The Alelyon (one another) passages in the New Testament:
Do not lie to each other but speak the truth to each other in love.
(Ephesians 4:14, 25; Colossians 3:9) – Part 2
Both the corrosive effects of lying, even to ourselves, and the corrective and transformative promise and power of the gospel, even for ourselves, are intimately connected to the Father’s purpose of creating unity among human beings that reflects and extends his own.
Anyone who is a parent knows that one of the first, and most persistent, challenges that we have with our children is to teach them the essence of Paul’s exhortation to eschew lying and to tell the truth. Many of us have spent many hours reading and talking about why it is so difficult to overcome the temptation to prevaricate. What is interesting to me is that, after all the agonizing over how to understand our sons and daughters and help them become truth-tellers, the bottom line about their tendency to lie is the same as ours: Every act of dissembling, double-dealing, obfuscation, fabrication, falsehood, and calumny is an attempt at some kind of self-preservation, most often our own selves, but occasionally some other person’s.
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