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.

Human lying expresses such a varied palette of deception: outright fabrications, half-truths, misrepresentations, manipulation, shadings, concealment, hyperbole, etc. The pattern began at the very beginning, where we find the Father of Lies having a field day with Adam and Eve. The two humans are no match for the serpent, and their performance is a tour-de-force of fear-driven lies that reads like a manual on the denial of reality. The first move is the devil’s seemingly innocent question, “Did the Lord really say not to eat?” And it only escalates from there to the blame game (the woman, the snake, God himself are all at fault), hide and seek in the Garden, pathetic little attempts to cover their nakedness. And we wonder why our children lie.

The origins and persistence of lying as a hallmark of our behavior only serve to highlight the necessity of telling each other gospel truth (which was the topic of last week’s blog post and is the focus of Paul’s Ephesians 4 encouragement). Adam and Eve’s first sins arise from agreeing to Satan’s Grand Lie – “You shall be as God” – which all of their offspring, we included, have perpetuated ever since. What this demonstrates is that falsehood is clearly at the heart of an unbelieving life, of habitually elevating ourselves above our non-divine status, ascribing to ourselves powers and abilities that belong only to God, and violating the call to live in love with our fellow human creatures.

We know that hiding, blaming, self-deification and the art of the defensive coverup are all serious enough as personal transgressions. But we greatly magnify them by the fact that we don’t commit them in a vacuum, but in the context of relationships. The more I read and think through the passages that we are considering, the more I see a second “big truth” revealed, which is that speaking what is true is a corporate practice, and that we only grown into full maturity (Eph. 4:13) together, rather than as a bunch of isolated individuals.

The Father’s choosing of any individual or family – Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, or Jesus himself – has one end in mind, which is to establish and sustain a people on whom he can bestow his goodness and inheritance, and through whom he can multiply his blessings. Here’s what we see in a very focussed way in Ephesians: God’s people are engaged in an ever escalating battle between knowing, understanding, living and proclaiming the life of Jesus (the truth) and being “tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming” (v. 14). Paul is being very clear here about what happens when we are negligent in speaking gospel truth to each other, or when we allow “original lies” to eclipse that truth. Our witness is only as winning, anointed, and effective as is our commitment to being truthful disciples.

Gospel truth is – no surprise – a broad and sometimes controversial concept. For the most part, we tend to focus on the doctrinal aspects of what we believe. Paul certainly agrees that doctrine is important. He cites the shifting winds of human ideas that are contrary to God’s teaching as a scourge on a church that is muddle-headed about the essential revelation of Scripture – things like the triunity of God, the divinity of Christ, the divine attributes of sovereignty, glory, justice, and wisdom as well as those of mercy, kindness, compassion, and love. Things like the pervasive nature of (our) sin, the necessity of righteousness, and the certainty of judgment as well as the presence of grace, the persistence of divine love, and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. When we are wrong on the key points of scriptural truth, we drown in the open sea of deception and confusion, and forfeit our call and ministry in and to the world. God help us to be faithful to the foundations.

But along with these Big Ideas – and hoping that we are agreed on their substance – there are biblical applications of truth that seep down into the daily practices of faith, expressions of gospel life that fulfill the encouragement to speak what is true. One that immediately comes to mind is James’ charge to “confess your sins to each other” (Jas. 5:16). Here is one of the gospel foundations, an expression of repentance, a key aspect of telling the truth. Confession recognizes our sinfulness and our sin, and does so in specific ways that give concrete evidence of how we are captive to sin’s power. I need a constant reminder that precise statements of wrongdoing are much more authentic articulations of who we are than the general agreement that “I am a sinner.” They also bring out a vulnerability that deals a powerful blow to our pride and requires a trust that the Lord (and our brothers and sisters) will accept us in the depths of our frailty.

Confession builds up the body, but confession goes beyond the body. The world needs the full gospel. That means that we tell the truth about God and about ourselves. The church does much better with the God part. We all know John 3:16; we are OK at telling unbelievers what they must do to be saved. What about us as those whom God so loved and who have been, and are being saved? Christians can be prone to defensiveness, triumphalism, exclusivist Pharisaism, all in the face of our blatant sin-warts: That we have not loved the world except to imitate it; that we are full of division and confusion; that we are self-righteous; that we are not particularly loving. And yet that we are greatly loved and in possession of a hope beyond hope. Not just you and I, but you and I together repenting, believing, and confessing the Good News. An act of the obedience of faith that the Spirit wants to inspire among all of God’s people.

Paul also counsels us in Ephesians to speak no rotten (sapros) words but only what builds up and gives grace (4:29). The obvious interpretation is that we are to avoid something like “coarse, cuss, and crass.” Maybe, but I think the passage is after more substantially harmful speech. I think about my own tendency to delight in sharpness, in being “incisive,” as being a kind of verbal physician wielding the scalpel of my wit and intellect. Such words seem robust and strong, but they are as corrupt as any expletive, and are far more effective in doing the devil’s work of tearing down. Then there are the grumblers and complainers, the Eeyores, the arguers, the gossipers, all of which is both inimical to the gospel and characteristic of the history of God’s people (see Psalms 106 for a classic example). The problem is that much of our rotten speech feels so natural that we fail to see how we are spreading spiritual disease in a way that severely erodes the testimony of God’s truth in the world.

What is the antidote to rottenness? We find one answer in the next chapter of Ephesians: to speak hymns, Psalms, and spiritual songs from the Spirit to each other, worshipping God from the heart. The key to countering foulness of speech is a sanctified tongue. And the source of a sanctified tongue is surrender to Spirit-led worship: the declaration of what is true about God and about what he has done  to ourselves, to our brothers and sisters, to the world, and to God himself. Whether when we are alone or with other believers, we allow the Spirit bring our hearts captive to truth so that our mouths and our lives can be equally captive to it. Letting the Sprit sing God’s songs in our hearts will correct our impulses to believe lies that lead us to speak from unbelief.

There are numerous other warnings, encouragements, and admonitions about what speaking gospel truth means, words about money, relationships, families, and the like. Maybe we’ll look at more of them next week. In the meantime, it is important to recognize that speaking what is true is a crucial part of a mission that the Father of Light has given to us, a mission that he began by sending his Truth into the world to destroy the works of the devil, the father of lies.

May the Spirit convict us of where we believe or speak falsehood, inspire in us a love of and courage for speaking truth, and anoint every true word that comes from our mouths.