kind of what it's like to have God ever before you. To realize that every word ought to be as if you're under oath. Do you life that way? Is that the way in which you see yourself always under oath? If you do, you realize there's no level of truthfulness, that every time you say, yes, I'll do this or that, you do it. Every time you say yes or no, that's an oath. Now let me just take a sidestep here and talk to my generation. For those of you in the back, that's Generation X, if you can't see. I'm 39 years old, I'm kind of on the front wave of that. We, and I can say we, because it's my generation, we hate commitment. Because if we commit to something, we're saying everything else is out of bounds. And we come from the generation that likes to have lots of channels on TV to choose from. We like to go in the grocery store and have not just one or two options, but 50 options. And so we get like a deer in headlights, and we stop. And we think, well, I couldn't choose that, because if I choose that, that negates everything else. You know? Or to put it more seriously, we don't like to commit ourselves to something, because then we have to say that is true. But listen. Commit yourself. Don't say, yeah, I'll go to the party on Friday, in the back of your mind thinking, unless something else better comes along. Let your yes be your yes and your no be a no. Join the church. Commit to your spouse. Stop floating around in our generation. Be a man or a woman of your word. Let your yes be your yes and your no be your no. Well, there's the meaning of the commandment and the importance of the commandment. But how in the world do you cultivate this commandment in your daily life? Do not lie, be honest, live a life of total integrity. But how do you live like that? How do you cultivate that? I'm not the first person to trace this out, but think about the way in which we teach our children to be honest. Think about how I teach my three-year-old Olivia, who's almost four. She'll be four in November. How do I teach her to be honest? I could ratchet up the fear and say, listen, I want to teach you the abstract moral principle of being honest. Do not lie. Nobody likes a liar. You'll be caught. Your teacher will catch you. The police will catch you. God will get you. And we can ratchet up the fear. Or I could ratchet up the pride. Be honest. Liv, you've got to be honest. Nobody likes a liar. You're better than that. Have more self-respect. You see? And we can manipulate guilt, fear, pride, and we can just ratchet it up until we get nice little boys and girls who on the outside have pretty good outward moral behavior. But what's really needed and is an inner supernatural heart change that's brought not by ratcheting up guilt and fear, but driven by the gospel. Think about the way we lie, or why we lie, rather. Interestingly enough, we lie because of fear and because of pride. We use fear and pride to kind of wrench people into moral behavior, but we are driven to lie because of fear and pride in our hearts. We're afraid to be found out. We're afraid that the future might not end up being what we want it to be. We're afraid that our reputation may not be intact if we tell the truth. Did you finish the TPC reports? No. Well, Yes, I did finish the TPC reports. Then you've got to run back to your office and finish the TPC reports because you don't want to be found out as somebody who didn't finish the TPC reports and then your reputation in the office is completely ruined. You see? And so we lie to protect ourselves, to keep ourselves intact because we're afraid of the truth. But we also lie out of pride. We want something and we'll lie to others to get it, which is what we're doing there in that situation, putting ourselves first, making ourselves first, driven by our own desires, our own pride, our own arrogance, really. But here's what Jesus Christ came to do. Jesus Christ came to not manipulate fear and pride, but actually to decimate it, to totally get rid of it, to totally destroy it. Don't you realize that you are so bad, so dishonest in the core of your heart that Jesus Christ had to die for you? Doesn't that humble you? Doesn't that and shouldn't that completely decimate your pride and your arrogance? That you were so bad that Jesus Christ had to die for you. You're in that much need of this. He had to do it. But not just our pride, he takes care of our fear too. Because in the gospel, you are so loved by Jesus Christ that he was willing to do it. You are so loved by him that he gladly laid down his life for you. And if that is true, why are you so afraid of what other people think of you? Why are you so concerned about your reputation? If you have the love and the gaze of your heavenly father, why are you so concerned about what other people think of you? Why are you afraid of being found out? God's grace in the gospel, you heard this, I know, many times from your former head pastor. And I know that you probably hear it from the other pastors around here too. But the gospel of God's grace is this, that in yourself you are more sinful than you could ever imagine. But in Jesus Christ, you are more loved and cared for than you could ever dare hope. Isn't there a joy in that? Don't you see the beauty in that? When you realize the grace of God, what he had to do for you and what he was willing to do for you, it simultaneously humbles you and it lifts you up. It takes our pride and our fear and it decimates them both. And you know what? Out of that grace flows a response. I want to be like him. I want to follow him. I'm sure somebody has said this along the way before commandment nine, but you realize how the commandments start? I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, grace. And out of the soil of that grace comes the ethic of who God is and who we ought to be. And out of what God has done for us through Jesus Christ ought to flow the response of I want to follow him. the one who is the way, the truth, and the life, and we follow him all the way to the Father. Jesus says, know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you for your grace in the gospel, your grace in Jesus Christ, that His grace, your grace through Him is greater than all of our sin. Thank you and work within us by your spirit a desire to follow after you, to be men and women who do not lie but who are honest, men and women who live a life of total integrity because you are our God and Father. You are the God of truth, and we want to be like you. Help us in this, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen.