Best. Sermon. Ever.: Honest to God

Good morning. My name is James Sutton. I'm one of the pastors here and we are continuing our sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's Gospel. If you have a Bible and want to turn to Matthew chapter five, we're going to be looking at verses 33 through 37 this morning.

The Sermon on the Mount is parallel in many ways to the narrative in Exodus where Moses comes and gives the people the law. Jesus is expounding on the law and in essence revealing the beauty of the law that has been lost in many ways because of the Pharisees and others minimizing its usefulness, its beauty, and its purpose. Jesus is functioning like Moses in bringing back the law.

This morning we're going to look at lying. This is a fun one. Let's read it together. It's Matthew 5:33-37.

You have heard that the ancients were told, "You shall not make false vows but shall fulfill your vows to the Lord." But I say to you, take no oath at all—neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God; nor by the earth, for it is the footstool of His feet; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King; nor shall you take an oath by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black. But make sure your statement is yes, or no. Anything beyond these is of evil origin. — Matthew 5:33-37

Let's pray together. Lord God, we thank you for your word. We thank you that it is true and that we can build our lives on it. Lord, we pray that as we come to your word this morning, we would see the beauty of your law, the beauty of your word, the beauty of who you are, Lord Jesus. As we encounter you, Lord, we would be changed and transformed. Lord, we long to be like you. This passage in many ways is descriptive of you, but Lord, we want to be changed to look like you. So Lord, use your word in that way as we study it this morning. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Jim Carrey and the Human Experience

In the '90s and early 2000s, Jim Carrey was on a tear doing movies that explored existential existence as a human. There's a whole string of them—The Truman Show, Bruce Almighty, maybe even The Mask a little bit. All these different movies where he was playing with what it means to be human and what the human experience is. As a pastor, I love that he did that. I'm very grateful because it's an endless supply of sermon illustrations.

One of the movies he made, of course, was Liar Liar. You remember that movie? In Liar Liar, he plays an attorney who isn't really convinced that he's particularly dishonest. His son, who is convinced that he's particularly dishonest, makes a wish that his father can't do anything but tell the truth. And then, of course, hilarity ensues as this lawyer attempts to navigate all of life trying to do that well without lying at all. He finds it incredibly hard, and it's hilarious.

I felt a little bit like I was in that movie this week. There's nothing like preaching a sermon on lying to start getting you thinking about all of the different ways in which you lie. That's what Jesus is doing here essentially. He's engaging with a group of people who have defined lying more narrowly than the law has. There's all this stuff about oaths and vows, and he's engaging with a group of Pharisees who have said, "Listen, you can imagine how this originated. I think it probably originated with good intentions. They said, 'Look, as long as you're not taking a vow on something sacred—like, you're not vowing on the temple or vowing on God—then there's a little leeway. If you're dishonest there, that's a really big deal because that involves God, but in these other secular places, if you're being dishonest, that's not as big of a deal.'"

You can see how they got there. But Jesus is engaging that. He says, "No, that's not right. That erases the beauty of this commandment. That erases the beauty of what humanity is supposed to be. It erases the beauty of what God has given you in that commandment."

So he's engaging with that, and in doing so, he engages with us. We think of silly Pharisees so often when we're reading the Bible. We look at them and go, "How could they have done that? Don't they know lying is just wrong? How could they do that?" Well, here's how they did it. They did it the same way we do it.

I can't tell you how many times I'm having lunch with somebody and they say, "I'm sorry, I don't mean to lie to you. You're a pastor." But yeah, okay. So it's wrong to lie to me but everybody else is fair game? Is that what that means? Or people joke about being up in the sanctuary lying. "If you wanna lie, go down to the basement to my office. It's safe down there but not here." We do this. We have different categories where we feel like, "Okay, lying is okay here, not okay here." And we don't just do it in sacred ways. In fact, as a culture, we seem to be increasingly embracing lying as okay. I'm talking about Americans.

There was a study done back in 2006 and then 2016. So I'm going to throw some statistics at you. Some of you might get the irony of that.

The Statistics on American Attitudes Toward Lying

In 2006, they asked Americans essentially, "Is it sometimes okay to lie?" Forty-two percent of us thought it was sometimes okay to lie. In 2016, 64% of us thought it was sometimes okay to lie. So lying is trending in our country. Some of you are not surprised to hear that. You've probably felt some of the effects of that or seen it, and you're probably aware of other people's lies. But this survey was asking people about their own lies and dug deeper into specifically where they feel comfortable lying and where they don't.

For example, 56% of Americans believe that it's okay to lie in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. "Oh, that shirt looks nice on you today" or "you look so pretty, dear" or "good sermon, pastor." A lot of you laughed. Fifty-four percent say that it's okay for a parent to lie to his or her child about their own past misbehavior: "I'm just protecting them." Fifty-two percent say it's okay to exaggerate the facts to make a story more interesting. Never done that. Fifty-one percent say it's okay to lie about one's age. Forty-eight percent say that it's okay to lie about being sick in order to take a day off of work. They don't give us enough days off anyway, right?

But there are still places where it's sacred for Americans. For example, only 18% of Americans think it's okay to lie on your resume. So you can lie about being sick to your boss but not about your background on paper. You could get in trouble for that. There's a record. Thirty-three percent of Americans say that lying to one spouse or partner about forgetting an anniversary is okay. Not particularly comfortable, but it's there. Fourteen percent of Americans say that lying about an affair is sometimes okay. So we don't tend to think that's okay.

We have these categories. There's certain places that are sacred where it's not okay to lie or less okay. But there are a lot of common areas where lying can just thrive. It's justified. "They deserve it" or "they can't take the truth. They can't handle the truth," right? Like Jack Nicholson said. So we justify it.

We're going to tackle this today and I hope you get to experience a little bit of the "liar liar" experience that I got to experience this week having to think about this sermon while kind of existing in our culture and doing the things that I do. Spoiler alert: I lie. I discovered I lie quite more than I thought. Maybe you will too in the process of us looking at this text.

How We're Going to Tackle This

Here's how we're going to tackle this. First, we're going to look at what Jesus is and isn't saying in this text. Here's what people love to do with the Sermon on the Mount: Jesus dives straight at our hearts in the Sermon on the Mount and he rarely gives qualifications. He's just going straight to the heart of the issue, and often that leads modern readers to come up with examples of exceptions or caveats. "Why doesn't Jesus give this caveat? It seems to be inconsistent and we can discount what he's saying." So I'm going to try and deal with some of that so that we can get to what he's saying, the heart of it.

We're going to look at what he's not saying and what he is saying. That's our first point. Secondly, we're going to look closer at what deception is and specifically why you don't want your no to be yes and your yes to be no. Why you want your yes to be yes and your no to be no. And then finally, we're going to look closer at truth and how your yes can be yes and your no can be no.

So: Jesus, what he said and what he didn't say; deception, what it is, and why you want to stay away from it; and truth and how you can do it.

Okay. So first of all, what Jesus is saying and what he's not saying.

I'm going to begin actually with what he's not saying because a lot of you are going to be confused by some of this. It's natural. If you look at verse 34, he says:

But I say to you, take no oath at all — Matthew 5:34

That's pretty strong. Some of you who are members of this church might remember standing up here, taking vows of membership. That might create some cognitive dissonance for you—it's like, wait a minute, you guys have people taking vows, but you're dealing with this text where Jesus said, "take no vows at all," right?

We live in a culture where we ask people to take oaths of office, oaths when they're testifying. So vows are kind of prevalent throughout our society. This could create confusion, but wait. The easiest reading of this text, the surface reading, is that Jesus is saying, "Get rid of all of that. That's wrong. That's terrible. Don't do that." That's not what he's saying, even though it seems like what he's saying. I want to be real careful here because it is kind of easy to come away with that as a plain reading of the text.

But here's how I know that's not what he's saying: if you just read on in Matthew, you have Jesus by the end of the gospel taking an oath to tell the truth essentially as he's testifying before the Sanhedrin. Jesus himself did this—took oaths, right?

In the broader corpus of the Bible, Paul takes oaths in his letters often, kind of swearing that he's a Roman citizen, that he's appointed by God. He swears these things. He takes oaths. Perhaps even more fundamentally, God himself in the Old Testament takes oaths. Not too long ago, we looked at Genesis 15 where God met with Abraham, made a covenant, an oath, a promise, gave him a sign of that promise, split the animals, walked through it—big deal, right? God himself takes oaths.

So even though it seems like that's what he's saying, I want you to hold on to this: that's not what he's saying. We'll come back to what he is saying, and I think it'll make sense why he's putting it that way. Just tuck that away.

What Jesus Is NOT Rejecting

Another thing that he's not saying is he's not saying that it's wrong to take vows on sacred things. That's another easy takeaway from this text—like, well, he's just saying, don't take vows on the temple or on something sacred. Essentially, stay away from those things because he does make a big deal out of that:

Take no oath at all, neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God — Matthew 5:34-35

If you kind of walk away thinking it's wrong not to take vows on sacred things, think again. The same reason why he's not saying that is we have all kinds of examples in Scripture of people taking vows on sacred things, and that being just fine—including God himself, who is himself sacred, taking vows. Our whole system of understanding the Bible is through covenants, through God's promises, through his vows, right? We celebrate a new covenant, a new promise. That's the foundation for what we believe as Christians. So he's not rejecting that. He can't. He wouldn't.

So he's not saying don't take any vows at all. He's not saying don't take vows specifically on holy things. What he is saying is that honesty on sacred things and in vows aren't the only important thing related to this commandment, okay?

In other words, what he's saying essentially is this: if you're gonna say that this is where it's okay to lie and this is where it's not okay to lie, and feel like you are fulfilling the commandment, just don't do that at all. Stop saying this is okay or that is okay, right? Don't separate it out. Just don't take vows at all. If you're gonna say that you can be dishonest over here and not dishonest over here, just forget it. That's essentially the force of what he's trying to say. Does that make sense?

A Personal Example

When I was a kid, my parents taught me about the importance of promises, right? And how we need to take those really seriously—like, if you promise something, if you pledge something, you need to be truthful to your word. Well, my stepsister and I very quickly weaponized that against each other, right? My parents got to witness this where we would lie bold face to each other left and right, and then in order to justify that, every now and then we would make a promise that we would be good on, right?

My parents were like, no. They took us right to this passage. This is my earliest experience of this passage as a kid—my parents coming and saying:

Let your yes be yes and your no be no — Matthew 5:37

Promises aren't somehow sacred areas where truth lives, and then everywhere else in human existence, it's kind of optional, right?

So that's what Jesus is saying. Part of the reason he's saying this is he's trying to get away from the notion that certain areas are sacred and therefore need to be accompanied with truth because they exist within the jurisdiction of God, while other areas are outside of that existence.

When I was a school teacher, I had my students break up and do some work. I love this story. They were doing group work, and I had this one group of guys. I let them pick their own groups—that's always a mistake by the way, teachers. So I had this one group of guys over by the door working together. They were doing this assignment, and then all of a sudden, I heard this eruption of laughter from that group. I thought, "Oh no, I better go check out what's going on there." So I get up from my desk, start walking over, and immediately one of the boys sees me. His eyes get as big as saucers. He takes a piece of paper off his desk, opens the door, and throws it out in the hallway and shuts it. I thought, "Oh yeah, that's clearly outside of my jurisdiction. I can't deal with them now that that's out there."

This is what we think when we're thinking that way. We're acting as though there are certain areas of our life where God isn't watching. Like, don't go into church and lie because God will see it, but you know, run outside and go crazy. Don't lie to the pastor, but as you're walking in and you pass a homeless person and they ask you for something, feel free to lie to them. That's the thinking we tend to do.

The other night, someone—this is another illustration—a guy came by at three in the morning, tried to check our doors and cars to see if we'd left any of them open. Well, we had. We left one of our rental minivans unlocked—we were getting our minivan fixed—so nothing was in the van, but we had left the door unlocked. He opened it up and helped himself, started looking around to see if he could find anything. What he didn't know is that we have Blink cameras—Amazon's little security cameras that connect to your phone. So at three in the morning, I, who have trouble sleeping, woke up. I looked, and there was a guy in my rental car. I thought, "What do I do?" Well, Blink cameras have an intercom system. So I turned on the intercom and said, "Get out of the car." You know what he did? He got out of the car. He was suddenly aware that someone was watching.

So often that's the way we live. We think God's not watching. All week after that, I thought, "I should have said something different. I should have said, 'Your mom called and she wants you to make better life choices.'" But we have that experience where we think certain things in our life are off limits, like we're not living in the face of God every day. And that's what He's getting at here when He says, don't swear by heaven—that's God's throne—but Earth is also not off limits. That's His footstool. It's not like God isn't aware what's going on there. Don't swear by the hairs on your head. It's not like He didn't create them. It's not like they're not made in His image. It's not like those aren't sacred. You don't have any control over whether they go gray—trust me on that. None of this is yours. It's all under the jurisdiction of God. It's all done in His face. It's all sacred. It's all holy.

So lying is wrong no matter where you are. And when he says, "let your yes be yes and your no be no," he's putting force on this, essentially trying to push in and say: the issue isn't just that you're honest, that the things you say are true. The issue is that you yourself are true. If it's yes, be yes. Don't be something else somewhere else. Don't be yes here and no there. Be yes and yes. Always yes. You should be whole and true.

The Temptation to Lie

Here's the problem though: we all want to lie. It sounds good to just be honest and true, but the temptations are just real and prevalent all the time, everywhere. Tim Keller gives this classic illustration that I think is very helpful. He talks about where people pleasers lie and where those who like control lie. I'm a people pleaser. I have several people in my life who like control, probably because opposites attract and I don't know. But I love those people. They're really great. I am a people pleaser. I like people to like me.

And so, what's not a problem for me is to be real open and honest and transparent about my sin. That's why oftentimes when I'm preaching, you hear a lot about that. It's because I want you to like me, right? I don't have problems being honest there. But when there's something wrong with you, that's where I have trouble. Like you got something in your teeth—no, nope. I don't wanna make you uncomfortable. I want you to be happy and like me. I'm gonna let someone else tell you about that, right? I have to really push myself to be honest in those situations. When there's something going on with you that's wrong, that I know, and it's gonna make me uncomfortable for me to tell you, I have trouble being honest.

People who like control, they're tempted in a different way. They have no problem telling you what's wrong with you, right? Where they have trouble is telling you what's wrong with them because they want to maintain control. They want you to feel like you can trust them. They can be in charge and don't worry, right? We all have different ways in which we're tempted in different motives, but none of us really want our yes to be yes and our no to be no. We're not always gonna be honest and transparent and clear because we're constantly tempted, right?

Dissecting Dishonesty

Let's look a little bit at that sin, the sin of dishonesty that Jesus is talking about. We're going to dissect the dishonesty. We're going to look at why you really shouldn't want your yes to be no, even though most of us can quickly realize we do.

First of all, being dishonest, lying—it's a declaration of war on creation. Think about that. When you are saying something that is not true, you're looking reality in the face and you're declaring war on it. God created everything with words, right?

Let there be light. — Genesis 1:3

That's kind of how it worked in Genesis. He declares all these different things, right? So when you're lying, you're declaring war on his creation. For those of you who are in the PCA and comfortable talking about magical books like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, right? It's like a wizarding duel that you're getting into with God. Like he has called this into existence and you're calling this lie into existence. Do you see? It's like we're declaring war with our words, with our deception, on God, on reality, on creation—and isn't that interesting?

Like when you look at Genesis, where does war begin? With the serpent coming in and lying, right? Lying, we tend to think of it as like one of the lesser sins, but it's really very foundational to all sin. When you lie, essentially, you are not only declaring war on creation like this very beautiful, good thing that God has created. You're entering in this curse essentially through this magical war you're declaring on God's good creation. That's what the serpent did, you see?

And let me just tell you something: spoiler alert on kind of like one of the big messages in the Bible. You don't want to get in a wizarding duel with God. That's not going to work out. In fact, all of the things that the serpent does, all the lies he tells, all of those things wind up working in his cursing ultimately. God's going to win this wizarding duel. So when you declare war on reality, eventually, reality has a way of catching up with you. God's made it that way, okay?

There's an inherent truth about dishonesty. Here's another one: dishonesty damages dignity. Inherent in dishonesty is taking. I want to take something. When you tell a lie to another person, you are essentially attacking their dignity. You're trying to take something from them. You're making them less than in order to make you more than.

Think about this in a couple of examples. For example, a marketing lie. I'm going to make this product look good so I can take your what? Money. Exactly, right? I'm trying to take something from you. Political lies—I'm going to tell you some sort of falsehood in order to get some power. I'm trying to get power, some kind of control. Political lies, by the way, aren't just in our political spheres, right? We tell political lies interpersonally all the time. Anytime you're trying to spin something in order to get your way and control over someone else, that's a political lie. Think about that for a minute. I bet you could come up with some examples.

Even those beneficent lies, right? The ones that we talked about earlier that 56% of us apparently feel like are okay—when you're lying to not hurt someone's feelings or you've determined that they can't handle the truth. Do you see how that's demeaning and attacks their dignity? Right? You're essentially looking down on them, making them less than.

Even when you're telling lies as jokes at someone else's expense, to fool them, to trick them—you're doing it for entertainment. You're taking something from them. No matter what, lies always attack the dignity of human creation because we're trying to take something from someone else. Do you see the insidious nature of them? They're not very pretty, really.

Another thing about lies: they fracture community and civilization. They fracture it. Anytime you have a bond with someone else, trust often is a part of that. You start telling lies, it starts to crack and fracture. Things like community and civilization—the more lies that exist in that civilization, the less it starts to look like civilization, and the more it starts to look like chaos and confusion.

So imagine a place like this: Imagine a place where doctors and pharmacists, instead of actually caring for your health, tell you to take medicine that profits them financially. Imagine a place where journalists, rather than reporting the news faithfully, exaggerate it in order to sell more newspapers. Imagine a place where individuals market themselves and their brand in order to get ahead instead of being honest and open about who they are. Imagine a place where husbands and wives look to take advantage of each other rather than serve each other. Or, unless you think I'm picking on you, imagine a place where pastors tell you what you want to hear in order to get money or influence, rather than engaging you on moral truth.

Can you imagine such a place? It's not hard to see the juxtaposition of how we are increasingly more comfortable with lying and how our civilization is starting to fray at the edges and crack and split apart and how we have a real trust problem in our culture. Because increasingly, we feel justified in not being honest with each other for whatever reason.

How Lies Fracture the Self

So lies fracture community and civilization, but it's not the only thing they fracture. They also fracture you. They fracture the person telling the lie. Keller makes this point as well.

You know what an integer is? An integer is a whole number versus a fraction. Well, we use the word integrity—it's the same root. Integrity is a whole person. When your yes is yes, you are whole. When you start telling lies, you become duplicitous. You become multiple. Two-faced, we say. So you start telling lies, and your wholeness, your integral unity, starts to fall apart. You start becoming less and less clear.

For those of you who took literature and history classes with me, one of the classes I took was science fiction literature—one of my favorite classes. I read a book by H.G. Wells called The Invisible Man. I was really excited about reading it because I thought it was about a superhero who had powers and used his invisibility to do good things. But those of you who've read it know that it's a horror story about a terrible person who was invisible and did terrible things to other people and who was completely invisible, couldn't be seen until he died.

Well, that's what we become when we become liars. Our wholeness becomes fractured, essentially making us not visible. We're not real. We're almost like ghosts. That is the nature of dishonesty. Not good stuff. Not what we want to be.

Becoming True Through Truth

But here's the problem: we struggle with that. So let's look at truth and how your yes can be yes. This command that Jesus is getting at—what is he pointing us to? He wants us to be honest. He wants us to be true, not just so that we tell the truth, but so that we are true.

So how do we do that, Jesus? How do we do that? Through his other teachings, through his life, he showed us. You know, truth is a big theme in the gospel of John. If you want to do a study this afternoon, just go home, type in "truth" and "gospel of John" and read all of those passages. Really interesting.

One of the things that Jesus says in the gospel of John is:

The truth will set you free — John 8:36

That's good news. But what truth? What is the truth? Here's the truth that Jesus consistently taught, that he consistently was expressing: You're a liar. That's the first part. Y'all are liars. All y'all are liars.

And just again, because I'm a people pleaser and I want you to like me, I'm not going to give you examples of your lies. I'm going to give you examples of mine. Here's a couple. Here's a fun one. When I was getting married, my wife and I were buying wedding rings.

We bought a really expensive one for her but I didn't have a lot of money. So I was nervous about that. I went down to a used jeweler on Hillsborough Street and I got a used wedding band for me. It was very affordable—$35. I brought it home and she said, "Oh, that's great. Where'd you get that?" I said, "Oh, I got it at a used dealer. I think it's a real nice antique. How much did you spend on it?" And I lied. I lied because I didn't want her to think that our marriage was cheap. I wanted her to think I was investing in this.

Then about a week later, I got a little convicted and I was like, well, I do want her to think our marriage is valued, me, but I also don't want a marriage founded on lies. So before we got married, I told her, "It's $35." She's like, "That's great." I was like, "Whoo. This is your pastor."

And unless you think I'm just giving you old examples, here's one from yesterday. Yesterday I drove down to Charlotte to pick up my son from Camp Grandaddy. The previous week we capped off Camp Grandaddy with a trip to Carowinds, that mythical place—wonderful land of rides and vomit and seas of humanity. Peter is fifty-three and three-quarters inches tall. You gotta be fifty-four inches to ride the big rides at Carowinds. So I get down there and I'm like, "Dad, you got any cardboard? I'm cutting out a sole to put under the insole of his shoe."

My stepmom says, "So you're preaching tomorrow. What are you preaching on?" And I'm like, "I'm Jim Carrey." Right? Yesterday, that happened. This morning I had to get up and I said, "Peter, I'm gonna talk about something in the sermon you need to know. This was wrong. I'm sorry." He's like, "Yeah. I was gonna talk to you about that. Kinda felt a little weird." And I was like, "Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry."

We lie all the time and Jesus showed up and he points this out. He points it out to me in his word when I'm preaching it. He points it out to you by putting me in your life. We are all a bunch of liars. It's everywhere and Jesus was not shy about telling us that. He told Peter that before he did it. "You are going to lie. You're going to deny me like crazy, okay?" So that's the first part of that truth that will set you free.

He Loves You Anyway

Here's the second part: He loves you anyway. He loves you anyway and here's why that's important. Jesus said:

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one gets to heaven except through me. — John 14:6

He says, essentially, "I came to give you a way through the truth to life. It's me. I'm the truth. I'm what's true." And here's the thing—you can take that to the bank because he is true. His yes is yes. His no is no. He's not just telling you that in the sacred spaces and then lying in other places. He doesn't just come down to Earth in order to say, "Hey, I love you" and then he goes back up to heaven, has a good laugh with the Father and the Spirit about it for eternity. No. He's always consistent and you see that throughout the gospels.

If you look at the end of his life—right, the end of the story—he gets taken before a trial in which they are producing false evidence against him. And he responds with the truth and they smack him. Right? And he looks over and there's Peter lying his full head off out in the courtyard saying, "I don't know him. I don't know him. I don't know him." Rooster crows. He goes to Pilate. He's telling Pilate the truth. Pilate's like, "What's truth? Don't care. I make my own truth, right? It's inconvenient, your truth." So I think you probably are innocent but whatever.

The Pharisees—they want control. They're taking. They're taking from Jesus. All of his authority. They want his prestige. They want him. They're taking, taking, taking. He's just telling the truth. He's giving. They smack him. His truth cost him his life. Do you see? Pilate's taking. Peter's taking. Peter thinks he's got to lie in order to save himself. But here's the thing: Jesus's truth reveals his love consistently. His yes was always yes even when the pressure was on. And rather than taking, his truth is always giving. That's a fundamental difference between the truth and lies.

When you give someone the truth, it's a gift. Jesus gave us the truth and in doing so, he gave himself, which is true fundamentally—which is what he was saying we need to be in this sermon. And now here's the beautiful thing: He's so true. He makes us true. Because here's the thing: Peter's out there lying his full head off. Why? Because he thinks he's gotta save himself. "I gotta lie." We all lie because we think we gotta take. We gotta take. We need. We need. We need. But in Jesus, we've been given everything. The more we realize that, the less we feel like we have to lie.

The more we realize that the gift of the truth, Jesus himself is true, the less we feel like we have to take matters into our own hands and make stuff up. Do you see? And that in essence is the journey of the Christian life in some ways, right? Us believing that more and more to the point where we feel like it's less and less necessary to lie. We don't need anything because we've been given everything in him.

Final Illustration

I love science fiction, obviously. Back to the Future—you remember that movie? Marty McFly travels back in time, right? Messes things up. He has to go back to fix everything, right? Because what's happening to his siblings? They're disappearing. Brothers and sisters, that's us. With all of our lives, who we really are is disappearing. But Jesus came back. He set things right. He was true, in order that we might be made visible again. Do you see?

So, CTK, this is our prayer: that Jesus and his value would be made so clear, that his truth would become so believed by us that we would no longer feel the need to be dishonest, no longer feel the need to do the damage that we do through our lives. We could let our yes be yes and our no be no.

Prayer

Lord Jesus, we recognize that we are sinful, duplicitous people. We are fractions of what we were created to be. So, Lord, we appreciate that you came and you were whole. And Lord, you suffered and died because of our lives. Lord, you gave us the truth instead of us having to take for ourselves. So, Lord, we worship you and we praise you.

We pray as we continue to worship that you would be with us, that we would see you more clearly even yet, and that Lord, you would impress upon our hearts the beauty of the gospel even more. We pray in Jesus's name. Amen.