DAILY DEVOTIONAL – June 26, 2019
“The Truth About Truth”
Prayer: Father of all Wisdom, there is no knowledge or truth apart from You and Your Word. Keep our minds and our lives focused narrowly on Your Son Jesus who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Amen.
Scripture – Proverbs 27:5-6 (NLT)
An open rebuke
Is better than hidden love
Wounds from a sincere friend
Are better than many kisses from an enemy.
Devotional – “The Truth About Truth”
It was in one of my favorite movies of all time, A Few Good Men, that the now infamous saying was popularized, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” The great irony in that scene is that the character who said it in the movie was on trial for covering up the truth not only from others, but first and foremost from himself.
Long, long before any Hollywood movie screen, there was yet another trial where even more famous words about truth were spoken, and with exponentially more irony. While trying our Lord Jesus for crimes He didn’t commit, the Roman ruler in Jerusalem Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” 38 Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” Here Pilate was, with the life of another human being at stake and at the mercy of his judgement, and Pilate asks, “what is truth?”
Just outside of Pilate’s private quarters, the crowd demanding Jesus’ crucifixion waited anxiously for a verdict from Pilate. Ironically, after being so dismissive of the truth in his reply to Jesus, Pilate then goes out and proclaims the truth for all to hear. Scripture says, “Pilate went back outside to the Jews and told them, “I find no guilt in this man [Jesus].”
You know, we all have a love-hate relationship with the truth. Not much different than Pilate. None of us want to be lied to, but yet if we are honest, we all have tried to cover up or avoid dealing with truth when it isn’t convenient or when we “can’t handle the truth.” We all want to be told the truth, but at times we ourselves are not honest and withhold the whole truth for a variety of reasons. Sometimes we are dishonest in our attempts to be merciful or spare someone pain. We think to ourselves “they can’t handle the truth.”
But listen again to what our Proverbs passage for today says, “Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Wounds from a sincere friend are better than many kisses from an enemy.” No doubt, when someone tells us an inconvenient or uncomfortable truth, our first reaction (and maybe even our reaction for some time after), is to be in denial or more offended by the fact that someone had the audacity to tell us the truth. Eventually, we hopefully make the truth itself more important than our ego, and at least seriously consider what a friend tells us even if we don’t want to hear it.
It takes a true friend, true love, to tell someone the truth even if it hurts. Of course, we should never tell the truth in order to hurt someone or tell them the truth in a hurtful way. We should always remember and heed the words of the Bible when it says in James 3, “3 We can make a large horse go wherever we want by means of a small bit in its mouth. 4 And a small rudder makes a huge ship turn wherever the pilot chooses to go, even though the winds are strong. 5 In the same way, the tongue is a small thing that makes grand speeches. But a tiny spark can set a great forest on fire.” And as Scripture also says, we should always “speak the truth in love.” Yet, at the same time, we should not let our noble desire to be sensitive and caring distort the truth. As our Proverb said, “An open rebuke is better than hidden love.” We don’t love people when we lie to them by way of multiplying our kisses when we should be caring enough to lovingly tell them the truth.
Our enemy the Devil, the Deceiver, is a master of covering up the truth with a false sense of affection. That’s what he did in his very first temptation with Adam and Eve. He pretended to be watching out for them and pretended to have their best interests in mind on the outside, all while twisting and distorting the truth that not only he but that Adam and Eve also knew.
I am not sure where the saying originated, but it is very true. “The Devil will tell you 999 truths, so that you will believe 1 lie.”
Speaking the Truth, the real Truth, and being the Truth Himself, is what ultimately got Jesus crucified. He told the Truth that all of mankind, every single person, is wicked in their hearts and that all of us have sinned and betrayed the love of our Creator God. He told the Truth that we all deserve hell, that is, eternal separation from God because of our sin. But, Jesus also proclaimed very clearly the Truth that He was in fact the Son of God, that He was God, and that He was and is the Messiah and Savior of the world and that by trusting in and believing in His life, death and resurrection…we have forgiveness for our sins and restoration with our Heavenly Father. Our sinful nature recoils at hearing the Truth that we are wicked in our hearts and sinful and undeserving of God’s grace. However, it is only when we receive and accept the truth of our need for saving, and turn to Christ the Truth, the only True Savior, that we can in fact know the Truth…and as Jesus said, His Truth sets us free.
Knowing and trusting in Jesus sets us free from self-justification and the endless attempt to cover up the ugly truth we share with all humanity in our sinfulness. The Truth frees us to confess an end to ourselves, and confess our every worth and hope in Jesus. Knowing Jesus as the Truth, also frees us and equips us to speak the Truth to others in love, to speak to them and share with them the Good News that Pilate was absolutely correct, “there was no guilt in Jesus.” He was and is the perfect Son of God who saves us from sin, death and the Devil!
The truth is, none of us can handle the Truth. God is so merciful and loving and gracious that He has given us His Holy Spirit who, as Jesus said in John 16, “will convict the world of its sin, and of God’s righteousness and of the coming judgement.” God so loved us that He told us the truth, not to condemn us, but rather to save us in the blood of His Son Jesus!
The only thing that matters, friends, is truth; the Truth. And the Truth is that Jesus is alive and risen from the dead. He is the Truth and the Life. The Word of God has been given to us so that each day The Spirit would remind us of the Truth, equip us with the Truth and send us out to proclaim the Truth to everyone.
Stay in the Word of God, for it is only with God’s help that we can handle the truth. As Paul says in Ephesians 4, when we hold firm to the Word of God, “we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.”
Enjoy the rest of your day friends, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
