Be Truthful

Because the church is not primarily a building or a place, but a people, “being” the church means that we allow our identity in Christ to inform everything we do - outside of 1 - 1.25 hours on a Sunday morning.

Being the church means that everything in our lives changes - how we engage with our family and friends, how we work, how we play, how we engage with other people. Our homes, jobs, and everywhere in between becomes a place for us to live out our identity in Christ in how we speak and behave. We are vehemently against the idea that you can flip your “Christian switch” on for a Sunday morning (and maybe for your small group if you’re really spiritual), and then live however you want for the other approximately 165 hours a week.

Since this is a way of life that we are committed to, being the church, we believe that it is our job as church leadership to lead the way in equipping to live as Spirit-led followers of Christ in the different spaces in your life. Thus, we want to help you to know How to Be the Church, the purpose of this series and the one that proceeded it last year.

Our specific focus this year is…

Living the New Life

As Christians we talk about having a “new life in Christ.” But, as many common things we say as Christians, it might need some explanation. Explanation of not just what it means that we have new life in Christ, but also what it looks like for us to live this new life.

This series is going to look at what it means for us to live this new life together.

We are going to use Ephesians 4-5 as our framework for the series.

First half: a celebration of the goodness, wonder, and beauty of the Gospel - that God displayed his mercy and love toward us, making us alive in Christ by grace as a gift to us that we did not and could never deserve.

Second half: how we should live in light of that good, wonderful, beautiful Gospel.

Chapter 4 signifies a shift in Paul’s writing. He goes from a beautiful description of the Gospel to giving practical exhortation of how believers should live according to this gift of God. How the Gospel should flow through them individually and corporately to magnify the name of Christ and draw others to him.

This is not our verse for today, but let’s read part of chapter 4 in order to see how Paul is setting up the second half of Ephesians, where we’re going to hang out in our series.

Ephesians 4:17–24 (CSB)

Therefore, I say this and testify in the Lord: You should no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thoughts. They are darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them and because of the hardness of their hearts. They became callous and gave themselves over to promiscuity for the practice of every kind of impurity with a desire for more and more.

But that is not how you came to know Christ, assuming you heard about him and were taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus, to take off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, the one created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth.

Hopefully you picked up on the title of our series as we read that together. “Put on the new self” or the “new life.”

Paul is saying, because of all that Christ has done for us, because you have literally been transformed, this is how we should behave. This is how the Gospel works itself out in our lives: Walk in manner worthy of your calling (4:1) in contrast with the Gentiles (unbelievers [4:17, 5:8, 15])

So we understand that are to be the church together as a community of people living the new life together. And our series for the next few weeks is going to be focused on what living that new life together looks like. In other words, what does it look like to be a new creation doing new creation things?

As we look at this series of exhortations from Paul in Ephesians 4-5, we are going to start with talking about truth. The title for this first part of the series is:

Be Truthful

Ephesians 4:25 (CSB)

Therefore, putting away lying, speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, because we are members of one another.

Truth is not something that our current culture seems to care about very much.

We know our culture doesn’t accept the idea of absolute truth. Truths that it seems like should be “self-evident” are being challenged constantly. Truth has taken a distant second place to trying to win cultural arguments by validating how we and others feel about certain topics rather than rooting our opinions and beliefs in absolute truth. And you each have someone, or a group of people, in mind when I make that statement. “Yeah, they do that!” But what I don’t think we understand is that we are all tempted to sacrifice truth when it suits our agenda - whether its our own personal agenda or an agenda we’ve affiliated ourselves with.

We have to remember that Paul is directly writing to a church here in Ephesians, and he is explicitly laying out for them how they should behave and how they should engage with each other - in contrast to how the unbelieving world around them is living. He is trying to show them how they need to live this new life in Christ together. And in Ephesians 4:25 Paul is saying that…

Living the New Life means we have to Be Truthful with one another.

A lot of the teaching in Ephesians 4-5 is formatted in a similar way, and you’ll see that in most cases as we go through our series. It’s a helpful framework for us to be able to unpack what Paul is saying:

Negative Command: “don’t do this”

Positive Command: “do this instead”

Theological Rationale: “this is why”

Here in verse 25, the negative command that Paul gives is to “put away lying,” the positive command is to “speak the truth,” and the theological rationale, or the reason, is “because we are members of one another.”

So, let’s go through this framework and really dig in to what it means to live the new life by being truthful with one another.

Paul first says that we must…

I. Negative Command: “Put Away Lying”

You may have quotes around part of this verse, or it may be bold in your Bible, and that’s because Paul is quoting from the OT, specifically…

Zechariah 8:16–17 CSB

These are the things you must do: Speak truth to one another; make true and sound decisions within your city gates. Do not plot evil in your hearts against your neighbor, and do not love perjury, for I hate all this”—this is the Lord’s declaration.

It’s no coincidence that Paul kicks off this section describing the new life by talking about lying.

Putting away lies is foundational for living the Christian life. It’s essential for living the Christian life. And, it is essential for living life in community with other Christians. It’s essential for “being the church.”

We can cognitively understand that lying is bad and telling the truth is good. But we can allow our culture’s cavalier attitude toward the truth to start infecting us, making it difficult for us “put away lying.” After all, what’s a little white lie here and there? An exaggeration, embellishment, not being completely honest about one thing or another?

You may also know that the Bible takes lying seriously. You shouldn’t do it. But I’m not sure we really stop and think about how seriously the Bible takes lying, and thus how important it is that we would “put away lying.”

Some brief examples…

Jesus when talking to the Pharisees:

John 8:44–45 CSB

You are of your father the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.

Paul in Romans discussing the hardheartedness of those who are far from God…

Romans 1:25 CSB

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen.

Back at the very beginning, how did sin enter the world? Through a lie…

Genesis 3:1 (CSB)

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?”

Do you hear that lie? That perversion of God’s truth?

Some of you may understand the problematic nature of lying at least one some level, but the Bible ratchets up the issue of lying to a level that we may sometimes be hesitant to consider.

When you lie, you are walking in Satan’s footsteps.

There is a deep, spiritual evil in lying. Satan, Jesus says, is the father of lies. Satan tempted Eve with a lie. Lying is destructive. Lying leads to death.

Truth is real, it’s “reality.”

On a cosmological level, lies, falsehood, deceit, all of that threaten to tear at the very fabric of the reality that God created. Lying is perversion, aberrance, it’s un-reality. A lie takes what God has said to be true and real and says - no, what God has said is real isn’t actually real. So God hates lying. It’s an abomination to him. Satan himself is the father of lies, and God is the God of truth. Lying is against God’s very nature, his being and essence.

This is why Christians need to “put away lying.”

Christians can’t lie to one another. Christian community has to be knit together with truth, not lies. Lying to one another will destroy the community and the members of it.

Let’s apply this to you, to us as a community.

Outright lying to each other we know to be wrong. Most of us are probably on the same page about that. Our lies are more subtle, nuanced, easier to defend. We might omit things, color some facts, exaggerate or downplay. All of this comes down to just not being honest with one another.

In the church as a community we have the ability to share our struggles and burdens with each other, so that God can use us to pursue healing and spiritual growth. But - we can’t do that unless we “put away lying.” Think about it: if we can’t be honest here where can we be honest? You can’t find help and healing if you are lying to the community about your struggles. It also isn’t anyone else’s fault if you are not willing to open up and ask for help.

Some of you lie by never putting yourself in a position where you would have to be honest. You hold everyone at arm’s length because you know if anyone got close you’d have to answer some uncomfortable questions about your walk with the Lord.

This has manifested itself for some of you by you living two different lives. You have the “you” that you are around church people, including Sunday mornings, and the “you” that you are around people who aren’t Christians. You’re two different people, a chameleon, living like a Christian or living like the world depending on who you’re around.

You are literally living a lie.

Here’s the warning for you: You may think that you’re hiding really well from everyone. You clean up well, no one knows who you really are. But God does. He sees, he knows. And he takes lying incredibly seriously, especially lying to the community of God.

We’ve been really firm, even stern about lying. It’s serious. It can’t be a thing. Living the new life means that lying isn’t something we are able to do anymore. So, what’s the antidote to lying? Paul does not just say that we shouldn’t lie…he says that instead we should…

II. Positive Command: “Speak the Truth”

As somewhat of an aside, this is an important principle for us. Living as a Christian is not about subtracting things from our lives, it’s about replacing them. In other words, we are not all about removing behaviors but instead replacing those behaviors.

If any of you have ever tried to kick a habit you are familiar with this principle. Simply saying “I’m not going to do this anymore,” isn’t often that effective. Instead, you need to replace a bad habit with a good habit.

So, living the new life by being truthful with each other is not just about “not lying,” but it is also about actually telling the truth to each other.

Why is this important to emphasize?

Christian community is not intended to be a neutral space where we just “don’t lie.” It is an active, intentional space where we tell the truth to our neighbors (which specifically means other Christians here) instead of telling and living lies.

On the surface, this may seem easier. Let’s just tell the truth instead of telling lies! Great! But here’s the thing: telling the truth can be hard.

We all come into a church with our own baggage, our own sin, struggles. Some of these things we can be really defensive about. There are some things about ourselves that we need the truth of God’s Word spoken into, even if perhaps we don’t “want” to hear it.

Truth can sometimes get a bad rap.

There’s negative connotations to “speaking the truth.” It can feel kind of like the intent of truth is to wield it like a hammer to crush people.

We don’t help ourselves by sometimes pitting grace and truth against each other and acting like grace is opposed to truth, as if something can’t true and gracious at the same time.

That is not how we should think about truth. It isn’t how the Bible talks about truth. Truth is not a weapon we use to tear people down, it is a gift we use to build them up.

The goal of speaking truth is always to bring freedom and life.

John 8:31–32 (CSB)

Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you continue in my word, you really are my disciples. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Since this is the goal, the way we speak truth has to be in line with that goal, done in love seeking unity:

Ephesians 4:15–16 CSB

But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into him who is the head—Christ. From him the whole body, fitted and knit together by every supporting ligament, promotes the growth of the body for building itself up in love by the proper working of each individual part.

Sin that isn’t confronted holds us in bondage:

John 8:34 CSB

Jesus responded, “Truly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.

Lies lead to bondage, truth leads to freedom.

We live in a time and place that seems like it is viciously hostile toward any claim of absolute truth that challenges certain cultural narratives, and at the same time seems desperate to have something to believe in.

The highest good now is to affirm everyone in anything that they want to do. Whatever they feel like is right. The highest good is no longer what is true, but what feels true. In this, it seems like people believe they have freedom.

But is this freedom? Is it freedom for you?

This is one of the major lies from the world that even some of us have started to believe. We believe that how we feel is more important than what is true and thus validating each other’s feelings is more important than telling each other the truth. Sometimes we would rather just ignore sin than ever confront wrong thought patterns and behavior in someone else’s life.

We have believed that there is freedom in embracing and validating how we feel. That our feelings are an end unto themselves. And while our capacity to feel emotion is good thing, a thing that God himself has created in us, when we primarily live our lives based on how we feel we are denying the reality that sometimes how we feel is wrong. That our feelings can lie to us.

Living by your feelings and not by the truth means that you are living in bondage.

You are enslaved to your feelings. Your ability to have joy, peace, your ability to be “okay” is completely up to how you feel. Your life has no equilibrium because anything minor or major that happens to you causes you to go into an emotional tailspin. You will even pursue sinful behaviors in order to medicate your feelings. Everything you do in your life serves your feelings. Speaking truth into that bondage brings each other freedom from the harsh taskmaster that is our own emotions.

“In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth — only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.” - C.S. Lewis

There is a tension here.

Speaking the truth does not mean that we become little “truth drones,” floating around just looking for anyone we can correct or critique. Jesus’ words are true - we should be more concerned about the log in our own eye than the splinter in someone else’s. We also need to be gentle and loving, understanding that we are all a work in progress, and sinful and wrong thought patterns and behavior may take some time to work through, both in our lives and others’. But this does not mean that in the right place, in the right way, at the right time, we are not supposed to speak the truth into other people’s lives as the Holy Spirit gives us the opportunity.

Living the new life means that we must “speak the truth” along with “putting away lying.” In this structure that Paul seems to be following, he gives a theological rationale, a reason, why we are supposed to not lie to each other but instead speak the truth. And that reason is…

III. Theological Rationale: “Because We are Members of One Another”

The New Testament is full of “body” language when talking about the Church of Jesus Christ. When we get back into our 1 Corinthians series in a few weeks we are going to jump into chapter 12 that deals specifically with the church as being the “Body of Christ.”

1 Corinthians 12:12 CSB

For just as the body is one and has many parts, and all the parts of that body, though many, are one body—so also is Christ.

When you become a Christian, you don’t just join a group of people.

You get bound to a group of people in such a unique, intimate way that Scripture literally refers to us as a body. The Body of Christ. The biggest expression of that body is the global Church of Jesus Christ, yes, but God in his mercy has given us local church “bodies” like Northstar in order for us to live out what it means to be the Body of Christ.

Tony Merida - “Your words greatly affect the whole body. If my eye says to my hand, “The iron is not hot,” and my hand touches it, I’ll get burned! Since we are united together, false words hurt the whole body.”

This is the point that Paul is making. Yes, lying is sinful, it’s even satanic in nature, but the specific reason that we have to tell each other the truth in order to “be the church” is that when we lie to each other it’s as if we are lying against our own selves. Why would we lie to ourselves?

Your honesty with yourself impacts your honesty with others.

A mark of an unhealthy person is one that is unwilling or unable to recognize the truth about themselves. We can call this a lack of self-awareness or just a flat out denial of something that is clear to everyone else. When an unhealthy person comes into community there are two options: 1) they move toward healing or 2) they infect the community with their lack of health.

The health of the community is directly tied to the health of the individual members of the community, which in turn is directly tied to the truth-telling that happens within the community.

This is not to say that someone has to be perfectly healthy to be a member of the body. Of course not. The church is a hospital for broken people to be healed. But there is a difference between someone who is willing to acknowledge their need for growth, and someone who isn’t. We all have pockets of our lives that are unhealthy, places that we are lying to ourselves, but being in a truth-telling community and submitting ourselves to the truth allows those places to be uncovered and healed by the Lord. But because we are members of one another, when we lie to each other we begin to destroy the body as a whole.

But in the midst of all of this we shouldn’t miss the beautiful reality that Paul is illustrating:

The church is not just a group of people - it is a body.

We are in middle of what has been called a “loneliness epidemic.”

Social disconnectedness was already a problem before the COVID-19 pandemic, and of course that only made the problem worse. Loneliness “feels bad,” but there are other effects of loneliness that are actually much worse. According to the Department of Health & Human Services, loneliness is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke depression, anxiety, and even premature death. Being socially disconnected causes an impact on human mortality that is similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

You need other people.

It isn’t a coincidence that this loneliness epidemic has grown as we move away from absolute truth as a culture. Strong, healthy communities are built around truth-telling, and when that element goes away a foundational component of healthy communities go with it. In our individualistic culture today, where we have interpreted the highest good to be whatever we want, or whatever we feel like doing, even at the expense of other people or what is true, it should be no surprise that we’re lonely. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner where have insulated ourselves from anyone who would speak the truth to us - but that also means that we are alone.

In the midst of this cultural landscape, the church should reveal a better way.

Being a part of the body of Christ - in fellowship with God and others - is the natural state for human beings. Humans were created for relationship with God and others. The church is supposed to reveal the way that humans are supposed to relate with each other. The way we were created to relate with each other.

We were created not just to have relationships with each other - we were created to be bound together in Christ.

If you show up in a church with self-absorbed goal of trying to medicate your own loneliness by being affirmed by everyone around you, even at the cost of truth, you’ll be disappointed. That’s not what we’re about. But, we hope that you’ll stick around long enough to learn about a new way of being, as a part of the body of Christ, bound together in truthful, life-giving relationship.

This kind of life is only possible if you are willing to put away lies and instead tell the truth - both to yourself and others…because we are members of one another. And so we hurt each other when we do not tell each other the truth, and heal each other when we do tell each other the truth.

Application

Living the new life means we have to be truthful with one another.

I mentioned earlier that truth can have a negative connotation, like speaking truth to each other is always done with the intent of critiquing something in their lives in a way that feels inherently negative.

Can we flip the script on telling the truth?

The truth is a weapon in that it destroys the lies of the enemy that have kept weary souls in bondage.

It’s a weapon that is wielded in your life to crush the lies that still threaten to entangle you.

It’s a life-giving weapon.

The truth, when handled and communicated with grace and love, brings life and healing to weary souls. To those that are far from God, and to those who already know him but need to be reminded of the truth…you see…

Of course the world needs to hear the truth, but so do you.

You need the truth spoken into your life, both as a corrective and as a reminder. We need to be fluent in speaking the truth with each other - which means that we need to be fluent in the gospel. Lost people need to hear the gospel, but so do you. You need to be reminded of the truth of the gospel and have it applied to your life. You can believe lies that trap you in sin, or keep you in guilt and shame.

The truth of the gospel says that since you have believed in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior you are set free from lies. Including the lies that make you feel condemned. The lies that say that God doesn’t really love you, he doesn’t even really like you, maybe just tolerates you at best.

The antidote to these lies, and so many others, is to embrace the truth.

God has given us each other to help us live in truth - to speak the truth to each other.

Put yourself in safe, healthy spaces where there can be honesty - discipleship, small groups, mentoring.

Ask good questions of others and invite them to ask you good questions.

Remind each other of the gospel and your identity in Christ.

If you are here today and you don’t know Jesus - I want to welcome you to consider the “truest truth that could ever be true.” You are broken, but you can be made whole. You’ve believed a lie, but you don’t have to anymore. There is a God who loves you and calls you to believe in him, so that you can be forgiven of your sins and be made whole.

There is truth here that the world denies and is blinded to, and so they are lost.

Conclusion

We are living in a world today that denies some of the most fundamental truths about human existence.

Things that Scripture and even nature itself clearly testify to be true. It can sometimes feel like we’re living in an upside-down world. It’s confusing even for a Christian that knows the truth when it seems like all around us the very concept of truth itself is under attack. Nothing is true anymore because everything is.

Interestingly, some of the main questions that our world is wrestling with are anthropological, as in, related to what it means to be a human being. People have a lot of questions about being a person. When does a human being come into existence? Are our bodies ours to do whatever we want with, or is there some external truth that our bodies are subject to? How does this inform questions of gender, sex, and identity? Are there even any differences between genders, or is gender just a social construct? Perhaps even more philosophical questions like, what is a human beings purpose? Why are we even here? Ultimately: what does it mean to be a human being?

The world tries to answer these questions with lies, fumbling around in the dark for some answer that they think will satisfy them, but instead just turns into needing more answers to more questions. They think that validating and affirming their choices and believes will satisfy them, but because they are lies, they can never be satisfied.

We’ve got a better story to tell. We know what they were created for because we know what we were created for. We know what their hearts are aching for and that even in the midst of believing and living awful lies, they are exhibiting their desperate need to be made right with their Father.

But - how are we supposed to tell others the truth if we can’t even tell each other the truth?

We can be like those people that are great at giving advice but their own lives are a mess - they don’t live by anything they say.

If we want to make an impact in our world, speaking the truth in love to them, we have to start by doing it here. It’s sometimes harder to do it here. It’s easier to lob truth grenades into the culture, even get involved in the culture war and just start shouting it out along with everyone else. In the church, it can be messy, complicated, even painful to speak the truth to each other. But ultimately, it’s healing. It unites us. It brings freedom and life. It’s a privilege and a blessing to be in this kind of community.

Lean into it. Embrace the new life in Christ together, being truthful with one another.

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