The Power of a Lie

I remember I first heard that phrase said during a Paul Washer video. He was discussing the fact that true Christians can come out of the most heretical of church or cult backgrounds and his discussion with a person who was still a part of one. He, however, was specifically addressing the power of a religious lie. Still, the point remains. Lies are a powerful thing.

I can remember several examples of my own life where I believed a lie that I had been told as a child and that lie followed me all the way to college. Part of me knew all along that they were wrong, but they had been so deeply engrained in my mind that I just couldn't bring myself to let them go.

Let me give you an example. Suppose a child regularly hears from his parents that he/she will never succeed in life because of some kind of flaw in the child's life. Now, regardless of how pervasive the flaw is or how much work the child puts into overcoming it, if he/she hears that over and over again, the child will believe it and either spend most of his/her life trying to prove the parents wrong (usually to no avail) or filled with despair because he/she feels like a failure at everything.

As I realized this, a couple verses I had read about telling the truth started to make a lot more sense. I suppose that it's only natural that one such verse happened to be Exodus 20:16, one of the Ten Commandments, "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor."Another great example is the six things that God hates and seven that He detests in Proverbs 6. Right there in verse 17 between "haughty eyes" and "hands that shed innocent blood" is "a lying tongue".

It's more than a little disappointing that the culture we live in makes it so hard to be truthful. We even have a name for lies that we think are harmless -- white lies. Still, God makes it clear that He hates lying as much as he hates pride, adultery, murder, and stealing. And yet so often, we rank lying as not as big a deal because it doesn't cause any immediate damage that we know of.

So, the question must be asked. Why, then, do we lie? There are quite a few reasons, but they really boil down to a few:

To spare people from the truth when we think they can't handle it,
To save ourselves from getting into trouble,
To keep ourselves from believing the truth because we don't want to face it.

But to be honest, it all really boils down to our own sinfulness and depravity. And when we lie, what happens? We get ourselves into trouble that we could have easily avoided, we mislead others (with varying, and sometimes, catastrophic results) or we complicate situations unnecessarily. Like I had said earlier, for years on end, my walk with Christ had been hindered greatly simply because of a few lies that I believed and allowed to get deeply engrained in my mind. And I know that I'm not the only person in the world that this has happened to.

Therefore, I challenge all of you to take seriously the words of Ephesians 4:25 - "Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body."

-Jason Clarke
Bassist of Generic Music Group