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Christian Network

 
 
Liar Liar Pants on Fire
 
Realizing Revival by Following The Rules
 
 

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 
  synonyms LIE, PREVARICATE, EQUIVOCATE, PALTER, FIB mean to tell an untruth. 
  LIE is the blunt term, imputing dishonesty . 
  PREVARICATE softens the bluntness of LIE by implying quibbling or confusing 
  the issue . 
  EQUIVOCATE implies using words having more than one sense so as to seem to say 
  one thing but intend another . PALTER implies making unreliable statements of fact or 
  intention or insincere promises . FIB 
  applies to a telling of a trivial untruth . 



  © 1998 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated
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