Man of Honesty

Good Evening,

Tonight we are going to be looking at what it is to be a man of honesty. When you guys first think of being a man of honesty what comes to mind?

Give time to respond.

We as men of God are called to live a life of honesty, we are called to put aside all deceit from us. We see this in 1 Peter

1 Peter 1:22–2:3 “22 Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, 23 since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; 24 for “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, 25 but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you. 1 So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

We see in the verse 22 that our obedience to the truth has a purifying affect on our souls. This implies though that we first must know truth. I will ask the same question that Pilate asked Jesus in John 18:38, “What is truth?”

Listen to answers.

Possible answers: Truth is what matches reality. Truth is that which matches its object. Truth is telling it like it is.

Jesus said in John 14:6 “6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Before we get into any of the philosophical or human answers to what is truth, we have to first understand that Jesus, and by extension every person in the trinity, is truth and the author of all truth. If he is the author of Truth then this book, is more true than anything in the world around us.

How many of us here have had an experience where we and another person experienced something together and came to very different views of what really happened, even contradictory stories of what happened?

I will share a story that kind of illustrates this point. I used to inspect products for quality control for the government, we had product documents we had to read and use for our inspection. Well, one time I was reading one of these documents and looking at a cable and I was not 100% clear which flange it wanted me to measure, we’ll call it flange a or flange b, from. I asked one of the other guys on my team to look at and read it and I told him I thought it was flange a and he disagreed and said it was flange b. We called the engineer, the document author, and had him look at it and he said it was flange b. We thought that was great the document author told us what it was and documented it and we submitted the work. Well this product was then audited by the government inspectors and they asked me why I measured to flange B and I showed them the documentation and they said that was wrong it should have been to flange A.

So who’s truth was true? Well in this instance it was the government auditor, regardless of what the engineer said. I use this example though to illustrate that human experience is not a great indicator of truth.