The Word To Live By: 10-5-25
Phil Waggoner
Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices. Colossians 3:9
The Word to live by: I’m still talking about Proverbs 3:3, “Do not let kindness and truth leave you …” The more I read the Bible, the more I see the fact that God is really against lying. There are probably several reasons for this, not the least of which is that the devil is a liar (John 8:44). However, like anything else God tells us to do or not to do, it is because He loves us and wants it to be well with us so that we may live long on the earth. There are three reasons we don’t tell the truth or be dishonest with people: to protect ourselves, to promote ourselves, or to manipulate the thoughts, feelings, or actions of others to favor ourselves. All three of these reasons are obviously rooted in selfishness. Dishonesty comes in two forms - distorting the truth and hiding the truth. I had a friend who became a multi-millionaire when his parents left him a huge amount of Enron stock. Enron was an energy and commodities company based out of Houston, Texas. His wife wanted him to sell it and retire but he insisted on holding on to it because he was advised that it could do nothing but go up. Actually, he never got any advice and lied to his wife. It was soon learned that top executives at Enron and Arthur Anderson accounting firm conspired to misrepresent the financial facts. Several months after he got the stock, the company collapsed overnight. The stress of it costed my friend his marriage, his job and eventually his health and he died at about the age of 50. Dishonesty has far-reaching consequences. It produces never-ending stress. You must constantly be thinking about what you said and that you will be exposed, which means you must always keep your stories straight and it forces you to think about it so you won’t say anything contradictory that exposes those lies. Also, that stress robs us of any potential for godly joy but ultimately steals our health as well. Each time we’re dishonest, we become less sensitive to our conscience in the future, and we create a greater capacity to lie next time. Integrity, on the other hand, is a mental and emotional muscle that is exercised when we make a conscious choice to tell the truth. You’ll never go wrong doing what is right.
Read through the Bible in a year: Revelation 5; Nehemiah 7:5-8:12; Psalms 100;
Read through the New Testament and Proverbs: Proverbs 5, Luke 5:1-20, 1
The sum of Thy Word is Truth Psalm 119:160