Truth





I have been thinking alot about Truth lately. And let me prefece this by the original audience for this message are children, so while reading this it may seem a little simple for all my friendly nieghborhood Theologians out there. I also want to say that I HaVe Terrible SpeLlinG so I pre Apologize.

At what cost are we willing to take to tell the truth? And further how can God in the person of Jesus be truth? These are questions that floated around in my head this past week as I was Preparing a message for the childrens church at my church. To answer these questions I started with why do we lie? And I couldn't really come up with a good excuse. (and I stress the word excuse) We lie about a whole number of things be they important and unimportant. From a reason for not wanting to hang out with someone to things such as where we were last night. And none of it really makes sense or jives shall I say. What does a lie do for us? It covers up something that we are shameful of. And might I say we are mostly ok with a lie as long as we are not caught, because the minute we are caught we tell another. WHATS WRONG WITH THE TRUTH?
The answer is nothing, but it does cost us something. ( we will come back to that thought) So truth, what is it? Truth is just "what Happened". It's telling what happened. It just is. Those three statements set off a whirlwind in my head. In John 14:1-6 Jesus tells Thomas " I am the way the truth and the life" now that statement is so loaded that we could stay there all day, but the Truth thing jumped at me. Now in context Jesus was telling Thomas that he was the way to the father, but the Truth statment speaks much more. He says "I am" which is a form of to be, which describes God ...... the TRUTH........ here we have the living embodiment of Truth. The Statement I made earlier "Truth just is" holds here. Another scripture that jumped at me was

John1:14

14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only,[d] who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

So God who "just is" spoke and we have Truth, in full form walking on this earth, ministering to people and sacrificing himself to show the way out of the lie. Now for a brief moment I would like to revist the subject of the "lie".

A lie is something that is fabricated and the dictionary definition is "a statement that deviates from or perverts the truth". I think it is a safe statement to make that lies hurt people. "during Kids Church I used two swords to llustrate this." (one sword was black and grey and had a snake theme going on, while the other was gold and White.) The sword looks scary and sharp but is just really a cheesey perversion of the real sword(gold and white). The sword of deception is a sword that we give all the power to, while the sword of truth stands on its own. The funny thing about the sword of deception is that in the presence of truth it cannot stand, and the same holds for us if we lie. In III John 4 it says " I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth" and even though John is the speaker and is talking to someone else I believe this virtue to be true of God. Earlier I said the truth does cost us something. The truth costs us ourselves. With that said , I strongly believe that this generation has been sold a bill of goods that is a Perversion of the truth. We look for truth in things that are meerly smoke and mirrors when it comes to the real truth. When we obtain what it is that we think is the truth we find we are still lacking and that the lie does not stand. "truth" be told we are all searching for truth and we can find that truth in the person of Jesus. The question is will you tell the truth to others once you have found it?