Good morning, everybody. My name's Thomas Ritchie. I'm an elder here at Redeemer. And it's, my privilege to get to preach to you today. And, the text we're gonna be looking at is about not bearing false witness against your neighbor.
Speaker 1:And I have to think that it's at least a little bit ironic in maybe some people's eyes that Joel asked a lawyer to get up here and preach about telling the truth. He might be trying to tell me something. But I do think that the perspective of the courtroom is a really useful one, when we look at this text. And I'm gonna lean on my day job a lot, as we open God's word together. So here's what we're gonna do.
Speaker 1:As we have throughout our sermon series on the 10 commandments, we're gonna recite the 10 commandments together. They're gonna be up on the screen over my head. And after we're done saying those, let's go back and look at the 9th commandment, and we'll dig into it together. So we're ready to roll. Say these with me.
Speaker 1:And again, from Exodus, chapter 20, verse 16. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray together.
Speaker 1:God, as you know, on my very best day, I'm an unequal to the task of proclaiming your word in all of its beauty, and capturing all of the wonderful insight that is here. I I cannot lift it, much less carry it. I cannot speak clearly, but your spirit can. Speak directly to our hearts, we ask, oh God. Use that which is weak, and which is broken, to reveal that which is true and eternal and everlasting.
Speaker 1:You are our hope. In Christ's name. Amen. Alright. So what initially struck me about the 9th commandment, is how it breaks the pattern of the commandments that have come before.
Speaker 1:And so if we look at starting with shall not murder, shall not commit adultery, shall not steal. If we knew that there was gonna be a commandment about telling the truth, we would expect for that commandment to be just as broad. You shall not lie. But that's not what God chose to give us. Instead, we have a much narrower commandment, and a commandment that comes out of courtroom imagery.
Speaker 1:Where it says we're not to bear false witness against our neighbor. When we find ourselves on the witness stand, make sure that we testify truthfully. And it's not just here in the 10 commandments that this emphasis on courtroom truthfulness appears. In other places such as Deuteronomy 19 verses 16 through 21 and Exodus 23 1 through 8, we see God giving a special attention to his people testifying truthfully. Now, that does not mean that it's okay to lie outside of the courtroom.
Speaker 1:There are plenty of other scriptures that show that deceit is wrong in every aspect of life. Indeed, the passage in Exodus that I just alluded to begins by saying, do not spread a false report. I think that's a good word for us right now. But for whatever reason, God did not give us the broad do not lie commandment. Instead, he chose to give us one that's narrow.
Speaker 1:And he had a purpose in doing so. We are to take from the narrowness of that commandment. That there's something special about the courtroom setting, that we might miss if the command were broader. And we're to carry that something special out with us, as we strive to tell the truth in the in every aspect of life. And there's several things we could highlight here.
Speaker 1:But I wanna start with what it says about God's character, and what he values. And that is this. That God cares about justice and the proper functioning of society. We cannot have a well functioning society, if our courts are making judgments based on false testimony. God demands that we show no favoritism, and no bias, and that we base our judgments on the truth.
Speaker 1:Exodus 23, for example, says that we cannot lie for the sake of the poor in court, and we cannot lie against the poor in court. We can show no favoritism. We must be impartial. In Jeremiah chapter 9 verses 3 through 8, we get a picture of what a society looks like, when it's become plagued and infested with deceit. Hear these words.
Speaker 1:Let everyone beware his neighbor and put no trust in any brother. For every brother is a deceiver and every neighbor goes about as a slanderer. And Jeremiah goes on to analogize words to weapons, Where he says that people bend their tongues like a bow. And, in other places, that their tongue is like a deadly arrow. Such a society cannot flourish.
Speaker 1:And God cares about flourishing. And, maybe that's a timely word for us. Because our society is plagued right now with a lot of swift and deceitful accusations. We hurl them around back and forth. And we are characterized as a place where trust is breaking down.
Speaker 1:And when trust breaks down, the day to day interactions upon which society is built, begin to decay. And those things matter to God. And we should fight for the truth in our social interactions. But that's not all that this commandment means. This focus on courtroom testimony also points out something that may go against the, school bus wisdom that we received as children.
Speaker 1:We all heard growing up, that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. But that's not true in court. Courts enter judgments, and those judgments affect the lives, the liberty, the property of real people. And, so your words have real consequences. That's why the commandment says don't bear false testimony against your neighbor.
Speaker 1:You're not just lying. You are lying and someone is hurt because of it. In a trial, words matter. And that's something that God wants us to hold onto, and carry with us out into the world. We need to recognize that our words have consequences.
Speaker 1:So by framing this commandment, in terms of the effect of our words on other people, it helps to take the focus off of us. If the commandment had just said, thou shall not lie, we would be able to look at our own conduct and say, well, in everything I've said today, I have been technically truthful. Therefore, I am righteous under this commandment. I have kept it. I'm moving on to number 10.
Speaker 1:That's next week. But that's not the way that Jesus summarizes these commandments. The purposes of these commandments, isn't that we might be able to measure ourselves righteous, but rather that we might love our neighbor as ourself. And so the focus on of this commandment is, what effect is your truthfulness or your falsity having on somebody else? We can't lose sight of that.
Speaker 1:It's not just about the purity of our speech, though it certainly is about that also. And this courtroom focus also gives us a useful tool that we can use to analyze our own temptations. And that we can use to go back and look at times when we've sinned. Because if we find ourselves lying, or being tempted to lie, we can ask this question. What trial am I trying to win?
Speaker 1:What am I trying to accomplish with this lie? Who is being accused? And what is the purpose of my testimony? Because I think if we look at our actions, and we consider the instances in which we make accusations against people, and if we look at times that we tell lies, we will see that when we lie, we lie about other people to obtain some good for ourselves, or to avoid some harm that we otherwise deserve. Alright.
Speaker 1:So we might falsely put somebody else down, to make ourselves feel good, or to make ourselves look better in comparison. We might take credit for someone else's success, so that we can reap a financial reward. Likewise, we might shift blame onto somebody else, so that they will pay the price for our mistakes and actions. When we gossip, we build a circle. We put ourselves inside the circle.
Speaker 1:And we look down on someone who's outside. We get to feel accepted, at the price of excluding somebody else. In every instance, from a murder trial to a post on Facebook, from the great to the trivial, we are saying something untrue to benefit us at somebody else's expense. And that's what it means to bear false witness against your neighbor. Saying something untrue to benefit yourself at somebody else's expense.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, this is very easy for us, and very common in our day to day lives, Because it comes straight out of our nature. All the way back with Adam and Eve, when they ate the forbidden fruit, we see deceit right there with them. Y'all remember Eve's answer that she gave to God, when he said, Eve, what has this stew done? She said, the serpent deceived me, and I ate. She was lied to.
Speaker 1:But Adam goes much further. Adam was not merely deceived. Adam blames Eve. He bears false witness against her. And not just that.
Speaker 1:He bears false witness against God himself. He says, when God turns to him, is this true? He says, the woman, the one that you, God, gave to me, she gave me this fruit, and I ate it. So he can still taste the fruit in his mouth. Sin might not be yet 30 minutes old.
Speaker 1:And already in his heart, he is willing to falsely condemn all of humanity at the time, and the God that made the world. How quickly does deceit follow after sin? And that sin carries forward in our hearts to this day. Jeremiah 17:9 says that the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. Who can understand it?
Speaker 1:Down deep, we know that we are guilty. And like Adam, we want to deflect blame onto somebody else. It's not my fault. It's her fault. It's not my fault, God.
Speaker 1:It's your fault. It's anybody's fault. It's everybody's fault. But it's not mine. We bear false witness against our neighbor, because we know that we are busted, and we are guilty, and we are desperate to avoid the consequences.
Speaker 1:Many, many lies are at bottom, an attempt to make somebody else pay for our sins. So a lie indeed comes out of the mouth, but its root is in the heart. Luke 645 says that, out of the abundance or the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. And, my dad, who's actually with us here this morning. Hey, dad.
Speaker 1:Has developed a scholarly paraphrase of this verse, and it goes something like this. What's down in the well is gonna come up in the bucket. And I think that's a great way of looking at it. Whatever's down in the well, whatever's down in our hearts, is going to come out in our speech. We cannot address the sin of lying without addressing the sickness, the brokenness and the depravity down in our hearts.
Speaker 1:Until we are rid of a deceitful heart, we will not be rid of a deceitful mouth. But praise God, that he changes hearts. While we were trying desperately to find someone, anyone, to put between us and the consequences of our sin, Jesus walked willingly to the cross. Though we inflicted an unjust sham trial upon him, he did not defend himself. And there's this great scene where Jesus is being questioned by Pilate as part of his trial.
Speaker 1:Pilate's questioning him and Jesus gives this answer. He says, for this purpose I was born. And for this purpose, I have come into the world to bear witness, not false witness, but witness to the truth. Witness to the truth. And Pilate asked the question that maybe we all ask.
Speaker 1:Looking Jesus square in the face says, what is truth? And Jesus doesn't answer him. Jesus doesn't say anything. Instead, he continues on the path to the cross, and he demonstrates there, once and for all, that we don't find the truth as an abstraction, but we find it in the person of Jesus Christ. We will know the truth when we know him, because he is the truth.
Speaker 1:He is the one who says, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples. And you will know the truth. And the truth will set you free. And my brothers and sisters, we are indeed free. We deserve to be tried and convicted, but our trial is over.
Speaker 1:Jesus has taken all of our guilt and has granted us his perfect pardon. And knowing Jesus now enables us to be truly free from the motivations that used to exist to lie. We don't have to shift blame onto other people, because we know that all of our blame has been taken away. Cast into the sea, as far as the east is from the west, so far as he removed our guilt from us. We do not need to try to profit unjustly off of others, because God has made us heirs of his eternal kingdom.
Speaker 1:There is nothing more that you could gain. Nothing that lasts. Nothing that satisfies. That you have not already been given and sealed as a promise. And not only has God taken away our motivations for lying, he's also addressed the deceit of our heart, by giving us his holy spirit, by whom we have the power and the wisdom to speak the truth.
Speaker 1:Not only for our own sake, but to do to do so in such a way that benefits our neighbors, our city, our world, even our enemies. Instead of bearing false witness against our neighbors, we can now speak for their good. So take this as a theological foundation. This is the commandment about lying and how the gospel addresses it. But I wanna build on this foundation with 3 points of application.
Speaker 1:The first is this. And I wanna stress this as directly as possible. We would do well to speak less. Especially online, but really, in all parts of our lives. Proverbs 10/19 says, when words are many, transgression is not lacking.
Speaker 1:But whoever restrains his lips is prudent. I'll give one more example. That there are literally 100. Proverbs 2428 expounds on the 9th commandment, by breaking it up into 2 parts. It says, be not a witness against your neighbor without cause and do not deceive with your lips.
Speaker 1:So don't miss this. The 9th commandment is, don't bear false witness against your neighbor. But Solomon, in his wisdom says, there's actually 2 steps there. Before you can bear false witness, you first have to get into the witness box. You've gotta put yourself forward to speak.
Speaker 1:And he says, you know what? Don't do that lightly. Don't just speak because the opportunity's there. Make sure you have cause. And then, if you're in the box and you have to be there giving testimony, then part 2, speak the truth.
Speaker 1:Don't deceive with your lips. Now look, we struggle to tell the truth. That part's not easy. But we don't I don't think we struggle enough with the first part over here. We are all too quick.
Speaker 1:Altogether too quick. Not, I don't mean that every one of us is. But many of us are altogether too quick to offer our opinion and our judgment and an accusation against all manner of things, and about all manner of people that we've never met, and have very little information about. Brothers and sisters, the world is not waiting for us to express our opinions and judgments about everything. Yes.
Speaker 1:There is a time to speak, and it's important that we speak when called upon. But it's probably not on Facebook, And it's probably not in the middle of the night, or when you're really angry about something. And the way that we're called upon to speak is probably not just to blindly retweet, or repost, or do whatever to something that somebody else is saying about a hot take from so and so today. We do much better if we slow down, because telling the truth is hard work. You know, lawyers get this reputation for lying, and I I spend a lot of my time, actually, a lot of my job helping people figure out the truth.
Speaker 1:And, it turns out it's really hard work. If somebody wants to testify truthfully about what happened 2 years ago, it involves studying a bunch of documents, reading over their emails and their communications, remembering very carefully, because our memories aren't perfect. And we have these built in biases that try to fit the facts to a narrative. And sometimes, it's self justifying. And sometimes, it's to penalize another person.
Speaker 1:And sometimes, it's just we don't remember correctly. Actually telling the truth carefully and intentionally is work. It's the hardest part of giving testimony, is just remembering exactly what happened. And that's before you layer in the possibility that somebody may have done something wrong they're trying to escape. It is hard to tell the truth.
Speaker 1:And so we should not put ourselves in situations where we've made an accusation in haste. And if we're wrong, we have now borne false witness against our neighbor. Because that person, just like you, is made in the image of God. And God cares for that person just as he cares for you. And you are not free to throw about your hasty opinions.
Speaker 1:Yes. The world may need your voice, but it does not need your snap judgments. The second point of application is this. Instead of just thinking negatively, how can I avoid bearing false witness? Let's think positively.
Speaker 1:What can we do to replace this negative talk? And, it's this. Speak the truth in love. Turn that commandment around. Let's replace bearing false witness with speaking the truth in love.
Speaker 1:And I don't have time to read through Ephesians 4 with you right now, but I do encourage you to go home and to read it and to study over it and to model these disciplines in your life. Because Paul sets forth in the 4th chapter of Ephesians, really good practices that will help us to slow down, and help us to rightly focus on the effects of our words on other people. He says that when we speak, we should aim at humility, gentleness, patience. That we should strive for unity in love. That means that before we say anything, we should look for pride in our own hearts.
Speaker 1:That our words should be gentle. They should not be hasty, but should be the fruit of patience. And, that we should start with common ground that we have with people. Instead of saying, you know, here's us throwing rocks at this faceless them. Let's find that common ground, that we can strive for unity.
Speaker 1:And, we can build out from the things that we already know that we hold in common. And, if we are aiming at those things in our communication, we are far less likely to slip into a destructive pattern of just hurling insults and false accusations at each other. Because that never persuades anybody anyway. And it gets us in danger in our own hearts of treating people as objects. Which is the opposite of how God sees them.
Speaker 1:And 3rd, and I'll close here. We should practice the discipline of telling the truth to ourselves. In a truly rare moment of parental wisdom, I told one of my kids, that one of the reasons why I insist on my kids telling me the whole and unvarnished truth, is because it's practice. It's valuable practice. Because telling the truth to your dad is hard.
Speaker 1:But telling the truth to yourself is much harder. And, this is paradoxical, because other people are skeptical when we tell them something. If you lie to somebody, they're gonna feel it a little bit. They're gonna wonder. They're gonna poke in.
Speaker 1:They're gonna investigate. But not yourself. You will believe your own lies and fall for it Hook, line and sinker. Because you want so desperately for those lies to be true. You can justify almost anything cause you want to be right.
Speaker 1:We all do this. We know that we're lying to ourselves, but we fully embrace the lie. So much that we forget that we're doing it. We're afraid of the truth of words like addict, or cheat, or drunk, or thief, or whatever else, whatever other label we might affix to our pet sins. And instead, we say that, no, this is just how business gets done.
Speaker 1:This is what everybody's doing. We could say, you know, I can quit anytime that I want to. We say things like, it's not that I'm abandoning or betraying somebody. I just feel the Lord calling me in a different direction right now. We are like the false prophets of Israel, that are described in Jeremiah 6 this way.
Speaker 1:They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, peace, peace, when there is no peace. And maybe the contemporary image there is Kevin Bacon in Animal House holding his hands up, saying, remain calm. All is well. Everything's fine. Everything is not fine.
Speaker 1:And we need to remember that. We need to know that we are prone to lying to ourselves. And the remedy is to remember the gospel daily. To tell it to ourselves. To tell it to each other daily.
Speaker 1:To remember the harsh things that the Bible says about our sin. That our sins are brutal and lethal and evil and real. But also to remember that those sins are entirely forgiven, by a God who loves you so much, that he sent his only son to die for you. Dwell on these truths daily. Meditate on them.
Speaker 1:They will inoculate you against the lies that you tell yourself. Lies that everything's fine when everything's not fine. Lies that everything's wrong when everything's not wrong. We need both sides of the gospel, telling us that our sins are real, but that grace is real. That our depravity goes far, but God's love is stronger.
Speaker 1:And, everything will always make truth claims. The internet says everything, all the time, all at once, right now. And it will drown you. Our culture proclaims its values. Though they are ever shifting, it proclaims those values loudly and forcefully.
Speaker 1:And often demands compliance. And it will wear you down. Your family has its own way of doing things that may or may not be God's way. Your job, your friends, your school, your team, your books, your music, your Netflix queue, your political allies, your political enemies, the people that you follow on social media, All of these people will proclaim what they perceive as truth to you. But none of them can set you free.
Speaker 1:None of them says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. So at day's end, the hard work of telling the truth is not so much about controlling what you say. It's about having your heart changed and shaped by God's grace and the truths contained in scripture. If you remember every day that your sins were like scarlet, but they have been washed white as snow, you will not feel so much the need to defend yourself, or to put somebody else down. If you remember that God has spilled his blood, that he might call you his child.
Speaker 1:You will not so quickly create a counterfeit reality in which you get what you think you want in the moment. For the truth is far greater than that story that you can create on your own. We have beheld truth in the person of Jesus Christ, who laid down his life that we might live. As we're gonna sing in a minute, we have a great high priest whose name is love, whoever lives and pleads for us. So if you want to tell the truth, I urge you, know Jesus.
Speaker 1:Follow him. Treasure up his words and his spirit, which lives within the hearts of all who believe, will replace the lies of sin with the truth that he is able to do far more abundantly than all we could ask or think. Please pray with me. God thank you for your word. For it is true.
Speaker 1:And in it we see you revealed. Through your word, we know that all of your word is true for we have tested it. And you have been found faithful again and again and again. And we ask the question every day in our lives, what is truth? And you are before us saying, I am the truth.
Speaker 1:God, might we know you. Might we be wise in the things of your kingdom. Even if it means that we are, from time to time, foolish in the ways of the world. Teach us to treasure obeying your statutes. To see that keeping this law is a way to life.
Speaker 1:Help us to be instruments of reconciliation. Not amplifying voices of hatred. Not amplifying, the patterns of rushing in to judgments. Not increasing divisions. But rather that we would be bridge builders.
Speaker 1:That through careful and loving speech, we might make brothers out of enemies. For God, we were your enemies and you called us your own. I thank you. In Christ name we pray. Amen.