Living in Truth: Embracing God's Call

**Prayer and Welcome**

"Lord, we say your name is Majestic in all the Earth. Even though you've created mountains and oceans, stars, galaxies, you see us, you know us, and you love us. So we're gathered here to make much of you. Holy Spirit, be present in our midst, make yourself evident today, minister to the hearts of your people. Lord, would you encourage us and build us up in your word, would you convict and challenge but also give us hope. Be present in our praises today. God, we pray for those who've walked into this place with burdens, with broken, hurting hearts, for those who've come into this place with no hope, for those who have come looking for answers. God, would you relieve the burden, heal the hurt, answer the queries and give us hope. In Jesus' name we pray, amen."

I want to welcome you in the name of Jesus and just say that I'm so glad that you're here. Not a single one of us is here today because we deserve it; we are here because we have been delivered from our sin and rescued by Jesus. We are here because God loves to find outcasts and invite them to be sons and daughters who gather around his banquet table.

This is what God's word says in Isaiah 55: "Come everyone who's thirsty, come to the water and you who have no money, come buy and eat, come buy wine and milk without silver and without cost." We are here to come to Jesus together as a family of former slaves, former outcasts, and former rebels who've been redeemed by Jesus and have been adopted as sons and daughters of the King. We are gathering around the banquet table together this morning.

**Worship Leaders and Ministry Opportunities**

Let's bow our heads and hearts and go to the Lord in prayer.

We are thankful for our worship leaders today for the great job they have already done leading us in worship. Our worship pastor, Tim Wedby, has stepped away this week on his sabbatical, and we want to be praying for him and his family. Nate Harrison is leading us in worship in his absence, and we are thankful for our wonderful worship team.

I want to share with you one ministry opportunity and one ministry update before we continue in worship. In the fall, in August, we will have some very special guests with us—children. Jesus said that a kingdom is made up of such as these, and every August when we come back from summer vacation, we always have an influx of kids. I'm looking for some folks who are willing to come and serve and love and care for our children in Jesus' name and serve as kids ministry volunteers.

If you'd like to be part of the most important job in our church, then I invite you to participate in that way. You will bless lots of people and receive a bigger blessing by serving. If you're interested, there are two ways you can let us know. You can fill out the volunteer card in the seat back pocket in front of you, or you can email children@moberly.org.

**Baptism Celebration**

Last Sunday, we got to celebrate baptizing 16 people out at our Williams Lake here at Moberly. It was the first time we did lake baptisms, and it was so muggy and wonderful. We baptized people who were in seven different decades of life; we baptized spouses, we baptized siblings. I had the opportunity to baptize my own daughter; it was just a wonderful celebration. After we watched a short video about that, we got to celebrate two more who were getting baptized this morning.

Getting baptized doesn't give you a relationship with God; it's a sign that you already have one. It's a physical picture of a spiritual reality and an outside visible sign of an inside spiritual truth. God has buried our sins away and raises us to walk in newness of life.

Good morning, Moberly family! What a special day that was, and what a special day today is. We have two cousins that have both shared their testimonies of their new creation in Christ. Would you share your testimony with us this morning?

"My Sophie and I have decided to follow Jesus. It's my joy to baptize you, my sister, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We are buried with Christ in baptism to death and raised to walk as a follower of Jesus Christ."

**Children's Ministry and God's Grace**

I was helping with the four-year-old class, and it was a blast. Among other things, I learned about seven different techniques for keeping alligators out of my bedroom at night, which was very important to know. So if you need help keeping alligators out of your bedroom at night, the four-year-olds can help you with all kinds of good ideas for keeping them away. You might need to know that one day. Serve with our kids' ministry, and it's going to be a wonderful way to serve the Lord and to receive a blessing in the process.

I want to take a moment and just remind us all that God is a God of grace and mercy and that he is a God who is willing to forgive us and to restore us and to bring us back into fellowship with him. So if you find yourself in a place where you're struggling with any of these things or any other sin, I want to encourage you to come to God and to confess your sin and to ask for his forgiveness and to receive his grace and mercy and to be restored to fellowship with him.

We have been looking at some hard topics such as anger, theft, lust, and adultery. If we find ourselves struggling with any of these sins, we should come to God and confess our sin, asking for His forgiveness and grace. We can then be restored to fellowship with Him.

In Exodus chapter 20, we are looking at the ninth of the Ten Commandments that God gave to His people Israel. This commandment has meaning for our lives today, and we should take the time to consider it. We should also take the time to thank God for His righteousness, strength, and peace that He gives us. We love Him and thank Him for loving us.

**Conviction and Confession**

Anytime God's Spirit uses God's Word in the lives of God's people, there will be conviction of sin in our lives. Even though we belong to Christ, nothing can change our status in Him. God wants to continually shape us to look more and more like Jesus, and this process is called sanctification. God's Word sometimes functions like a sword that pierces our hearts, or like a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon, cutting out of our lives anything that doesn't look like Christ. This is often hard work.

The right response to conviction of sin is to confess it before the Lord. The Bible tells us that if we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. After confessing our sin to God, we should also confess it to those we may have caused hurt or harm.

When God's Spirit convicts us of sin and we confess it, we can be left feeling hopeless in the wake of that confession. We may feel like we are standing in a pile of rubble, wondering if there is any hope. The pastoral word is that there is no pit so deep that Jesus can't rescue us out of it, and no mess that our sin may have made that God can't redeem and bring reconciliation and restoration. There is hope in Christ, no matter the wreckage or the rubble, no matter how ugly the sin. God can put it back together again.

I'm telling you this from experience. I've been in a place where I'm wondering if I've dug too deep, if I'm in too deep of a pit. Amy and I are very open about our marriage and our story. In the seventh year of our marriage, we had an awful year. It was awful. We did not even like each other for like a year, which is hard to believe, right? True, Amy said she's so likable, but for a year we had a hard time being in the same room together. There were moments where we wondered if we were ever going to be able to climb out of this pit, if there was ever going to be hope for our marriage again.

I'm telling you now, we've been married over 16 years; there is hope, and there is nothing that you have broken so much that God can't put it back together again. So have hope if that's you today. If you've confessed something and you're now dealing with the aftermath of the broken pieces, just understand it's a process and it takes time, but God can redeem and restore what sin has broken.

There might need to be some reconstruction that happens; there's going to be some rebuilding that needs to take place in your life. And that's what the church is here for. You have pastors, you have ministers, we have a Hope Road Counseling Center where we have counselors who can walk with you through some things. We also have godly men and women in this room who, although they're not perfect people, they're redeemed people who've experienced God's grace, and we are called to be that family of brothers and sisters who walk with each other no matter what it is that we're walking through.

**The Ninth Commandment**

So with that said, we're going to turn our attention now to Exodus chapter 20 and verse 16 as we turn our attention to the ninth commandment. Let's read it together: Exodus 20 verse 16. God's word says this: "Do not give false testimony against your neighbor." Some of you have a translation that reads this way: "Do not bear false witness against your neighbor."

I want to spend a few moments with you talking today about the importance of being people who believe the truth, who love the truth, and who speak the truth. People have a complicated relationship with the truth. From the opening pages of the Bible, you see the poisonous questions slip out of the Serpent's crooked tongue: "Did God really say?" And our first human parents chose to live a lie as they believed the Serpent and chose their own truth instead of living God's truth.

So let us be people who believe the truth, who love the truth, and who speak the truth. God's truth is that things have gone downhill from Genesis chapter 3. Remember when Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate and Pilate asked Jesus this very poignant question: "What is truth?" Many in our culture would have a hard time recognizing truth if it hit them in the face. Many people won't even acknowledge that there is such a thing as the truth.

You'll hear common mantras in our day like, "There's no such thing as absolute truth," which is ironic because it's an absolute statement. People will say, "All truth is relative," or "What's true for you is true for you, what's true for me is true for me," or "What really matters is that we each live our own truth." More specifically, in this cultural moment, there is a movement that says that truth is whatever I claim it to be. So, even how I identify myself, I can identify as any gender I want as long as I identify that way; that's true for me. Even race, I can identify as whatever race that I want to be. What truth is what I define it to be.

Now, listen, I want to identify as someone who lives in Hawaii, but that doesn't make it true. In the face of all of this, God says if you're going to be my people living distinctly in this world, you must be people who believe, love, and speak the truth. In the ninth commandment, God gives Israel instruction about how to love one another by being people of truth. Do not bear false witness against your neighbor. That's stated in the negative.

The Westminster Catechism says that in the commandments, whatever is forbidden, the opposite is also required. We're being forbidden from bearing false witness, which means we're being required to bear faithful witness. We're being forbidden against living a lie; we're being called and required to love and to live and to speak the truth.

If we believe God is a God of truth, then we cannot be people who live by lies. John Calvin, reflecting on this commandment, expresses the big idea of this command very well. He puts it this way: "Since God, who is truth, abhors falsehood, then we must cultivate unfeigned truth towards each other."

So, just think about that. God exists; he's real, and that's the truest truth and the biggest truth. It's the truth from which all other truths are derived. God hates what hurts us, and he knows that it was a lie in the garden that led to the fall. So, he abhors falsehood, and because that's who God is in his character, he is truth; he hates falsehood. We're called to align our lives with the life of God by cultivating unfeigned, unadorned truth towards each other. In other words, we're called to love and to live and to speak the truth.

**The Importance of Truth**

Six things the Lord hates; seven are an abomination to him: a lying tongue, a false witness who breathes out lies. So God hates lying, and he hates false witness, and he hates bearing false witness against your neighbor. So that's what it means to bear false witness against your neighbor.

As Christians, we are called to hold truth sacred. Bearing false witness against our neighbor has to do with the context of a law court. In the ancient world, if someone was accused of a crime, the way to prove guilt was by bringing witnesses who would bear testimony as to what happened. If someone bore false witness against their neighbor in a courtroom, it could be a matter of life or death. Telling the truth today is also a life and death matter. Proverbs 6:16-17 says that God hates a lying tongue and a false witness who breathes out lies.

So why do we do this? Why is it that we live false lives or tell lies? We can be set free from falsehood by understanding that God hates lying and false witness. We can be set free to live as people of the truth by understanding that telling the truth is a matter of life or death.

God hates six things: a prideful spirit, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood. In the ancient world, a lying tongue could lead to the shedding of innocent blood. This is why Proverbs 18:21 says that death and life are in the power of the tongue. This verse is repeated in the New Testament and applies to our lives. We can kill or give life by what we say.

In the context of a courtroom, God calls us to something higher than bearing false witness against our neighbor. We should love our neighbor and protect their reputation and life. Jesus says that we can violate the sixth commandment by having anger in our heart and the seventh commandment by having lust in our heart. Bearing false witness against our neighbor is the most extreme version of violating the ninth commandment, but it is not the only way.

There are seven other ways we can violate this commandment. Violating the ninth commandment, bearing false witness, is one way to break it. However, there are seven other ways. Lying is one of them. Whether we are in a courtroom or not, if we lie, we have violated the ninth commandment. To tell a lie is to tell what is not true. The first person to tell a lie in the Bible was Satan. He questioned God's word and then contradicted it. Jesus called Satan the father of lies. Satan loves to lie to us and about us. He loves to point out our past and question our future. When we tell a lie, we are acting like the devil.

Exaggeration is another way to violate the ninth commandment. Exaggeration is when we make something seem bigger than it is. We can do this positively or negatively. For example, if we are trying to sell a car, we might exaggerate its features to make it seem better than it is.

All know what I'm talking about—don't do it! Exaggeration is when you make something sound better or worse than it actually is. For example, you can describe an interaction you had with someone at work, and when you tell your spouse about it, you exaggerate and make it sound much worse than it actually was or make them sound like a much worse person than they actually are. This is a violation of the ninth commandment, which is to not tell half-truths.

A half-truth is when you tell some of the truth but not all of the truth, usually because if you told all of the truth, it would get you in trouble. An example of this is the woman at the well in John chapter 4. Jesus asks her to bring her husband to him, and she responds by saying she is not married, which is true but only half of the truth. Jesus then reveals that she has had five husbands and her live-in boyfriend is not her husband. This is the full truth.

Half-truths are also seen in advertising, such as when a cereal box says it is part of a heart-healthy diet, but you can't eat anything else enjoyable. In 1946, Camel cigarettes got in trouble because of a half-truth they told in their advertising.

Gossiping is another form of bearing false witness. Gossiping is when you whisper a rumor about someone else, which might be something that's false, something you don't know if it's true or false, or something that's true but you share it with the intent to hurt your neighbor. When you gossip about someone, you are weaponizing truth in order to hurt them. Therefore, it is important to not do this.

You're actually violating the ninth commandment when you bear false witness against your neighbor. This includes lying, exaggerating, telling half-truths, gossiping, and slandering. Slander goes beyond gossip, as it is when you pass along something that is false with the intent to damage the person's reputation. Flattery is the opposite of slander, as it is when you say something positive about a person that is not true, usually with a false motive. An example of this would be buying your boss a mug that says "World's Best Boss" when you don't actually believe it. Both slander and flattery are violations of the ninth commandment.

Flattery is like perfume, according to Aleister Begg. He said we should sniff it, but not swallow it. This is good advice, as there are many ways to tell a lie. We can lie by speaking, exaggerating, telling half-truths, gossiping, slandering, or flattering. We can also lie by not speaking, such as when we remain silent when we should be speaking. This is a violation of the ninth commandment.

**Heart Issues Behind Lies**

We have all told lies in one form or fashion, sometimes big lies, sometimes small lies. But why do we do this? Jen Wilkin says that our character is revealed by our speech, and that we can draw a direct line from the heart to the mouth. Jesus said almost the same thing in Luke 6:45, that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. This means that if we are speaking falsehood, it is revealing something that is sick in our hearts. We must examine our hearts to understand why we bear false witness.

Bearing false witness sometimes reveals pride. We put others down with our words so that we feel better about ourselves. This is why as a kid, we were always excited when we caught our sibling doing something they shouldn't have done. We would run to our parents to tattle because it made us look like the star student and made our sibling look bad. We tell half-truths to try to make them look bad so that we look better.

Bearing false witness may also reveal hatred in our hearts. We may use falsehood as a revenge tactic to get back at someone who hurt us. Our hearts may be so full of hatred and contempt that we participate in gossip or spread rumors to damage their reputation.

Proverbs 6:17 states that God hates a prideful spirit, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood. All three of these are connected, as a lying tongue can lead to the shedding of innocent blood.

Maybe we bear false witness out of a jealousy for someone else's success. We hear someone else praising them for being a great football player, and we just say something like, "Well, if you really knew what they were like in the locker room, you wouldn't think such great thoughts about them." This reveals something deep down in our hearts: hatred, contempt, envy, and jealousy.

The Ten Commandments are divided into two pieces; commandments one through four which have to do with our love for God and commandments five through ten which have to do with our love for one another. Commandment nine is in that second part, which means that this ultimately has to do with how we love our neighbor. One of the major tests of whether or not we really and truly love our neighbor is how we speak to them and how we speak about them. If we are speaking falsehood about them or allowing falsehoods to be spoken about them, we really don't love them.

**Fear and Hypocrisy**

There is a third reason that we think we lie; a heart issue. It's not just pride, it's not just hatred, but deep down one of the reasons we think that we bear false witness is because of fear. We don't tell the truth about ourselves or about our situation because we fear what might happen if the truth were fully known. This plays out in a lot of different ways.

For example, if we are late to work, we are afraid that if we tell the truth to our boss about why we are late, there might be some unpleasant consequences. So, because we are afraid of what might happen if we tell the truth, we make up a lie. We also lie when we are late on turning in a paper. We are afraid of the consequences if the truth were known, so we tell our professor something that is not true.

But I think the reason that we sometimes lie goes much deeper than this fear thing. We are not sure that if we were fully known, that we would still be accepted.

We all want to be fully known and fully loved, but sometimes we fear that if the truth were really told about us, no one would want us or love us. To protect ourselves, we put on a false self and wear a mask, pretending to be something we're not. This is called hypocrisy, and it comes from the world of acting. In the ancient world, actors would put on masks to portray different emotions, regardless of what they were actually feeling.

As Christians, we have become very proficient at wearing masks and hiding the real us. We don't want people to know what's going on inside of us because we're afraid they won't love us if they really knew the truth. We try to be lovable and acceptable to everyone, but deep down in the human heart, we all want to be fully known and fully loved.

Sometimes we're fully loved, but it's because people don't really know us. They love what they think we are, not what we actually are. We're afraid that if they really knew the truth about us, they wouldn't love us. We've felt the insecurity of losing someone's love because they came to know the truth about us. Through experience, we've learned to tell lies about ourselves in order to protect ourselves.

We fear that if God really knew what we were really like, he wouldn't want us. We wonder if our spouse or pastor would still love us if they knew we struggled with certain things. We're afraid that if the truth were really known about us, we wouldn't be fully loved.

We often put up a mask in church, pretending that our lives are in order and that we don't struggle with real sin and ugliness. We act like we have it all together, but in reality, we may be struggling with the worst week of our lives. We don't want to be fully known, so we put up a false self and say, "I'm fine" when asked how we are doing.

But the good news of Jesus Christ is that we can be fully known and fully loved. We can admit to ourselves that we are more sinful than we want to admit, but also that we are more loved by God than we can ever imagine. We can acknowledge that we are uglier than we want to admit, but also that we are more loved than we can ever imagine. God knows us more fully than anyone else, even more than we know ourselves.

We can lie to others to make them think better of us, but we can't lie to God. He knows our true intents and motives of the heart. The gospel gives us freedom to be fully known and fully loved. He knows you more fully than your kids do, your best friend does, and even you yourself know. He loves you more than you can ever imagine.

**The Gospel Truth**

Fully known and fully loved, when you come to accept that reality, you can be freed from falsehood and live into the truth. You know yourself so well, and when God says He fully loves you, He means He's wildly in love with you. God is crazy about you, madly and passionately in love with you. Some of you have a hard time believing that because you know what you're really like when you take the mask off. How can God love this? He gave us proof.

Romans 5:8 is the proof of the extent of God's love. The measure of God's love for you is the cross. On the cross, God loves you so much that the God of Truth, Jesus, endured falsehood, false accusation, and false witnesses, and was nailed to the cross to take all of your sin and ugliness. In exchange, you get all of His holiness, perfection, and righteousness. God takes all of your ugliness and sin and buries it, never to be raised back to life. In its place, you are given a brand new life because of the resurrection of Jesus. Your sins are forgiven, you are made new, and you are cleansed from your sins.

This is the gospel truth, and it is what frees you from falsehood and allows you to live as a person of truth. The gospel frees you from pride because the God of the universe loves you, and you don't deserve it at all. There is no room for boasting because you are the chief of sinners. The gospel also frees you from hatred because you are fully known and fully loved in Christ. Life is no longer a competition where you need to win. You don't need to put others down or be on the top of the heap because you are fully known and fully loved.

I'm freed from that competitive spirit where I need to hate you or put you down. Now I'm free to love you, free to be concerned for you, and free to bear faithful witness to the gospel that can save you as well as it saved me. The gospel frees me from hatred and fear because I'm fully known and fully loved. There's a security in that, so now I don't have to be afraid. I can now face the truth about myself confident that at the end of the day, God still loves me more than I can imagine. Amen.

If you don't know that gospel, I pray that you know it today. In a moment, I'm going to close in prayer. There will be people who are down here who can pray with you and share with you this good news of a God who knows you fully and yet loves you deeply.

If you're here today and you know Jesus as Lord and Savior and you're a follower of Christ, then allow the gospel to shape your life. Allow it to free you from pride and hatred and fear. Allow it to form you into a person who believes the truth, knows the truth, loves the truth, lives the truth, and speaks the truth. Amen.

**Closing Prayer**

Let's bow together. Lord, we thank you for the good news of Jesus. We're thankful that in Christ we are both fully known and fully loved. So we can be honest, we can live out the truth, allow the gospel to shape us. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Thank you, Pastor. If you need prayer today, Craig and Wendy are going to be down here at the front. They're two of our decision prayer partners, and they'd love a chance just to pray with you if you need help with the gospel or coming to the place of putting your faith in Jesus Christ. They can help you with that this morning or any other prayer need that you may have this morning. They'd love a chance to visit with you about that.

If you're a guest, real quick let me ask you to take your phone out and text the word "next" to the number that's on the screen, 57686. That's just a way for us to connect with you and start a texting conversation with you where we can help you understand how to really take your next step here at the church and know how to take your next step in your discipleship. That would be something that we'd love to do.

If you're watching online this morning, you can do it there. You can also share your prayer requests over that, and we would be happy to pray with you and glad to partner with you about that as well.

Well, this summer's here, and a lot of people are traveling, and so sometimes when people travel, they fail to be faithful in their giving. Let me encourage you just to continue to be faithful in your giving. There's lots of ways you can give, but our church is always a very generous church, and we're able to do a lot of ministry because of that, and so I want to encourage you to continue to be faithful.

Glad you're with us this morning. You guys are sent out to live for the Lord this week.