Tự Do Của Sự Thật—Phần 2: Mười Điều Răn

We’re looking, for a series of weeks, at the Ten Commandments, and we’re at the ninth commandment. We choose a different passage somewhere from the Scripture that expounds or relates to the commandment. The commandment we’re looking at this week is, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Even though you can break all of the other commandments with words … you can kill with words, you can commit adultery with words, you can steal with words … this is the one commandment that actually takes and addresses the whole subject of speech and words. Let’s take a look at what this particular passage, James 3:1–12, says about the tongue.

1 Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. 2 We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check. 3 When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. 4 Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go.

5 Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. 6 The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. 7 All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, 8 but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

9 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. 10 Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be. 11 Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? 12 My brothers, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.

This is God’s Word

There are three things the passage tells us about, and we’re going to address them all. It talks about the power of the tongue, the abuse of it, and the healing of it. When we use the word tongue we’re talking about words, so in the same sense we’re going to be talking about the power of words, the abuse of words, and the healing of our words.

1. The power (or the importance) of the tongue

The very first verse is an interesting approach. The way James is making his case is he starts with a case study. He says, “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” Then he moves on.

It’s pretty clear his purpose is not to make me, or people like me, want to quit. It’s a case study as a way of trying to get across a principle. The principle basically is that words count. God sits in judgment over our words. Therefore, the more words, the more evaluation is being done by God, the closer God is looking at you.

We can go off onto another side road about the particular and peculiar dangers of being a person who’s a professional speaker, a professional talker, and especially a Christian teacher or talker, but that’s not James’ point; otherwise, he would have gone into it more. What he’s trying to get across is the same fact Jesus Christ gets across in Matthew 12:36, where he says, “I tell you, on judgment day you will have to account for every idle word.”

The whole idea behind why teachers should be careful is God judges words. The more words, the more judgment. But he’s not trying to just say only teachers have to shudder here, even though I shuddered for you all. The whole idea is that words count. Words have consequences. Words will be judged strictly. “I tell you,” says Jesus, “on judgment day you will have to account for every idle word.” Proverbs 18:21 says, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.”

Let’s keep moving here, but just to point out, James himself mentions the reason for this. The reason for the power and importance of the tongue he mentions down here in verse 9. “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness [or image].”

One of the beauties of the Ten Commandments is that all of the commandments that have to do with our relationships with each other, our relationships from human being to human being, all have to do with certain essential elements God created us with when he made us in his image, or likeness. One of the most important teachings of the Bible is that human beings are different than rocks, animals, or machines. We’re mini-models of God.

Our natures were built on the same blueprint, or structure, as God. We have personality and rationality. We have creativity. We have eternity in us. Therefore, in many ways, we have a peculiar dignity as being in the image of God. Every one of the final commandments … the last commandments have to do with our relationships, person to person … has to do with some essential element of what makes us human.

The great thing about the Ten Commandments is they’re not at all negative, though they’re couched in negative ways. Instead, they tell us these are things God has put into human beings, and to trample on them, to violate these rules, is to violate the humanity of your neighbor and treat that person as an animal, as a rock, as a machine, as an object, instead of a subject.

We’ve been looking at this. We said stealing takes away property, and God invented us to have things and take care of things. Impurity tramples on sex, and the Bible tells us sexuality is a very important part of what God made us. We are sexual beings in that we need closure, we need oneness, and so on. We’re not supposed to abuse or kill or even say abusive things to each other because we are trampling upon the humanity and the dignity of people in the image of God.

It’s the same thing when we come to this. He actually goes so far as to say that speech, words, is absolutely critical to what makes us human. Maybe dolphins can say a few things. They can be trained to say “Pa” and “Ma.” Have you ever seen that movie with George C. Scott? Parrots can be trained to say things, but by and large, the idea is that speech, the ability to make words and the ability to hear words, is intrinsic to what makes us human; therefore, the abuse of words actually tramples on people. We’re going to see how this works.

Lies dehumanize. Lies demean. Lies treat people as objects, as children, as things. What does a lie do? We’re not moralists. We don’t say, “You shouldn’t lie because it’s impractical.” Christians don’t say, “You shouldn’t lie because that’s just the way we’re brought up. In our family we were always taught not to lie.” We don’t say, “Don’t lie because Marines don’t lie, because gentlemen don’t lie.” We don’t talk like that. We say lying tramples on something God has put into us, a greatness, a dignity.

That’s why he says, “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness.” So what we actually do is trample. Let’s take a look and see how that happens. We’ll see as we abuse with lies and abuse words, we trample on people. Just for a moment, think about the power of the tongue. He goes so far as to tell us that the tongue is so powerful because it can set the world on fire and because it steers your entire being. What he’s saying is something pretty surprising. He’s telling us that words have power not only over the hearers but also over the speaker. Let’s take a look at that.

First of all, he shows us the power of the tongue rests in the fact that words have power over the one speaking. Most of us know (and we will certainly get to it) words can harm the people listening, but do you know the first thing, the first and primary violation you do when you lie or when you use abusive words is against you? Take a look here. For example, it says, “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go.”

What is it talking about? He says, “Take a look at the ship. Here’s a huge ship.” He’s thinking, obviously, of great wooden boats. He says, “It’s made of acres of wood, and yet there’s only one little piece of wood, the rudder, that is so strategically placed it completely directs where everything else goes.” Then he goes and says, “Likewise the tongue. If you can harness the tongue, you harness yourself.”

What he’s trying to say is very critical. First of all, there’s a general rule here. The general rule is in the short run when you sin … Let’s just talk about this in the general before we get into the particular. When you sin, in the short run, you hurt people and you hurt God more. In the long run, you hurt yourself the most. The law of God is not busywork. The law of God is not like the homework my eighth-grade algebra teacher used to give us. She used to say, “Do all this,” and we’d say, “Why?” and she’d say, “It’ll keep you busy, keep you off the street, keep you out of your mother’s hair. I have kids too.” We hated that, and we hated her for it. It’s just busywork. You didn’t need it.

The law of God is not arbitrary. The law of God is based on how we’re made. It’s based on how God designed humanity. When you move against the law of God, you move against yourself. When you trample on the law of God, you’re trampling on yourself. James is saying, “When you misuse the tongue, you abuse yourself. The tongue has tremendous power over you.” What does it mean? How could that be? If you use the tongue abusively, you dehumanize you. In what ways is that possible?

First of all, I think he’s very clearly saying in verse 2, “If you keep your words in check, you can keep your body in check.” What he’s trying to say is the tongue has a tremendous amount of power over your character. Think about this for a second. I’m going to have to thread the needle here, because it’d be very easy to be misunderstood. Your words mold character. I’ll put it this way. Just as you get out of bed in the morning and you’re semi- or virtually naked you have to put on clothes if you’re going to go out and do your work, in the same way, your thoughts need to be clothed in words to do their work.

When you take an angry thought, a bitter thought, and clothe it in words, it has a new power over you. If you take a fearful thought and clothe it in words, it has a new power over you. If you sit around saying, “I’m stupid; I’m an idiot; I don’t deserve to live,” what you’ve done is taken your thoughts, which had a certain amount of power, and now you’ve given them tremendous power. What you say with your words takes on a reality. Your words take on a being of their own.

Now, you may think what I’m saying is, “Therefore, if you have any negative thoughts, never say anything.” No. What James is pointing out is you really work stuff out, you work your life out, not so much through thinking but through talking. In the right environment, you do need to say, “I’m bitter.” You need to say it. Why? The Bible talks about a very, very important way of self-organization and self-cleansing and self-realization and self-authentication. It’s called confession.

The word confession literally means to say the same thing as God. Homologeo is the Greek word for confession. Logos is the word for logic or word. To say the same thing as God. There is nothing worse for me if I am bitter than not to admit it to myself, not to say anything about it. Instead, in the right place … at the Lord’s Supper, with a good counselor, with a good friend … to sit down and to talk out … We call it “talking out a problem.” As you talk it out, you’re clothing those words, so they become visible. Not just to the person who’s listening but to you.

Haven’t you noticed how different things are when you have to say them? Because they take on a reality. Then you can sort through that reality. It’s very important to be able to say, “I am bitter,” to say it out loud. Sometimes as soon as you say it to somebody else, immediately those thoughts now have some body and you can do something about them. You and your friend can look at it and say, “Is that right or is that a lie?” But sometimes not until you say it out loud can you organize yourself.

Pure ventilation, uncritical ventilation, just pouring all of your thoughts into words … Those words have a reality, and then they drive you. This is the example of the basic principle. As you express something, even though it was originally just a motive, when you put it into expression through words or through behavior it takes on a reality of its own, and then it can actually drive those thoughts.

C.S. Lewis put it this way. He said first the Nazis killed the Jews because they hated them. Then they hated the Jews because they’d killed them. If you see the movie Schindler’s List … Right away I couldn’t help but think about what he said. He says first they killed them because they hated them, but then the more they killed them, the more they hated them because they’d killed them. You can see the hatred build up. As you give expression to those feelings in words, terrible words, and then eventually in behavior, those thoughts take on a being and they can drive you.

In the very same way, if you just allow yourself to spew out the venom that’s in your heart, if you allow yourself to spew out the bitterness, spew out the despair, spew out the fear, those words begin to take on a being, and they drive you and control you. On the other hand, just to show you the power of the tongue, there are not just bad things in your heart.

Now, to get into the whole idea about good and bad thoughts and why you have so many destructive thoughts in the heart is a whole ‘nother sermon on the nature of sin. We’re not there right now. But I think everybody who’s here can understand and certainly accept this idea. You have all kinds of terrible and destructive thoughts in the heart, and you have good ones. You have worthy, noble, and just thoughts in the heart. Words are just as important there. You take your best sentiments and your best desires and your best thoughts and make them into promises.

When you say things out loud, good things out loud, they have a reality, and it brings it up. You will only comb out and deal with your dark side and bring up and nurture and nourish the divine nature in you, Christians, through words. For example, two little words spoken years ago have helped my wife and me through some very hard times. Do you know what those two little words are? “I do.” Nineteen years ago … “I do.” (Or maybe it was “I will.” It depended on the church form.)

At the moment you get married, you look at each other and say, “I feel in myself a desire to be faithful. I feel in myself a desire to be honest, to cherish this person at all times, regardless of my feelings. I have selfishness in me, but I want to overcome that selfishness. I have pride in me, but I want to overcome that pride. I want to be faithful to this person.” So what do you do? You take that feeling and put it into words. The power of the tongue. If you can control the tongue, you can control the heart.

Therefore, you have to be so careful about what you say. You have to be careful when you are talking, when you are expressing those parts of your heart and thoughts that are so dark, that you’re doing it under controlled conditions, where you’re giving those thoughts a kind of visibility and a reality in such a condition that you can see them for what they are, that you’re in a situation where, like Ulysses, you’re tied to the mast so when the Sirens begin to howl it’s a controlled situation and you’re not going to dash your boat against the rocks.

As a wonderful result of learning to take the tongue and say what is true and good and turn them into promises and to watch what you say, to watch the feelings inside you that want to abuse, the feelings inside of you that want to lie, the feelings inside of you that want to deceive, the feelings inside of you that want to despair … Watch your tongue. The tongue is so powerful because it has a tremendous power over you.

Of course, it also has a terrible power over the people around you. It has a terrible power to wound and destroy. It’s a terrible thing that children have gotten ahold of this terrible nursery poem. “Sticks and stones …” Let me tell you what the poem should say. It’s absolutely and completely unbiblical and totally wrong, psychologically and theologically. It’s wrong in every way. “Sticks and stones can only break my bones, but words can pollute and distort and destroy my very soul.” It doesn’t rhyme.

One of the things that is so ironic is that children say that. Do you not still remember abusive words, unkind words, cruel words that were said to you as children by adults and by children? You’ve never been able to forget them. They’ve sunk into you. They’ve become part of you. “Sticks and stones can only break my bones, but words can kill my soul, pollute me.” Proverbs 12:18 says, “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” Words penetrate. Words can destroy morale. Words can destroy everything. But words also can heal. They have a tremendous power for good.

2. How words can be abused

There’s an awful lot that can be said about this. I’m going to start by giving you a real overview to show you a balance, but then I’m going to spend time, because we’re on the ninth commandment, just on one side of the airplane. The airplane of what the Bible says about words (the two wings, both of which are absolutely critical) is you must speak the truth in love, Ephesians 4:15. Untruthful words, or unloving words, either of them set the tongue on fire from hell and can set the whole world on fire around you. That’s what it’s saying. Untruthful or unloving.

By the way, that’s not just New Testament. That’s in the ninth commandment. It says, “Don’t bear false witness against thy neighbor.” On the one hand it says, “Bear true witness. Tell the truth. Represent reality as it really is.” On the other hand, the whole purpose of the truth is to be for your neighbor. The ninth commandment is saying you must tell the truth, but the whole purpose of the truth, the whole purpose of your words, is to be for your neighbor.

Therefore, even though I’m going to spend the next five or ten minutes here talking about what it means to be untruthful, I just want you to know there is a kind of truthfulness that is absolutely repugnant to God, because God is true but God is love. Let me tell you to what lengths, to what depths God would go to be both loving and truthful. Do you know what lengths? Do you know what depths? The cross.

I say it with reverence. God is an omnipotent God. As a result, creating the world was no problem for him. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. He just said it. It happened in a moment. God said, “Let there be this.” God said, “Let there be that.” God did not ever say, “Let there be forgiveness of sins.” He couldn’t snap his fingers on that one. Do you know why? Because truth and love were in a certain kind of tension there unless he did something pretty radical.

God is a God of truth, and the truth is God created us and we owe him everything. We owe it to him to obey him and to love him with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind. It’s only natural. He created us. We’re dependent on him for every dimension of our being. We owe him everything we are. Therefore, because instead we want to be our own masters and nobody has ever come close to acting toward God as we should, in truth he should punish us, but in love he wanted to receive us. So what did he do? On the cross truth and love met.

Let me tell you something. It took centuries to set it up. It took incomprehensible things, like the Father rejecting the Son, the Son experiencing torture and torment on the cross, all to do what? So God would not have to choose between truth and love. I know there are tons of little situations day in and day out in which it seems like we can’t keep them together. God says, “I know it’s hard. Look what I had to do. It was even a challenge for God Almighty to keep truth and love together, but look at the lengths to which I did.”

We’d better try the same thing. We dare not continually abuse people by either speaking truth “lovelessly” or loving people without truth. Whenever you say, “Oh, she would never understand. I couldn’t say that to her. I’ll just let her go along, not realizing how people think about her. Oh, I just couldn’t bear it. She’d be mad at me.” That’s loving without truth. Or else truth without love …

By the way, when you tell people the truth in a loveless, mean, “I just want to get this off the chest” way, they don’t hear it. If you don’t tell the truth in love, they don’t hear it either. In either case they don’t hear it. Truth without love isn’t really truth unless it’s for the neighbor. How difficult it is to find ways of keeping those things together, to say something that’s truthful yet doing it in a loving way, of loving that person yet telling the truth.

Of course it’s hard. It’s just no good to say, “Well I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do it. It’s going to take a lot of thought. I don’t know how to do it. It’s going to take a lot of prayer. It’s scary.” Don’t you think that’s how Jesus felt? Look at to what lengths he went to speak the truth in love to you, to keep them together.

How are you doing with the people around you? Of course it’s going to take more ingenuity. Truth without love and love without truth … A monkey can do that. A computer can do that. Anybody can do that. Are you willing? Truth without love, love without truth … neither really are truth. Both of them break the commandment. Both of them abuse people and trample on their humanity.

How? Let me just give you a little rundown. When the Bible says, “Don’t abuse the tongue, don’t bear false witness” … Let me give you six examples of ways in which the Bible tells us (not here in James but all through) we can be untruthful and, therefore, destroy people and trample on their humanity. Let me show you.

A. So-called “harmless lies.” Harmless lies are polite lies, euphemisms, kindly-meant lies. For example, polite lies are things like, “You know, I’d love to go, but I really think I have a commitment that night.” It’s a polite lie. You wouldn’t love to go; you’d hate to go. You don’t even know whether you have a commitment. Kindly-meant lies are Watergate lies. “Ah, the little people … they wouldn’t understand,” or “I just think she’d be destroyed by the truth; I don’t want to tell her.” Or you have euphemisms. “Your writing is too sophisticated for our readers,” when actually it stinks.

Now, let me tell you what the problem is with all of those lies. By the way, I think you can go further on polite lies. Word inflation. There are people who are continually saying, “Everything is wonderful. Everything is the best. Everything is the worst. Everything is a blessing.” Word inflation. After a while you just tune the person out.

These so-called little lies still do exactly what all lies do. The way Joy Davidman put it … Joy Davidman was C.S. Lewis’ wife. She graduated from Hunter College. She was a Jewish lady, raised in the city of New York. She became a Christian, married C.S. Lewis, and wrote a book on the Ten Commandments called Smoke on the Mountain.

In her chapter on lying, she says, “There are the lies of gossip, public and private, which make haters out of us; the lies of advertising and salesmanship, which make money out of us; the lies of politicians, who make power out of us.” Her point is every lie objectifies, demeans, makes a person dependent, tramples on their dignity. Even those little lies make a person dependent. By keeping the truth away, you put them in a dependent posture. You demean them. You treat them like children at best, or worse. You’re trampling on them. Even the little ones. Harmless lies are not so harmless.

B. Any kind of twisting or exaggeration of the truth.

C. Deceptive partial truths. The important thing to understand under these two headings, which go together, is when the Bible talks about untruths and it says, “Don’t bear false witness against your neighbor,” the phrase don’t bear false witness is a word that literally means insincere.

What makes untruthfulness untruthfulness is deception. Not the factual accuracy or inaccuracy of the words you say but your intention to deceive and to pull truth away from that person, put them in a dependent condition, trample on their dignity, refuse to let them have the same knowledge you have, refuse to put them on the same standing as you, and refuse to let them be independent, responsible human beings. Twisting, partial truth, exaggeration … all of these things are the same.

Joy Davidman in her little article puts it this way. X, Y, and Z all know Mr. Jones did not rob the bank. The police come and say to X, Y, and Z, “Did Mr. Jones rob the bank?” X says, “Yes, he did.” Y says, “I saw him in the vicinity that night,” which is true. Mr. Z says nothing at all. They have all been untruthful. They’ve all violated the ninth commandment. X said something factually inaccurate, Y said something factually accurate, and Z said nothing at all.

But you’re supposed to bear witness for your neighbor, so Z is wrong. You’re supposed to make sure you’re for your neighbor. The deception, whether by silence or by partial truth or by factual inaccuracy, by twisting the truth, by exaggerating … All of those things are untruthful because they do the very same thing. They trample on the person. They say, “I am not going to let you know what I know. I am not going to respect your dignity as a human being. I’m going to keep you in a dependent posture. I’m going to isolate you from me and from the community who also knows this.”

D. Prejudice is untruthfulness. Oh yeah. What do you think prejudice is? Prejudice is assuming somebody is the way all those kinds of people are instead of caring enough about the truth to find out what that person is like, what people are like on a case-by-case basis. Prejudice comes from the word prejudge, to judge someone before you know the truth. Prejudice is trampling on the idea of truth. Prejudice is saying, “Don’t blind me with the facts.”

E. Duplicity is also a form of untruthfulness. The word integrity comes from the word integer, which means to be the same one place as another. Duplicity means to be multifaceted instead of to have a wholeness about you, a coherence, so you’re the same with one person as another, the same in one setting as another.

Just to give you a quick example of how duplicity kills business, Tom Peters, who’s a management guru, in one of his books says you have to have total integrity or, in the long run, you’re not going to make it very well in business. This is a terrific example of duplicity. He says, for example, total integrity means being the same in one place as another. So he says be totally dependable. Never make a promise you can’t keep or make a claim you can’t produce on. In other words, be the same one day as another.

Then he goes on and says always over-deliver. Never lie, or virtually lie, to get a contract. Then he says treat everybody evenhandedly. Everybody. Don’t have the Eddie Haskell syndrome. That’s duplicity. What’s the Eddie Haskell syndrome? Remember? With the Beaver, Eddie Haskell was cruel and abusive. “Heh, heh, heh, you snot-faced little kid.” Then suddenly, “Oh, Mrs. Cleaver, what a beautiful dress.”

What’s the matter with you? You never saw Leave it to Beaver? The Eddie Haskell syndrome. What is it? It’s duplicity, and Tom Peters says it’ll destroy you. He gives some examples. Don’t say in public, “Our company is for quality,” but in private you have unreasonable deadlines, so all your employees know you don’t care about quality. Don’t give huge perks for management and leave everybody else out.

Don’t take friends to the company box seats, which everybody knows are only for clients. Don’t tell the public, “Everything is fine, everything is fine,” but the employees know it’s not. Don’t tell salespeople just before the accounting period ends to put in a lot of orders even though you’re going to cancel most of them a week later, because they’re going to look tremendous on the report to the board. There is no such thing, he says, as small lapses of integrity.

It says in Psalm 16 that if you swear to your own hurt and you never take a bribe and you keep all of your promises, a man who does these things will never be shaken. Tom Peters in this book I was reading goes through and gives you all kinds of examples of how your sins, lack of integrity, duplicity, find you out. Duplicity. Not exactly lies, but total lack of integrity.

F. Not keeping your promises. I’m just going to read you one quote. We live in a society that says, “Don’t make promises, or if you do make promises and you find they’re not fulfilling you, break them.” Jeff Greenfield … You know, I like Jeff Greenfield. He’s a news reporter. There was an article in today’s New York Times magazine, and he was part of a forum. He mentioned how when he first heard as a newspaper reporter that Gary Hart was a compulsive adulterer, he decided, “That’s private; that has nothing to do with whether or not he’s a good public servant.” He didn’t want to report on it.

Then some guy called him up from Texas and said, “Excuse me, but to me, a man who stands in church in front of God and lies to the woman he’s going to marry about how he will conduct his marriage, I don’t want that guy in the White House.” Greenfield, incredibly, says, “Well that’s not my standard, but I realize for millions of people compulsive adultery is evidence of a character flaw.”

Do you know what he means? Now this is modern. Joy Davidman in her book points out that ancient people, even the Vikings, even the people who would go and normally pillage and loot and burn villages and rape the women, would be absolutely panic-stricken at the thought of a guy making a public promise and then breaking it. Do you know why? Because, she says, the pagans knew it’s one thing to murder. It’s one thing to rape. It’s another thing to decide you have the right to define reality, that you have the right to make a public promise and then break it.

She says the pagans knew you can’t have a society that way. You can’t have commerce. You can’t have economics. You can’t have relationships. You can’t have anything. You can’t even be thieves if you break your promises to each other. The thieving will never work. She says the old pagans understood that. Jeff Greenfield, as much as I like him (he’s a mighty smart guy and I love his stories), says, “Well that’s not my standard.” In other words, he’s saying, “If a politician lies to me, that’s bad. If he lies to his wife, that’s his business.” There’s no difference.

Lewis Smedes has this tremendous quote about promise-keeping. He says, “When I make a promise, I bear witness that my future with you is not locked into a bionic beam by which I was stuck with the fateful combinations of X’s and Y’s in the hand I was dealt out of my parents’ genetic deck. When I make a promise, I testify that I was not routed along some unalterable itinerary by the psychic conditioning visited on me by my slightly wacky parents.

When I make a promise, I declare that my future with people who depend on me is not predetermined by the mixed-up culture of my tender years … No German shepherd ever promised to be there with me. No home computer ever promised to be a loyal help meet for the contemporary householder. Only a person can make a promise. And when he does, he is most free.”

Here’s what he says. You live in a modern culture that says, “If you make a promise and then it looks like it’s going to be hard, if it’s not fulfilling, break it. Or don’t make any promises.” Don’t you see? Truth-keeping, promise-keeping, is part of our humanity, as we’ve been saying all along. It’s part of the way God made us. Only a person can make a promise.

When you only can do what you feel right now, what your impulses tell you, what your genes tell you, what your glands tell you, in spite of your promises, you have descended to being an animal or a machine, and you’re programmed. In a promise you show yourself to be a human being. In a truth-telling person you show yourself to be a human being, not an animal or a machine. Don’t you see how we need that?

3. How can you heal the tongue?

I know what some people are going to be asking, and I’d better at least say something for one minute. Are there never promises you should ever break? There are stupid promises that, because you made them unwisely, bring you to the position where you’re actually disobeying God or hurting other people. Herod is a great example. He promised something to Salome, “I’ll give you anything you want up to half my kingdom.” She asked for the head of John the Baptist. He said, “Woops.” It was a stupid promise.

When the promise, however, binds you into obeying God and it gets hard, don’t you dare break it. When the promise, you find out, binds you into hurting people or disobeying God in the process, well then there might be … The Bible says, “Beware of rash vows.” Is there never, ever any time you can tell an untruth? Again, the Bible tells us about how Rahab told an untruth to save lives, how the Israelite midwives told an untruth back in Exodus to save lives.

The fact is since truth means to represent reality and since untruth is to misrepresent or deceive, in certain cases the Bible shows us when very evil people come and for you to give them the information they want will not be for your neighbor and it will certainly not be in the interest of truth but rather the information they want is to enable them to continue to distort reality … There are extreme cases in which to tell an untruth to save lives in the face of a very evil person, the Bible seems to commend it.

The Bible is not mechanical. Here’s the great thing about God. Truth is not an abstract thing God knows. Two plus two equals four. It’s not true and then God knows it; it’s true because God knows it. In other words, truth isn’t true and then God knows it, but truth is true because it is something God knows. Jesus doesn’t say, “I know the truth.” He says, “I am the truth.” Therefore, being like God and being like Jesus and obeying the Word of God and not some abstract idea of truth is what we’re after.

Christians care about truth because they live with a God of truth who cannot lie and does not lie. There are those places where I say, “Is there ever any time you shouldn’t keep a promise? Is there any time you need to tell an untruth?” There are some times, and I just mentioned them from the Scripture. I had to say that. Lastly, here’s what you’re going to have to do. If you want to heal the tongue, there are just two things but two very important things.

A. You have to be honest about your dishonesty. Father Brown is a fictional Catholic sleuth, a detective, in G.K. Chesterton’s novels, and he mentions at one point that the reason he’s able to catch all these criminals is because he understands their criminal minds. Somebody says, “How could that be?”

He says, “No man is really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, [the one under his own hat].”

You’ll never become honest unless you’re willing to get honest with yourself about your own sin, about your own flaws, about your own dishonesty, about your own fear of the truth. You twist the truth because God defines reality because he’s God, and if you want to be your own little god, if you want to be your own master, you’re going to have to twist the truth too. That’s why we do it. Dishonesty is inveterate in us, and you have to admit it.

B. We need a word from outside. In spite of what so many of the popular books tell you … They say, “You shouldn’t care about what other people think. You just decide what you want and you do that.” It doesn’t work. For example, if you’re an artist, you don’t paint a picture and say, “I know that’s good. I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I don’t want to even ask anybody. I don’t even want to show it to anybody. I know it’s wonderful.”

You don’t know that’s a good piece of art until a word from the outside comes to validate you. We need words. Words are powerful. We don’t have a self without words. You can say all you want, “All that matters is how I feel about myself.” No. Somebody from the outside has to tell you you’re valuable. Somebody from the outside has to tell you you’re great. Somebody from the outside has to tell you you’re acceptable, or you won’t believe it.

One of the reasons why we lie is because we’re desperately trying to get people to tell us that. That’s why we lie. The Bible tells us God said to his Son, “You are my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased.” The Bible tells us that if we receive him, he loves us even as he loves his own Son because he died for us on the cross. Romans 8:16 tells us it’s the job of the Holy Spirit to come into our hearts repeatedly and bear witness with our own hearts that we are his children.

Until you hear over and over and over in your own heart through prayer, through reading the Word of God, through a variety of ways, unless you hear God saying to you, “You are my beloved child in whom I’m well pleased” … Until you hear a word from the outside that tells you who you are, you’re going to be trying desperately, through all kinds of duplicity and all kinds of deception, to create a self by getting people to tell you how great you are. That’s why you lie.

Underneath it all we know we’re unacceptable until the word from the outside comes. Our words will not be cleansed until we get the word. “This is my beloved child in whom I’m well pleased.” That’ll heal your tongue. It’ll set your tongue on fire with a different kind of fire, the fire that came down at Pentecost, not from hell but from heaven, and immediately transformed the tongues and the words of those men and women. It can do it for you too. Let’s pray.