The Truth About Lying!

 J. Michael Shannon tells about three men discussing the biggest liars they had ever heard. One said, “I know a boy who lied so often he had to get somebody else to call his dog.” The second man complained, “That’s nothing. I knew a man who lied about his golf score so often that one day he made a hole in one and wrote down ‘0’ (zero) on his scorecard.” The third man chimed in, “My preacher said last Sunday that our crowd was somewhere between four and five-hundred. I told him I only counted 125. He insisted, ‘Well, that’s between four and five hundred.’ ” These funny stories illustrate a sad truth – lying is common and acceptable. Groucho Marx once said, “There is one way to find out if a man is honest. Ask him. If he says yes, you know he is crooked.” David said in Psalm 116:11, “I said in my haste, all men are liars.” David admits he was hasty in saying that, and I don’t want to overstate the case. Still, there’s a lot of lying going on. Advertisers, politicians, even preachers sometimes prevaricate (a fancy way to say fabricate, fib,lie)! It is easy to say someone looks nice when they don’t, or tell the preacher you “enjoyed” the sermon when you slept half way through it! Or tell your host the grilled steak was great when it was tough as shoe leather! In "The Day America Told the Truth" (published 1991) author James Patterson, then CEO of J. Walter Patterson (an ad’ agency in New York) related that 91% of those surveyed lied routinely about matters they considered trivial; 36% lied about more important matters; 86% lied regularly to parents, 75% to friends, 73% to siblings, and 69% to spouses. Girls lie to boyfriends and boys lie to girlfriends. Husbands lie to wives and wives to husbands. People lie to the IRS, their employers, and their insurance companies. Witnesses lie to courts, students lie to teachers, and people lie to preachers. All indications are many people have a proclivity to prevaricate! Put more simply, there’s a whole lot of lying going on! And that’s the truth!

Abraham Lincoln famously said: “It is true that you can fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” What can you say about people who are consistently deceitful and dishonest and who make lying a way of life? All you can honestly say is they are liars. Some people lie to be polite, others out of carelessness or to avoid conflict, and some lie out of malice, seeking to create or add to conflict. Some people lie out of habit. The apostle Paul must have been referring to such liars (on the Mediterranean island of Crete) in Titus 1:12 when he wrote, “One of them, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” This passage and the people it describes brings to mind the businessman who complained about a partner: “He’s a real phony – I wouldn’t believe him if he said he was lying.” If  we engage in deceit and lying, we are very unlike the God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and for whom it is impossible to lie (Hebrews 6:18). “The truth is in Jesus” (Ephesians 4:21b) and Jesus’ gospel is “the word of truth” (Ephesians 1:13). Christians are told to“ put away lying ... Let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one another” (Ephesians 5:25). There will be no liars in heaven (Revelation 21:8). There ought not to be any in the church of Christ here on earth. To be like Jesus, Christians simply will not lie to one another (Colossians 3:9). That’s the truth about lying. 

By: Dan Gulley, Smithville TN