Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Hey New Life Gillette Church, we are thrilled you decided to listen to our teaching on your favorite podcast app. If you made a decision to follow Christ today, would you let us know by visiting? Yes.newlife gillette.com Here is this week's teaching.
[00:00:25] I want to say Happy Father's Day, by the way to all the fathers out there and all the fathers online on Church 307. Also to say good morning to our friends down at the prison who join us every week. We're stoked that you're here today. We are in Exodus, chapter 20 again. We're going to read verse 16, Exodus chapter 20. We are on the ninth commandment. We are almost done with our series through the Ten Commandments. We're reading the ninth one. So Exodus, chapter 20, verse 16. Here's what it says.
[00:00:55] You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
[00:01:00] Let's pray.
[00:01:03] God, it's your Word.
[00:01:05] We love you, God. If one word is the only thing you speak, we have heard it all.
[00:01:11] God, we thank you for your presence with us. We thank you for the ability to give you glory and to sing your praise.
[00:01:18] Thank you that out of everything else you could pay attention to, you decide to be here with us this morning.
[00:01:25] Jesus, in this sermon, if there's any of my opinions in here, would you let us notice those so we can throw them away? No one needs to hear my opinions, God. But if there's anything that's consistent with your character and faithful to your word, would you plant it in our hearts? Jesus, that's why we're here. We're here to give you glory and to become like you.
[00:01:41] Amen.
[00:01:45] This morning I'm going to give you a few statements that are going to seem kind of obvious. I think these statements are going to seem pretty clear. They're not going to need a lot of explanation. I don't think you're going to need to convinced that they're true or anything like that. But these statements are going to create a progression of thought. So here's the first one.
[00:02:06] Truth is the foundation of trust.
[00:02:11] Truth is the foundation of trust. Now that's obvious, right? You can't trust something if you don't know that it's true. You can't trust information if you don't know it's true. That's why you shouldn't believe anything you see on social media because there's no way of verifying whether it's true or not. Right? If you're going to trust something, truth is super important. This is why when you need advice.
[00:02:32] When you need real advice, like life's hard, things aren't going so well, and you need good feedback from someone you call your tell it like it is friend.
[00:02:43] You know what I mean when I say tell it like it is friend? Yeah. We've all got one, you've all got that friend that doesn't really care about your feelings, right?
[00:02:49] But they're gonna tell you it like it is. And when you need real advice, when you need someone to give you feedback and help you set yourself straight, that's the person you need, right? You need your tell it like it is friend. You don't need your the fish was this big friend, right?
[00:03:06] You don't need your friend that every time they miss a buck, it was 200 inches and they were this close, right?
[00:03:11] You don't need your friend that every time she tells you a story, you go find someone else who was also there to see if it was true or not, right? We've got those friends. But when you need advice, feedback you can trust, you need someone who's going to tell it like it is, right? Who's going to look you in the eyes and tell you what they genuinely believe. Not soft sell it, not try to round the edges so it doesn't hurt so bad. You need the truth.
[00:03:39] I think it actually says a lot about our culture and the way we interact with truth that when I say tell it like it is friend, everybody knows what I mean, because we know not everybody is a tell it like it is frank.
[00:03:54] In fact, a lot of us might only have one or two, maybe not any people, that when it really comes down to it, they will call it like they see it and tell it like it is. They'll speak the truth no matter what. A lot of us like to think that we're telling like it is friends, you know, I'd like to think I am. We love being, you know, I'm a man of my word. You know, my word is my bond, right. I've found for myself though, over the years that I really like the truth when the truth makes me look good, but the truth doesn't make me look good as often as I would like it to.
[00:04:23] My relationship with truth gets a little bit more complicated when I realize that telling the whole truth, telling it like it is, wouldn't be super fun.
[00:04:32] But if we're going to have trust, then we have to have truth, right? That's why I bet anything that if things fall apart in the middle of the night, you don't call you're the fish was this big friend because you just don't know for sure, right? You're not 100% sure whether they're going to follow through because you don't know that everything they say is true, right? I bet that when things are tough, you don't call your friend that. You always have to check their story because you just don't know, right? They don't always tell what actually happened. They don't always remember things right? They sometimes get a little fuzzy on the details. And when you need someone to have your back, it's just really hard to trust someone that's fuzzy on the details.
[00:05:18] It's really hard to trust when there's not truth.
[00:05:22] Here's the next Trust is the foundation of healthy relationships.
[00:05:29] Truth is the foundation of trust.
[00:05:32] Trust is the foundation of healthy relationships. Here's a lesson that it took me way too long to learn in life. It is way better to do it right the first time with the right tools than it is to do it four or five more times. I have turned a $50 project into a $500 project way too many times. Way more times than I'm proud of. Because my jeep has had a lot of stripped out bolts because I had mostly the same the right size socket and the bolt didn't look that stuck, right? So I decided to do it. And then $200 at Harbor Freight later, I finally got the bolt unstuck and got the job done after six more hours. Or if you're a hunter, you probably know this feeling. You ever had your rifle slide off your truck and fall right on the scope, right? And you know it's probably fine, right? It didn't hit it that hard. It's probably fine. But we also know you gotta go check the zero, right? If you want to have a good hunt, you gotta go to the range, you gotta set up a target, you gotta send one shot, and you gotta make sure that that gun is hitting where it's supposed to, because otherwise later that day you definitely will. So see a 200 inch buck. That's just how it works. And then when you miss, you just won't know for sure whether it was you, whether you flinched, whether it was the wind, or whether that gun's just not on anymore, right? And that will eat you alive.
[00:06:49] It's better to do the hard work up front so that then you can trust your equipment, right?
[00:06:58] It's better to make sure things are true, make sure the gun's shooting true, make sure the tools are right for the job, then it is to go back later and have to fix it.
[00:07:11] Because when it's not true, when you're not sure, it changes your relationship with the equipment, changes your relationship with what you're doing, changes your relationship with the job, and it almost always changes the outcome.
[00:07:27] Because of my job, I spend a lot of time with couples who are engaged. I do a lot of premarital counseling. Couples come to the church, and if we do a wedding, if any of our pastors on staff do a wedding, we always require premarital counseling as part of that to help establish the relationship in the right way, in a healthy way. Here's something that I always talk about with couples that sometimes causes some eyebrows to raise.
[00:07:53] I tell every couple, if you want a healthy marriage, you cannot have any secrets.
[00:08:00] And then I look at them again, and I say, any secrets? And then I look at them one more time, and I say, not any secrets.
[00:08:11] Not a secret about what you did on spring break in high school.
[00:08:15] Not a secret about how much money you actually spend down at Wyoming Downs.
[00:08:21] Not a secret about how many drinks you actually have.
[00:08:27] Not a secret about what you may or may not have done, what you may or may not be thinking.
[00:08:33] No secrets. If you want a healthy relationship, if you want a healthy marriage, you have to have absolutely no secrets, right? You can't have any. And what that means is. And then we take it further, and I say, what that means is, she needs to have all your passwords. He needs to have all of your passwords. He needs to know everything that's on your phone by the time you get married. You need to either have merged your bank accounts or you need to both have the passwords to one another's bank accounts. You can't have an account that that person doesn't have access to in secret. You can't have a social media account that she can't get into or that he can't get into, where you can be messaging anybody that you want. It doesn't work. If you want trust, if you want a healthy relationship, since trust is the foundation of a healthy relationship, you have to have truth, the whole truth, because truth is the only way to have trust. So if you want that healthy relationship, you can't have any secret. And that means just opening up your life to that person and giving them full and complete access. That's what has to happen if you want a healthy marriage. And then every once in a while, you'll say stuff like that, and people will be like, doesn't that mean I'm living Like I'm in trouble. I mean, you're kind of treating me like a criminal here, aren't you? Like, making me share all my passwords and prove that I'm not doing bad stuff all the time. Isn't that a little bit edgy? Isn't that a little intense? And then I usually say, or at least think something like, I want you to imagine your 16 year old son came to you and said, I promise you can trust me. No, you cannot see the pictures on my phone.
[00:10:00] Do you trust them?
[00:10:02] Absolutely not. Of course not. No. Because you can't trust someone when there's not truth, right?
[00:10:10] And if someone's withholding truth, that's a really good indication that you shouldn't trust.
[00:10:16] When someone's not willing to share the truth, it's a really strong indication that that is not a trustworthy relationship. And look, that relationship probably won't exist if there's no trust. But the thing I can guarantee you is that even if it does exist, it will not be healthy while there are secrets. Because secrets grow, secrets multiply. It's way better to tell a secret two weeks before you get married than it is to admit that secret two weeks after. Because afterwards they'll think, why didn't you tell me? And what else haven't you told me? The longer secrets live, the more trust gets destroyed. If you want help. Look, if you want healthy relationships with close godly friends, if you want brothers or sisters in Christ who can have your back and hold you accountable and help push you to become like Jesus, this isn't just marriage. You got to have trust.
[00:11:05] And to have trust, you've got to have truth.
[00:11:08] Do you know why I talk with every premarital couple about this?
[00:11:13] Because on my job, I also do a lot of marriage counseling.
[00:11:17] I have married couples who come into my office. And sometimes things are really bad, sometimes they're a little bad, but they want to talk about it.
[00:11:26] And just about every time, it's because trust was broken.
[00:11:32] Just about every time trust was broken, somebody lied. Somebody didn't think it was a big deal.
[00:11:40] Why did they really need to know about that? It's not really a big deal. I mean, I can just. I don't have to share everything. It's not hurting anything. I didn't do anything wrong. And that secret grows, that secret multiplies. And that secret that started off as an innocent thing all of a sudden becomes the destroyed foundation of trust and the relationship starts to fall apart.
[00:12:01] All right? And let's just call it like it is. Because sometimes I think, you know, we should, you know, say it like it is.
[00:12:08] Let me be the tell it like it is friend a little bit. Today nobody wakes up one morning and decides to have an affair because they have a healthy marriage. They're just bored.
[00:12:18] That's not how it works.
[00:12:19] Nobody has a great, happy marriage and then winds up at a cheap hotel.
[00:12:24] No.
[00:12:25] Trust gets broken a little bit, and a secret gets held a little bit longer, and then trust gets broken a little bit more, and then a secret gets held a little bit longer. And that goes on for a year or five years until two people are basically living separate lives.
[00:12:39] And that's when marriages fall apart.
[00:12:42] Can I tell y' all something?
[00:12:44] It's way easier to build trust than it is to rebuild it.
[00:12:52] Let me just, like, talk to all the teenagers here for a second. You really want your parents to trust you? It's way easier to build trust than it is to rebuild it.
[00:13:04] Way easier. Do you know what kind of house people who flip houses hate? Buying houses with cracked, what?
[00:13:13] Foundations?
[00:13:14] Because it's almost easier to tear the house down and just build a new one. Right? If the foundation's cracked, it takes so much work to make sure that house is going to be stable. And if the foundation's cracked, it's going to break everything else. It's going to throw stuff off balance. The roof is going to be leaking, but not because the roof is leaking, because the foundation is cracked. Right? It's pulling the whole house apart. Sometimes it's easier to rebuild altogether.
[00:13:37] Please build trust now.
[00:13:40] Don't try to rebuild it later.
[00:13:43] Before we move on. I gotta take a sidebar here, because I know that there are probably some people here that have lost trust to varying degrees in a relationship. That you're hearing this and you're thinking, look, we're living in secrets already. I don't know what to do. I want to tell you.
[00:13:59] Do you know what Jesus wants to do? Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.
[00:14:10] He's the way, the truth and the life. You know what that means? Jesus wants to bring truth back into your marriage. He wants to bring truth back into the relationship with your kids. He wants to bring truth back into your family. He will restore. He will heal. Look, I cannot tell you it's going to be easy, and it's just going to happen overnight. But what I can tell you is that Jesus will restore everything sin touched. He will give back the years the locust took. Jesus will restore and heal everything. He can heal a relationship where trust has been destroyed. He can heal the foundation that's been crumbling. He can do it if you will let him. He can heal in your life and your heart. He can heal in your marriage, he can heal in your family. He can and he will. And he wants to heal absolutely anything. You will let him because he is the truth. He is the truth. Listen, don't keep shooting the gun when you don't know the scope's on zero. Let Jesus recenter it for you. Let him bring truth back into the relationship.
[00:15:05] Let him redeem, heal and restore everything.
[00:15:09] God is a healer and he wants to heal. I know sin has made it seem like your marriage will never be better again, but I promise you, Jesus can and will heal it. The thing I love about new life is I look out on any Sunday morning and I see marriage after marriage, story after story, transformation, healing, growth, complete restoration, over and over and over again. If you don't believe me, we could spend the rest of the morning having people testify. My marriage trust was broken and now my marriage is godly. My life was upside down. Jesus put it right side up.
[00:15:40] It's not too late, you're not too far. I promise.
[00:15:44] Jesus is a healer.
[00:15:46] Y' all aren't excited enough about that. It's not too late, you're not too far. I promise. Jesus is a healer.
[00:15:57] Truth is the foundation of trust.
[00:16:01] Trust is the foundation of relationships.
[00:16:05] And relationships are the foundation of healthy community.
[00:16:10] Or we could say communities. Healthy communities, healthy churches, healthy neighborhoods, healthy cities, healthy nations.
[00:16:19] Relationships are the foundation of healthy communities. If we want healthy communities at any level, national, local, we have to have relationships built on trust, built on truth.
[00:16:32] Truth is at the bottom of all of it.
[00:16:36] A while back, there was a pretty well known pastor. I used to listen to a lot of his sermons and stuff, and he got in a lot of trouble. He didn't do anything illegal. He didn't like, have an affair. He didn't steal money from the church or anything like that. But he said a lot of things from stage that got him in a lot of trouble.
[00:16:52] And people were saying he's a bully and he's mean and a whole lot of things like that. And I listened to a bunch of stuff and read the articles. And I remember thinking at that time, who in the world would do that? What kind of pastor could ever say something like that? I mean, this guy must have been corrupt the whole time. He should have never been given a microphone. How in the world didn't they see through him all? I mean, I was just, you know, just Angry. And how could this ever happen?
[00:17:19] Couldn't imagine how he could be anything but corrupt, having said the things that he said. And then I met somebody who knew him.
[00:17:30] I realized I didn't have the whole story.
[00:17:34] I didn't have the truth.
[00:17:37] So what I said couldn't be trusted.
[00:17:41] You know why I didn't have the truth?
[00:17:43] Because I didn't have a relationship.
[00:17:46] How in the world could I have had the truth? I didn't know the guy. We weren't friends.
[00:17:53] There was no way for me to know what was actually going on.
[00:17:58] So what I was inadvertently doing was bearing false witness.
[00:18:04] You know, the Ten Commandments? We've learned this throughout the series. In the beginning, we said the 10 Commandments are given to us in the shape of a wedding ceremony that Moses goes up on the mountain, meets the Lord before the congregation. They make commitments to one another. The Ten Commandments, also called the decalogue in Hebrew, called the ten words that. These are like the vows of the covenant, the vows of the marriage. So these commandments function like. Like a wedding ceremony, like the commitments of our relationship. And then a couple weeks ago, when we talked about adultery, we said that marriage is both legal and. And spiritual. Marriage is supposed to be hard to get out of. There's a legal and a spiritual element to marriage. So when we look at the Ten Commandments, there is both legal and spiritual implications for them. They are laws, they are expectations, and they are spiritual and relational truth. So when we look at this command, you shall not bear false witness against one another. It sounds legal, doesn't it? It makes you think of perjury. Do not bear false witness. You're a witness in a trial. Do not bear false witness. Do not say what you do not know to be true about.
[00:19:11] And that's absolutely true. That's one of the implications of this command, is that God is establishing the legal process. He's creating a trustworthy legal process. But here's the thing. A legal process can't be trusted unless it's built on truth.
[00:19:26] Right? And the legal process of our society keeps our relationship stable, right? Allows you to operate safely, allows you to generally trust that you'll be treated well and other people will be treated well. So you can't really separate the legal from relational.
[00:19:43] A healthy community is built on healthy relationships, which are built on trust, which are built on truth.
[00:19:50] Here's the interesting thing about testimony bearing false witness.
[00:19:55] If.
[00:19:57] Let's imagine something. Let's imagine that I'm a witness in a trial, okay? I'm a Witness in a trial, and Pastor Mark is on trial, okay? Now, if I get up on the witness stand and I say, I saw Mark do it, I saw him.
[00:20:15] But what I actually mean is I think Mark did it because I saw someone who looked a whole lot like him.
[00:20:22] What is that called?
[00:20:26] It's called perjury.
[00:20:29] Right.
[00:20:31] Because I'm not telling the truth in the witness stand.
[00:20:35] I'm telling you what I think is true, but I'm telling it to you like it absolutely is true. Because when you bear witness for or against someone, you don't do that to share your opinions about them. You do that to share what you do or do not know to be true about them.
[00:20:53] So bearing false witness, this is very important.
[00:20:57] Bearing false witness.
[00:21:00] Yes, it has to do with lying. It absolutely has to do with saying something I know to be untrue, but it also has to do with saying something that I do not know to be true.
[00:21:12] You see the difference?
[00:21:14] It is bearing false witness if I say what I know to be a lie, it is also bearing false witness if I say what I do not know to be true, as if it is true.
[00:21:27] If I'm saying what I think about you, but not what I know about you, I'm bearing false witness. And look, I think once again, we just need to kind of call it like it is this morning. Because we live in a world where we've got things like Facebook and Instagram and social media, which create just a hotbed of bearing false witness. Can we just be honest about that? Where for some reason, people who claim to be good, faithful Christians and go to church every week and generally would never lie, will say things that are absolutely atrocious about other human beings that there's absolutely no way that we could know that they're true, but will say it just because they're a Democrat or just because they're a Republican or just because they're a vegan or just because they're from California or just because they're from Montana or whatever, Colorado, whatever state or whatever place we're not from, we'll say, well, those people over there, you know how they are, but you don't know them, so we don't know how they are, it's bearing false witness.
[00:22:23] It's saying what I think to be true, but I don't know is true about someone.
[00:22:30] I'm misrepresenting a human being because there's absolutely no way I can know what everybody who votes that way or everybody who lives there or everybody who thinks like that or talks like that or dresses like that. There's absolutely no way I can know who they are, everything about them. But man, we'll talk like it, won't we?
[00:22:49] And we'd never talk about a co worker like that. But we'll talk about a celebrity like that as if they're not human too.
[00:22:58] Saying things that there's absolutely no way we could know that they're true. Because we don't have relationship.
[00:23:06] We don't have the relationship. So we don't have truth. And we don't have truth. So we don't have trust and our communities fall apart. Look, it's not going to surprise you, you know, we live in a pretty divided time where we have a hard time even sitting down at the same table or in the same restaurant with people who are on different sides of the political aisle generally, because we don't actually know them, we just think things about them that there's no way we could know whether they're true or not.
[00:23:31] Can you imagine a world where just us, just us who follow Jesus, just us who go to new life. If we said, you know what, I will not say anything I do not know to be true about anyone.
[00:23:43] Can you imagine that? If we said, I won't say anything about you, about a politician, about anybody else, unless I know that it's true, I just won't say it. Look, we can share our opinions. We can talk about policies and differences of opinion. That's totally fine, right? That's talking about me and what I think. But when I switch from talking about policies and opinions to talking about the people, then I'm bearing false witness.
[00:24:05] When I'm talking about people, not opinions, that's different. When I'm saying I can say I think and I believe all I want, but when I start saying they, they act, they think those people. I'm bearing false witness because I'm talking about something there's no way I could know.
[00:24:22] Can you imagine how different our world would be? Do you want to see a community that's unified because we're not fighting over secondary things? Do you want to see cities and states and nations where we can set aside division? It's only going to come when we build our lives on truth.
[00:24:40] Build your relationships on truth and trust will follow.
[00:24:46] Build your relationships on truth and trust will follow.
[00:24:51] Let me ask you another question. Who is truth?
[00:24:54] Jesus. Who is truth?
[00:24:58] He's the way, the truth and the life. So another way you can say this is build your relationships on Christ. Build your relationships on Jesus and Trust will follow. Do you know why? Do you know why trust always follows Jesus? Because he always tells the truth.
[00:25:14] He tells the whole truth. Here's the crazy thing, the craziest thing in the world. Jesus knows everything about you. He knows absolutely everything about you. He knew it before you were ever born. He knows every good and bad thing. He knows every evil thought you've ever had. He knows everything that you're hoping to keep secret and hoping all your friends never find out about.
[00:25:30] Absolutely everything about you.
[00:25:32] And he loves you completely. Jesus looks at us and he tells the whole truth. He says, you are broken. You're a sinner. You've fallen short. You need forgiveness. And he says, I love you. I want to heal you. I will forgive you. I'll restore you. He tells the whole truth so you can completely trust him. You can trust him with your whole self. You can build your whole relationship and your whole life on him because he tells the whole truth. He tells the truth of the brokenness and sin and corruption, and he tells the truth of the love and forgiveness and restoration. Build your relationship, build your life on him, and you will build it on the truth. And when you build it on the truth, your relationships can be trusted. And we get healthy communities as the result of that. Have you let Jesus tell you the truth lately?
[00:26:15] Have you let Jesus tell you how much he loves you? Or do you keep looking in the mirror and the only thing you can see is everything bad you've ever done and every regret? Because that's true, too. It's just not the whole truth.
[00:26:26] It's not all of it.
[00:26:28] Jesus wants to tell you the whole truth. He wants to say, yeah, you failed, but I didn't.
[00:26:34] Yeah, you fell short, but I loved you anyway.
[00:26:39] You might have let me down, but I'll never let you down.
[00:26:42] He wants to tell you the whole truth. If you. If I. If we can build our relationships on truth, on the truth of Jesus, trust will follow. Do you want a healthy marriage? Build it on the truth of Jesus. Build a marriage where you tell the whole truth. Do you want godly friendships that will last, that will make it through the test of time and difficult things? Build it on Christ and build it on the truth.
[00:27:07] Build your relationships on Jesus, on the truth. And trust will follow.
[00:27:12] Because it is true that we have all fallen short and sinned and messed up. It's true that we are all corrupt.
[00:27:19] The Old Testament tells us that the heart of a man, the heart of a human, is deceitful above all things who can know it. But it's also true that you were made in the image of God and that he loves you completely and perfectly and will never stop seeking you to forgive you and restore you and heal you.
[00:27:36] That is just as true as every failure.
[00:27:46] Are you going to tell the truth?
[00:27:51] Are you going to tell the truth about how loved you are?
[00:27:54] Are you going to tell the truth to your spouse?
[00:28:00] It's time to finally admit the secret.
[00:28:03] It's time to finally admit it. Look, I know you think that, because I've thought it before, that if just nobody finds out.
[00:28:12] I know we think if nobody finds out, well, then it'll be okay if I can just keep the secret.
[00:28:20] That's the thing about secrets, is they don't. We don't keep them, they keep us.
[00:28:26] The longer you keep it, the more it controls you. Paul said in first Corinthians, I will not be mastered by anything. I will not be controlled by anything.
[00:28:35] That's what we get. We get freedom when we surrender to the truth of Jesus instead of trying to let the secret control us.
[00:28:45] We weren't planning on doing this, but I'm going to ask whoever our prayer partner is for today to just go ahead and go to the prayer wall during this song.
[00:28:52] If there's something that you need to pray about, maybe one of our pastors can be over at the 5 and 5 wall to pray as well. If you need to tell the truth about something, if you need someone to look you in the eyes and tell you the truth that Jesus loves you, there's no shame in this. There's absolutely no shame. Shame died at the cross.
[00:29:09] We don't have to carry it anymore.
[00:29:12] While we're responding in worship, I want to invite you to just come up to the prayer wall. Come up to the 5 and 5 wall and tell the truth.
[00:29:19] Maybe you're not sure what the truth is and you need someone to tell it to you. You don't have to go through it alone. You don't have to do it alone. You don't have to fight it alone.
[00:29:27] Jesus is with you and so are we.
[00:29:31] Let's stand and pray.
[00:29:34] Jesus, you tell us the truth. You tell us the whole truth.
[00:29:40] The truth that we have fallen short and failed, but the truth that we are loved and that nothing can get in the way of your love. That neither height, nor death, nor angels, nor demons, nor anything on heaven, on earth, or under the earth can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. That is the truth.
[00:29:57] God, would you give us the confidence and the courage to receive your truth, to be people of the truth, to run from secrets and run from shame and run into the light of your truth. God. And if there's somebody here listening to this sermon who doesn't want to step out and pray with someone, but you know, and we know that they need to. God, would you give them the courage to not care what anybody thinks about them for stepping out? Would you give them the courage to speak the truth, to hear the truth, to respond to your conviction right now that they would not miss the moment, but that you would meet them here even as we worship, we love you.
[00:30:37] Amen.
