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We may think it’d be nice if there were a device where we could make people tell the truth. But, what about ourselves? We take credit that belongs to someone else, withhold truth when it could help, or pass along a claim we have not checked. How out of control are our own words everyday?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
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Ah, sometimes it’d be nice to have superpowers, wouldn’t it? Just like, I don’t know, I think I’d like to be Tech Man, right? I could just point at technology, it just works. That’d be kind of interesting. But every superhero does have a superpower, right? Otherwise, you wouldn’t be very super. You’d be kind of ordinary man or something. You wouldn’t write a story about that. So everyone does.
And I found myself this week thinking about Wonder Woman’s superpower, or one of her powers, at least. We watched Wonder Woman, the 2017 movie, a while back and had a film discussion about it. And if you recall or if you know her story from elsewhere, she has a lasso. Do you remember what kind of lasso that is? It makes you tell the truth. Yes, it’s the lasso of truth.
Here’s an interesting little tidbit about that, right? Because we kind of have this superpower and we think, wouldn’t it be nice if we had that, right? There are those times you just like to lasso someone, right? Okay, now you’re going to tell the truth. I’m aiming all over because I’m not targeting anyone here. But it’d just be so handy, right? Now, here’s what I didn’t know until this week. The man who came up with the character of Wonder Woman and came up with the lasso of truth is also the man who claimed to have invented the lie detector, the polygraph.
Now, he had this idea, developed this thing. Let’s try to develop this in the world. But it’s imperfect. There’s a lot of debate whether it actually works at all, even. Some people think that polygraphs are useful. A lot of times they’re also viewed as simply a way to intimidate people into telling the truth because they’re afraid it’s going to work.
But it gets even more complicated than that. The man who invented the lasso of truth for Wonder Woman and invented the polygraph in our world, well, there’s debate on whether he actually invented the polygraph because there are different people who claim to have invented the lie detector. Isn’t it kind of ironic that this device intended to discern the truth has several different people claiming to have invented it, so presumably several of them would not pass if their own machine works correctly.
And I thought about that. Here’s a man who came up with this superhero power of making people tell the truth and tried to develop the same thing in our real world, and he’s involved in a controversy on who’s telling the truth about coming up with this machine. We have a hard time speaking the truth, and we have a hard time discerning the truth.
That second problem amplifies the first because if we have a hard time telling the truth, isn’t it appealing to think that the person who came up with the lasso of truth is also the one who brought a real-world solution to determining truth? Well, it encourages more non-truth-telling. It encourages more lying because if we can be good enough at it, we can convince people, and then they’ll like it. They’ll maybe like us, maybe elevate us. Maybe they’ll make us feel important. Maybe we will, in at least a worldly sense, be important.
Well, as we come to the next of our, the next to last commandment, and the next one that we’re looking at, God’s going to challenge us as people to be people who tell the truth. God’s not going to throw a lasso of truth around us and say, now you’re going to tell the truth. He simply calls us as his people. We talked a moment ago about putting on that shirt of victory. If we’re going to put on the shirt of victory, if we’re going to have that proclamation in our lives that Jesus is the victor, he wants us to be people whose lips reflect that.
Let’s pray that he’d help us to do that tonight. Father, we are those who come with unclean lips. We don’t always speak the truth. Sometimes we actively distort it. Sometimes we take credit where we shouldn’t. Sometimes we simply choose not to speak when we should. But Lord, would you help us to be those who, recognizing who you are and what you’ve done for us, we wouldn’t need a lasso of truth. People just see us as your followers and say, well, a follower of Jesus. That person, he or she’s going to tell the truth. Help us to live up to that, that people would know they could trust what we say and know that we’re using our lips, our words, for your glory. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Okay, so our next commandment, like the last few, they’re pretty straightforward. They’re short. Seems rather uncomplicated. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
I think it goes further than how sometimes we want this to go, though, because what we’d kind of like for this to be is I shouldn’t lie in court about someone I’m really close to, right? Because that’s pretty easy. If you haven’t been called to testify in court or you haven’t been called to testify in court very often, well, the rest of the time it’s a 100% success rate.
The problem is, though, is God wants us to be people who clearly don’t need the lasso of truth, not just when we’re sitting there and the judge is staring at us and we’ve put our hand on the Bible and been sworn in and we’re giving testimony in a court of law and we could perjure ourselves. God wants everything that comes out of our mouths to be that way.
And so, really, this is a calling, quite simply, to not lie about anyone. He doesn’t want us to lie. Certainly not against people.
We get into interesting discussions every so often in Bible study. You get to one of those stories, we were at one a couple weeks ago, where David goes in to get some supplies for the troops as he’s out running Saul, and he’s not exactly completely honest with the priests. It’s sort of like, well, okay, what’s David doing here? Is this good? Is this bad? Is he lying? Is the priest entitled to know? Etcetera, etcetera. You get into this whole thing, right?
People have debated this for a very long time. We can get really bogged down there, but in particular in this commandment, what we’re focused on, more than anything else, is what are we saying against other people? And we should have that conversation. It’s worth diving into those weird little nuanced examples, like what David’s doing there and how that all works out.
But most of them don’t need nuance. Most of the situations aren’t complicated. Most of them aren’t, the king is going to kill me over here, and we’re going to starve to death over there. What should I say? Most of them are, if I open my mouth, am I going to choose to say things that are true and stop building for the people around me, or am I going to tear them down?
And I make that distinction because we can get so busy looking at those nuanced, weird situations that we don’t really look at the straightforward ones that are usually in front of us. God wants us to be thinking about those.
Now last week we were looking at stealing, and if we go over to Leviticus 19:11, we see how these two tie together. Leviticus, we find these words: you shall not steal, you shall not deal falsely, you shall not lie to one another, you shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God; I am the Lord. God puts stealing and falsehoods that we say together, and that’s rightly so.
We talked last week that stealing isn’t only physical objects. We can steal someone’s reputation, and certainly one of the primary ways we can do that is by giving false witness. What do we say about other people? Are we taking something that belongs to them? A lot of times it seems innocent enough in the moment. It doesn’t have to be big, grand things, but oftentimes it’s the little things that build up over time that end up hurting.
You’re at work, and you see someone working really hard, and the boss comes in and gives you a compliment. Do you redirect and say, well, it wasn’t me. No, Joe over here, he’s been working night and day on this. I just came in, I was on break. What do we say? Oh, yeah, thanks. It’s really subtle like that.
It’s not some big, amazing deception that we put together. I’m going to tear these people apart. Sometimes it’s just not making sure that the honor goes in the right place. But nonetheless, it’s false witness, because what we’re choosing to do is to turn it towards us.
And that’s the real challenge here, I think, is that when we’re talking about not bearing false witness, what we’re really dealing with is, to what degree are we looking to get benefit out of what we say? We’re looking for how can I benefit from my words.
It’s much easier to fall into this. One of the great temptations of bearing false witness is if we have bribery involved, and sometimes that’s just outright bribery. Say you’re a politician, you’re going to have people trying to get you to say things for money. A lot of people trying to get you to say things for money. The temptation is, well, I said that. I could do so much more good with that money.
Now, if you’re not a politician and you’re just an ordinary person, you probably aren’t going to have as many opportunities that are that direct. Here, I’ll hand you a sack of cash if you’ll say something. But it can be those reputational things, right? I could take this credit from the boss and not pass it on because it would benefit me. I really need the promotion, and I know I’m this close. This close. A little bit won’t hurt. Yeah, Joe’s been working hard, but everyone knows he works hard. I could use a little right now.
You know? It falls into those times where we just withhold useful information.
Leviticus 5:1: If anyone sins in that he hears a public adjuration to testify, and though he is a witness, whether he has seen or come to know the matter, yet does not speak, he shall bear his iniquity.
I think sometimes we think we’re off the hook if we just don’t say anything, right? If I keep silent, if I zip up my mouth and no one hears from me, then I don’t have to worry about this because I won’t say anything false. But silence can be a form of false testimony.
God doesn’t want us to say, well, I don’t want to break his commandments, so I won’t say anything, and if I don’t say anything, then I’ll never get in trouble for this.
Because if we’re not saying something, we’re saying something, right? People are saying, well, who stole the whole box of communion and left us without any elements tonight? No one did, thankfully. But someone says that, and we know, but we choose not to say it implies, well, maybe we just have to ignore it because we have no idea who stole it.
Rob, do you know? Jeff. Jeff stole it. Okay, very good. Oh, no, Kathy stole it. Oh, we have a lot of false witnesses. Oh, the other Jeff. Oh, I’m sorry. I jumped to conclusions there.
We are called to actually say what we know when it will help someone, especially, and here’s the thing, what God’s concerned about there is someone gets accused of something, right? Someone’s accused of stealing. Someone’s accused of murder. Someone’s accused of something, and we choose not to say anything because we think, I might get in trouble. I might be called to testify, and I might say something wrong, and then they’ll think that I’m perjuring myself, and suddenly I’ll be in trouble, or maybe that person was involved with a gang, and suddenly other people will want to kill me. It’ll just be inconvenient.
That can come up in actual legal settings, right? You’re not forced to testify, but someone contacts you and says, will you testify? Would you be willing? I’d like my lawyer to call you up and have you testify, and you think, boy, I know this is not going to be convenient for me. I’m not glutton for punishment. This does not sound like what I wanted to do with my time and the temptation is, okay, no, I won’t.
God says, if you know, if you can help, then speak. Again, it doesn’t have to be those giant, huge, high-stakes legal settings. It’s just in day-to-day speech. Are we willing to speak when we have opportunity to? Because what God wants us to do, he’s given us a voice. He’s given us the ability to communicate with language. The reason he’s given that is so we can use it for good.
And so we have the opportunity, and we choose not to, even if we’re not actively saying something false, we’re missing an opportunity to do what God’s given us that voice for.
I mean, think about God’s voice. Think about what God does. He didn’t need to ever speak. God could have just been triune by himself forever, not creating anything, and God chooses to speak and make something good out in his presence. And if he hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here. God is the one who speaks truth, and it happens.
And you think about that. The psalmists go back to this over and over again. I was reading Psalm 33, verse 9, and just the psalmist is in wonder at how God spoke and created, and you think about that. This beauty of creation. And God says he wants us to follow him.
We think about putting on that shirt of victory, and what does it look like to follow him? Well, it looks like, well, not. We speak and things happen, right? It wouldn’t be if it did. But he’s not chosen to give us that ability.
We don’t speak and make the world change physically. Can’t say, you know, add another floor to this building and suddenly, oh, there’s an elevator over there. I never noticed that before. It doesn’t happen that way for us, but we can choose to be creative and constructive and up-building in how we speak so that we’re following the example of our Heavenly Father by sharing. We’re following our Heavenly Father by helping those who need a voice.
It’s where we’re challenged in our time of confession. God time and time again says, speak out for those who are voiceless. Speak out for those who are suffering. We look through the law over and over again. Speak out for those who are falsely accused. Speak out for the widow, for the orphan, for the poor. Why does God want us to do this? Because he wants us to follow his example and be those who build up with our voices.
It ruins our testimony when we do otherwise. That’s where we come back to this instruction that we looked at earlier in Leviticus 19. Why does God say we shouldn’t steal and shouldn’t lie? Because he’s the Lord and he’s holy. If we’re God’s people, if we’re meant to be a holy people, then the thing that we can’t do is take our lips that are supposed to confess the wonders of what God has done and instead use them to convey things that are untrue.
It’s one of the things that I think is so disturbing is we get caught up, and it’s so easy to do, but we get caught up in our high-volume, full-on, constant onslaught that we have in social media today, and we’re so tempted to just share things, right? I’ll just reshare this. I’ll just spread it around. I’ll share this meme, and it makes this person, this figure, this public figure that I think is just horrible look horrible, and that’s such a good thing because this person’s so horrible.
Do we stop and think, well, is it true? Because we may not, but someone else may, and that someone else may be someone who is wondering about whether it’s worth listening to Jesus. They hear what we’re saying, and they know it’s not true, and they say, well, if you don’t care about the truth in this, why should I believe that you care about the truth when you talk about that alleged God’s word, right? Because you say it’s God’s word, but how should I know? I can’t even trust that you’ll be a little thoughtful in what you share about the people that have verifiable, objective things happening to them right now. How in the world can I trust you to talk about something that happened 2,000 years ago?
The same challenge for the Israelites, because the Israelites were meant to be a nation of priests. They were called to be a people that pointed to the Lord for the rest of the world to see, and God said, don’t be a people where those around you hear that you are constantly giving false testimony about each other, because if they hear that, then why are they ever going to listen to you when you talk about me, when you talk about the wonders of what I do? When generations from now, you talk about the Exodus and how I brought you out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and people see that you can’t even talk about what happened yesterday faithfully, why are they going to listen?
God’s calling us to be careful with our words, to be thoughtful with our words. I think that’s a key reason why, when we look at how God develops the law, take a look at Deuteronomy 17:7. He has this provision: The hand of the witnesses shall be the first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people, so you shall purge the evil from your midst.
The law allows for capital punishment. In fact, God says there are times that it should happen, so it’s not to say that shouldn’t happen, but what God says is, you better be really sure about what you’re doing. And here’s how I want to know that you’re going to be sure, he says. He says, if you are going to testify against someone, you’re going to say, yes, I saw him right before we found out that Sam was smacked in the head, and he was laying there, and he was dying, and so I know that he’s the one that did it. God says, I want you to be so sure of that that you’re willing to pick up the stone to execute. Are you that sure?
And yes, that’s a matter of life and death, but so often the things that we say are matters, maybe not of immediate life and death, but life and death nonetheless. We see someone who’s at the end of the rope, and we don’t even know it, and we say something false, and that person decides, fine, I guess I’m not supposed to live anymore.
We don’t want to be a people that contribute to that. We want to be a people that pull people away from the brink. And sometimes it doesn’t mean that the person is actually physically going to take his or her own life. It could just be that we’re putting them into a place where they’re not really living because they’re miserable.
We take away something that they deserve. We place on them something that they don’t deserve. And what do we do? We take away a bit of the life that God intended for them.
God wants us to say, I’m going to speak about somebody. I’m going to give a witness against somebody. I better be willing to actually, whatever the punishment’s going to be upon that person, it should be the sort of thing where I want to be the person doing it. If I’m not confident enough, then I should pause.
And so on the one hand, God wants us to be ready to testify. We looked earlier. We shouldn’t withhold information that needs to be said. But at the same time, if we’re going to testify, we should be very confident in what we’re saying.
So there’s a tension there. God wants us to both be willing to speak when speaking is needed, but not to frivolously speak when we’re not actually certain, and not to frivolously make things up because we think, eh, it doesn’t really matter.
Too often we just feel removed from the consequences. We don’t really think about where the consequences are going, or at least we know they’re not going to get in our way. And so, what’s it matter? You talk to somebody in customer service and you hear about people who are just frustrated, and so they give a bad review to someone who’s serving customers like themselves. And maybe the person helped this particular individual as much as possible but wasn’t able to solve the problem.
And so the customer gives a review and just lies about that agent. What’s it matter? You’re never going to talk to him again. You’re never going to talk to her again, right? What’s it matter? It matters to God. He doesn’t want us to speak falsely. And even if we don’t immediately see the results, even if we try to talk ourselves into it, what’s it matter?
God wants us to actually care about telling the truth instead. And to tell the truth broadly, not narrowly. Because the temptation here can be to try to play the game that the legalists throughout all the ages have tried to do with the word neighbor.
Who’s my neighbor? Oh, I can’t bear false witness against my neighbor? Well, okay, my neighbor’s difficult, but I can live with that. But when I call up the bank and I’m just annoyed, if they ask to stay on the line and answer that survey, that person isn’t my neighbor. I don’t even know where that person lives. I don’t even know if that person’s in this country, right? I’ll probably never meet that person.
No. God says, your neighbor is the person you’re dealing with right now, whomever it is.
Commentators have observed, actually, in this passage, when we see this, and then we see how it’s drawn out throughout the law, and God goes over and over again how we should always speak truthfully about people, that this is really the first time that we see that broader use of neighbor that God then draws us to over and over again in Scripture.
The first times that we see the references to neighbors, God is referring to those in close proximity. But here, here’s the first time he starts to open up. In these Ten Commandments, as God is calling us to be people who witness to him, and witness to the world about him, he calls to think more broadly about neighbor.
And it’s so, so easy when we’re removing ourselves from those consequences to not think about that.
I remember a number of years ago, I was discipling a young man, and he and his family were finishing up church service, and he and his family said, well, why don’t you come along with us to lunch? We love this sushi place.
Now, I’ll confess, I cannot muster the strength to eat sushi. I just can’t. I’m sorry for sushi lovers here. I just can’t. Well, I’m not really sorry. You can have all my sushi, every single bit of it. I just can’t do it. I would like my food cooked.
But anyway, we go to this sushi place, which I did kind of gently, gracefully confirm ahead of time had something cooked on the menu. I just wanted to make sure. And we went there, and it was a different concept than I was used to. You had a menu, and you ordered from it, but it was all you can eat. And so you could say, you know, I want so many of this piece of sushi or that piece, and they’d bring it out, and then if you wanted more, they’d bring it out again.
There was one little footnote on the menu, though. You could ask for as much sushi as you wanted, and thankfully as much of anything cooked that they had as you wanted as well. But if you asked for more than you were willing to eat, you were going to pay for every piece that you didn’t eat.
And that really stuck in my head, and for one, it made me a little nervous. I thought, well, what if the initial portion’s too big, and I can’t, you know? But it also struck me that what they’re trying to do is that when we have an all-you-can-eat kind of situation, the temptation can be, I’m not going to think about if I’m going to waste a bunch of food. I’ll just take a bunch of everything, and if I don’t like something, and normally I’d eat it because I’d actually paid for it, I’m not really paying for that specific thing, so I’ll just throw that away. I’ll get something else, right? I’ll just keep going through it because there’s no real consequence to it.
But when they said, well, you can have as much as you want, but if you leave anything on that table, and you haven’t eaten it, you’re paying for it, they bring the consequences right back into focus, right? Okay, I’m going to think about what I can actually eat, and if I’m not sure, I’ll order a little, and maybe I’ll order a little more, but I’m not going to order a bunch and then have to pay another 10, 20, 30 bucks in uncooked food.
It brings the consequences closer.
When God, for example, said, if you’re going to testify against someone, and that person’s going to be put to death, you’re going to actually participate in putting that person to death.
What he was saying is, don’t think that your speech is an all-you-can-eat buffet that doesn’t have consequence. Think about what you’re actually doing to people.
And while that was a very specific application of it, what he wants us to do is think about that in every opportunity we have to speak. Am I going to build up, or am I going to tear down?
And so often, it’s easy to just run one’s mouth, right? I do that plenty of times. I’m just talking, and all of a sudden I think, oh, I really shouldn’t have said that.
It can be kind of challenging when you’re preaching on a passage like this, because you can start to talk to somebody, yeah, you know, I was thinking about this passage about how you shouldn’t speak falsely about people, and you know, I know some people that are, oh boy, let me tell you about them.
And you start talking about them, right? And then you want it to be a good story, so you just kind of get really going into it. Maybe it’s been a little while, so you can kind of, you can’t quite remember details, just go ahead and fill it in, right, make a good story. Oh, wait a second, that’s why I’m preaching on it. Yeah, I don’t want to do that, do I? No, no, I don’t want to do that. Let’s tighten that button back up here. I need to be careful, right?
Do we think about that? When we’re going to say something about somebody, are we thinking, is this speaking that truth that God said I’m obliged to speak to not remain silent, or am I just speaking something because it feels good to speak it right now? Am I sure when the waiter comes by and looks at the table that I’m not going to have a lot of uneaten speech on this table that there needs to be a reckoning for?
Because what God’s saying is, yeah, I want you to speak. I just wanted to make sure that you actually think about how it’s attached so that when the meal’s done, the table’s empty. You said the truth and the whole truth, and yes, we should ask God to help us to do that. But we haven’t embellished. We haven’t distorted. And we haven’t gotten that silent dessert that’s sitting there that we’ve just chosen not to say anything, but it’s accumulating on the table either.
We’ve balanced it all, and we’ve cared enough to understand what we say matters, both our speech and our lack thereof.
God wants us not to be using speech to tear people down. He wants the primary focus of it to be to build people up.
Leviticus 19:16: You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor. I am the Lord.
What does God want us to do? What should be the primary focus of our speech? Our primary focus should be to actually stand up for our neighbor, not to stand against our neighbor.
Now again, sometimes the two get kind of confusing, right? You see something that is deeply wrong and disturbing done, and you have to speak against one neighbor for the benefit of another neighbor. We should feel that tension.
Because certainly, we’ve just been challenged. We can’t remain silent if there’s a wrong being done. But what we should do is be people who are eager. The main thing that we’re doing is we’re building people up.
Old saying, right? Everyone says, oh, my mother always used to say, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all, right? Yeah. God wants us to be people who are searching for good things to say, not to butter people up, but because God comes and speaks good things to us. He draws us, and he speaks of his love to us.
And here’s something that’s always true, something good we can say. We can always tell someone that God loves them. We might be really, really frustrated. That person might just be so frustrating to us right now, but yet, God loves him. God loves her.
Now, we shouldn’t do that in full Southern hospitality style. God love you, right? It’s not that, right? Because then we know, I’m not really saying, right? No.
We can say it genuinely. Sometimes we might need to say, you know, I’m struggling right now, but I know God loves you, and I want to work to where I can say more good.
Now, again, that’s not to say there aren’t times to speak up, right? If you witness a murder, you should speak out in the right constructive ways, because that’s not helpful for the family of the victim. It’s not helpful for future victims that could still be harmed.
If you see someone embezzling, going to work, and you see that your co-worker emptying the cash drawer, you shouldn’t say, well, God wants me to build up. Well, I know Sally’s had it kind of rough lately. Maybe I’ll just look the other way.
No, you should speak up. You should love your other neighbor, your boss, enough to speak up in that situation.
The point is, I think we really need more correction in the other direction, because at least in our cultural moment, I’d say we’re in a cultural moment that loves to speak in ways that tear down, not so much to build up.
And so if we need a corrective, it’s probably towards building up.
Think about the story of the Good Samaritan, which is really fitting with this commandment, because it is that first commandment to use that broad sense of neighbor.
And if you recall the context of when Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, why does he do it? He tells that story because he’s being asked by one of the teachers of the law, who’s my neighbor?
And it’s right to that, let’s see if we can narrow it down, impulse that we have. Whom is it that I need to love?
Jesus tells the story of a man of a hated group, and how that man showed love to someone he didn’t know, he had no connection to. The only kind of way he could figure out a way to relate to that man is that he was of the other side of the hatred.
What does he do with his voice? Well, he helps the man physically, but then he goes and he speaks promises to the innkeeper that this man would be taken care of, that he would provide the funds necessary to take care of the man.
Jesus sums up in Luke 10:36: After he’s talked about the priest and the Levite, he didn’t do any of those things as well. He says, which of these three do you think proved to be the neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?
The man who had been questioning Jesus, the answer is the one who showed him mercy. And Jesus said to him, you go and do likewise.
Imagine for a moment, if we took this commandment, and we thought about how we shouldn’t bear false witness against our neighbor, we said, okay, I’m not going to say anything false against my neighbor. I’ll only speak the truth.
And if you knew my neighbor, you’d know that it would be awfully tempting.
So if I’m only going to speak the truth, here’s what I’m going to do. I really am not going to say anything. I’m never going to say an encouraging word. I’m certainly not going to tell anyone else anything nice or helpful about that neighbor. And if I see that neighbor in distress, I’m not going to speak out in a way that could help. It would be tempting.
And I would imagine all of us, certainly I’m guilty of this, there have been times where I’ve been frustrated or angry or hurt, and I choose not to say something when it would be helpful.
Because boy, is that tempting.
But as we think about this, and we try to sort of slide under that narrower sense, oh, I’m not saying anything false, I think the thing that we should think about is what if that’s the standard that God provided for us, that He approached us with?
Imagine if God only said true things about us, where would we get? That’s it, right? He’s not going to say anything false about us. He’s just going to remain silent. We’d be doomed. We’d be doomed.
The Samaritan didn’t have to go over to the injured Jewish man and say, you stupid Jew, see now who’s the superior one? I’m superior, I’m standing up here, don’t you see me? I’m a Samaritan and you’re on the ground and I’m up here.
And then go into town, well, I saw that beat up guy back there, and those guys, they think that they have all the truth about the Bible, but I’m a Samaritan, and he’s dead back there on the trail. I’m not saying anything false.
What does he do? He speaks something true and constructive instead. He chooses not to be silent even when it would be convenient to be silent.
He wouldn’t have to go and be that much of a jerk about it. He could have just gone and chosen not to say anything. Goes on about his business. No one asks, hey, did you see the guy that was dying on the side of the road? No one’s gonna ask that. No, he just goes on, he goes about his business, arrives at the place he was headed towards, and acts like nothing happened at all, and no one would think any worse for him about it.
But Jesus said, there’s the person who actually understands the heart of God. Because he chooses to say something that’s not necessarily going to be beneficial to himself.
No one at the time said, oh, I knew there was going to be a good Samaritan someday but now I know that you’re the good Samaritan, right? No, he just chooses to do it because in that moment, in God’s strength that’s being given to him, he thinks back to any arguments he’s had with people on the other side of that argument, any Jews that hated him and how much he hated the Jews and back and forth. He doesn’t think about that.
He looks at a man and he says, here’s someone that’s made in the image of God and he needs help and I have the ability to speak for him. And so I will.
And in that moment, he’s the neighbor. And in that moment, he’s choosing to move not just from refraining from false witness but moving towards a helpful witness, a loving witness, a God-like witness, because that’s what God wants us to do.
You may have heard on the news a few years ago the story of Raymond Zack, a man who lived in San Francisco, a man who apparently had gone through all kinds of difficulties throughout his life. He had credentials to work in various business settings that should have taken him places but they hadn’t worked out. He’d been trying to get a job. He couldn’t get a job.
He said he had a deep belief in God but at this point, he just seemingly felt like God wasn’t answering his prayers, wasn’t making things come to fruition, and so he decided that life wasn’t worth living any longer.
Maybe with a little doubt there, he wasn’t completely sure and so what did he do? He went out into San Francisco Bay on a day that the water was 50 degrees and he just stood in the bay right in front of all the people on the beach.
Someone asked him where he was going, and he started to wade in the water. He said he was going to go and pray. And he just froze out there. He just stood out there.
Well, his foster mom, this man’s 50 years old by this point but she still, I mean, they still had a relationship. They were still connected and she learns that he’s out there and she calls 911 and apparently, Raymond, he didn’t swim and I suppose she didn’t swim either, and so she calls 911 and said, my foster son, he’s suicidal. He’s out in San Francisco Bay and he’s going to die.
And the firemen came. The police came. Coast Guard came and they watched.
Firemen didn’t go into the water because they hadn’t received water rescue training. Coast Guard, there was some certification or some reason that since he was still able to stand that they weren’t going to go and rescue.
The people on the beach, including people going in and out of the water, they stood and watched. What’s this weird man doing out there?
After about an hour, he collapsed and then he died.
Right before he died, someone finally, I guess, couldn’t take it and jumped into the water and tried to rescue him but it was too late.
And I think about that story and I think about that man and I think he was sincere. I don’t think he was saying he was going out to pray. I think he did go out to pray and I think he went out there to pray that someone would show him that his life was worth still living.
And in that moment, no one was obliged in the sense that they were lifeguards. No one was, even the professionals there, the firefighters, they didn’t have the certification so they weren’t obliged to go do it.
The question was, did someone look out there and see a man made in the image of God and say, I don’t know why he’s standing in this cold water. I don’t know why he’s there but he’s made in the image of God and he doesn’t deserve to just stand out there until he gets hypothermia and dies.
I am going to do something.
And no one did.
We don’t always have that much drama in it but there are an awful lot of times in our lives that there are people standing in the water and waiting to see what we’re going to say.
And certainly, one of the great risks in our society is we’re going to say false things, right? We hear something weird about that person, we hear something bad about that person, and we just pass it on because it makes us feel better, it makes other people feel better about us, we can all kind of feel good about the weirdo over there, and we just go on because it doesn’t seem to matter.
Maybe that person’s out there in the bay saying, God, please just show me someone who cares.
Maybe you’re the one, maybe I’m the one that God is saying, go out there into that water.
Because you’re my hands, you’re my feet. I want you to go. I want you to speak.
I don’t want you just to restrain from false witness, I don’t want you to just restrain from throwing things at the weirdo in the water, I want you to go and rescue the person in the water because that person is a weirdo, that’s a person who I love.
Do we go from, is this beneficial to me? And move to, well, I’ll not think about that but I just want to know if it’s my problem or not.
Can we move all the way to the point where when we see someone who needs us to speak, we say, if there’s someone and I can do something then it is my problem because God has placed me here to show his love.
We serve a God who acts in truth, who speaks in truth. And he calls us to be people who act and speak in truth as well.
Would you pray with me?
Father, we all have those who are standing in the bay right now, those who are wondering whether they have worth, who are beaten down by things that are false, who are beaten down by things that are true.
Whatever the case may be, that person, those people in our lives, they’re made in your image and Lord, would you help us to be people who don’t stand on the shore and gawk, who stand on the shore and talk about what to do, but would you help us to be people who speak truth and act in truth.
As we serve the God who speaks and the whole creation is formed by your words, that we might be people in that creation who bring truth and love, that people would see your love and action and that we might bring healing and hope.
We ask this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Thank you, Chris.
The inner ring is gluten-free, the outer part is not.
Every week as we take these elements, we say if you haven’t yet trusted in Jesus, would you please let these elements pass you by, and that seems like a sort of funny thing to say.
I’ve just been talking about how we should love people, and we’re saying, well, don’t take. But here’s the thing, we do want to speak loving truth.
And the truth is if you have these elements but you haven’t trusted in Jesus, these elements, they’re empty words at best. They can be a distraction, they can be an idol, they can draw you away from the Lord.
But if you feel like you’re out there standing in that bay wondering if God cares, then know tonight as you are here in this place, as you are online, that God is saying to you, I do care, I am with you.
And tonight’s a wonderful night to turn to him and say, Jesus, rescue me.
Because you know the thing that’s true, we might find in this world that oftentimes when we need rescue, that rescue doesn’t come.
When we cry out to our Lord, that rescue does come. His spirit is there, he is there for you to rescue you right now.
And then come back next week and take these elements and take them not as some thing just to receive but rather as a meal in which your Heavenly Father invites you to the very table where he looks at you and says, my son, my daughter, I love you. You are mine.
He says that every time we take these elements and he said that the very first time as Jesus gathered his disciples for that last supper. He gave them the bread and he broke it saying, this is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.
Like man after supper he took the cup and he said, this cup is the new covenant, my blood poured out for you unto the remission of sins. Do this as often as you drink of it in remembrance of me.
For as often as you eat this bread and you drink this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
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