Re: Little white lies....

Here's one last way to look at this whole subject. Forgive me if I've already said this, but sometimes I can't remember which part of the studies I've written down here and which parts are just in my personal notes.

Take a look at this verse:

John 8:44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

By that verse alone (and there are many others) we can easily see that lying-any and all kinds of lies, is from Satan and not from God. Lying is something humans come by naturally. Think about it...have you ever known of any parent that had to teach their child to lie? I sure haven't! No, we have to teach them to tell the truth because lying comes naturally from their sin nature.

Then we have this verse:

John 14:6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Here we are shown again one of God's attributes. God is truth, just as God is love. Satan is the opposite of God. Now that we know God is truth we know that in order to be like Him, we too must be the truth as much as we can be. We can't do it on our own though because just as we had to teach our children to tell the truth, we need our Daddy to teach us to tell the truth ALL the time. So He then tells us:

John 14:15-17 “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

He gives us His Holy Spirit to dwell within us. The Holy Spirit is also God and being God, He too is Truth just as Jesus and the Father are Truth.

John 16:13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.

God will never ever guide us to go against His own written Word. Never! Not for any reason! That is one Truth that we can stand on all our lives and use to test things to see if they're from God or not. If someone tries to tell us that God told them to lie, we can instantly know that they have been badly deceived because God cannot go against Himself and God is Truth.

I'm afraid that there is simply no way to get around the fact that any and all lies are a sin, regardless of why the lies are told, where they're told, how they're told or anything else we can think up as an excuse.

This is yet another area where we who have been born again are different from the world. The unsaved hate to be told they've done something wrong and will instantly defend themselves and make excuses for what they've done. However as we mature we begin to want to know what our sins are. We want to know them so we can stop doing them because we want above all else to please our Lord. We love Him and don't want to disappoint him or hurt Him. Therefore we generally are pleased in a way when we discover something that we've been doing is a sin. We're not pleased we've been sinning but are pleased that we now understand that it's a sin and can ask our Father's help in overcoming it. We can then praise Him because we know He will never turn us down when we ask for help to please Him!

I'm not saying that those of us who are born again don't ever get defensive when we learn something we do is a sin; sometimes we do that too, but we do it for a different reason then the world does. The world does it because they want to be right. We do it because the thought that we might be displeasing our Lord is so horrible to us that we often don't want to admit it our guilt at first.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately since we've been writing about it and it amazes me how closely these studies are all tied together:

Stress,worry,fear etc & the Christian (condensed)

what is your take on swearing (bible study thread)

Little white lies.....

Thoughts that are sin

So I've been reflecting on this a lot as I said and I think what I'd like to do is start a new thread to show how they all connect.

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