When my grandmother died, my grandfather made the declaration that he was no longer going to cook lunch anymore. That he was going to start driving from the road to the Dairy Queen every day, and that's what he wanted to do, and that's what he did. And one day he was driving to the Dairy Queen in Omaha, Texas, tiny town, like 600 people. He shows up to Dairy Queen, and the little girl behind the counter asked him, said, Mr.
Billy, he made his normal order. And she said, Mr. Billy, do you want to upsize your meal? And he looked, and this wasn't too long ago.
But he despised traveling, he despised things he didn't understand. So, like, he had missed McDonald's whole supersized me. Like, trust me, BG Hawkins never saw the documentary. But the girl said, you want to upsize this?
And he was like, well, what are you talking about? He said, well, you pay an extra $0.59 and you get a large root beer and you get a large onion ring. I think his response to her was, well, why would I not want to do that? And so he upsides his meal for the first time and he drove back to the house and he pulled up the house.
And my grandmother had polio as a child, and so she was on crutches her entire life. And so their back porch was actually pretty low to the ground and he had built a ramp when she got older to make sure it was easier for her to get up on the porch. But somehow, my grandfather managed to fall getting on the back porch. And his neighbor who went across the street from him, his name was Stik.
I don't know what his real name was. I've always done him a stick. As far as I know his mother gave him the name Stik when he was born. But all Stik said he saw, if he heard my grandfather go down and he saw two size 14 Tony llamas just dancing around until he managed to get back up.
And my grandfather swears until the day he died, he swore that he fell because since he upsides his Dairy Queen meal, that it offset his balance and his back weighed more than his root beer did. And he never upsides it ever again. And if he heard you upsides him, the dairy can say, listen, I did that and I fell because it messed my balance up. Like, he honestly believed that.
You know, the things that we can convince ourselves are true. We're going to talk about truth today in a couple of different ways. But the things that we can convince ourselves are true. And we think about how truth works in our lives and in our world now.
These last couple of weeks we've been dancing around Jesus' sermon on the mountain, Matthew 5 through 7. We're going to kind of continue that dance today as well. But we see the sermon on the mountain is really about, it's an outline of a life that's lived well. And it's lived in radical orientation to the kingdom of God.
A few summers ago we did three whole months on the sermon on the mountain called Jesus is Greatest Hits. You can find those just in the archives on our podcast. You want to listen to those messages. But it's about that.
It's about how do we live a life oriented towards the kingdom. And Jesus uses the sermon to just line that out for us. But Jesus calls us to a higher righteousness than we are capable on our own. And sometimes what this means is, what we're going to talk about today is that sometimes this higher righteousness he calls us to means us not trying to find loopholes.
Where we can get around the things that he asks us to do. And so Matthew 5 is where we're going to find ourselves today. Let's listen to these words of Jesus. We're going to talk about what happens when we loophole the truth.
You've heard it said that our ancestors were told you must not break your vows. You must carry out vows you make to the Lord. But I say do not even make any vows. Do not say by heaven because heaven is God's throne.
And do not say by the earth because the earth is his footstool. Do not say by Jerusalem for Jerusalem is the city of the great king. And do not even say by my head for you can't turn one hair white or black. Just say a simple yes I will or no I won't.
Anything beyond this is from the evil one. So truth telling is actually kind of a complicated matter. And what Jesus is talking about is that there's this thing about oaths in the first century. And this passage all in the six of these you have heard it said passages in the Sermon on the Mount.
This one really finds his Old Testament roots in the book of Numbers 30 verse 2. And this is what it says. A man who makes a vow to the Lord or makes a pledge under oath must never break it. He must do exactly what he said he would do.
Now we're thinking about this one. This all just kind of sounds a little bit different from what I'm used to. It just sounds odd. Well, 2000 years ago in the world of Jesus there was this hot mess of religious agreements that were going on.
It was actually a fashionable thing to do. We don't think about making promises as a fashionable thing. It's just kind of, this is a weird thing. It's all right, Chad, this is weird because it is.
But there's a couple of things that are going on. There's this idea of divine binding that was popular at the time. Now in scripture sometimes we see vows and we think that most common one is the Nazarite vows. So you think of Samson, you know the long hair, it was really, really strong.
John the Baptist probably took a Nazarite vow. That was the thing from the early days of the Bible to where someone would not cut their hair, a razor would never touch their head and they would not drink alcohol. And it was a special way that they would dedicate themselves to God. Paul takes a Nazarite vow for a season we find it out in the book of Acts.
And so a vow is this covenant you make between you and God. What Jesus is talking about is an oath. This sounds kind of funny but we have some similarities to it today. An oath is when you make a promise and you invoke the name of God to kind of state the seriousness of your promise.
Like when I was a kid, my parents heard me or my sister say, well I swear to God, I think it really mattered to us. And that's kind of this thing. It's like you're invoking the divine presence to try to convince someone that you're going to do what you say you're going to do. The only problem was this was the popular thing in those days.
It sounds kind of weird to think about a way of making a promise being popular. But if you broke the promise and you made the promise based off of your relationship with God, if you broke the promise, thereby you broke your relationship with God. And so what people would try to do is what Jesus is speaking about here is they would say, oh, well, by Jerusalem or by the throne of God. They would try to mention something that is holy that seems to have the seriousness that might be going on.
But it is not God themselves. So if and when they break this promise, they're not actually breaking their relationship with God. They just use something else. It sounds kind of funny.
But to put this in 21st century North Louisiana language, what really is going on is Jesus is saying don't get God involved in something you're going to try to crawfish out of. If you think you're going to break it, that alone itself is bad enough. Don't bring God into your mess. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, says this, oaths are a sign that we are living in a world of lies.
Just the fact that we have to make oaths mean that trust is an issue. The trustworthiness is an issue. The truth and falsehood is an issue. I think in our world now, we kind of have this fascination with truth, don't we?
We talked about this last week in our fall Bible study. But the fact that the word fake news is always trending now should tell us that we have a problem with trustworthiness in our culture. We have to make an oath that means that we're going to assume that a lie is going to happen and that we might lie ourselves. This is an issue to Jesus because it's disciples of Jesus Christ.
We're to speak the truth because we are seeking to be pure in heart, not because we have some sort of external necessity to keep our truth because of the way that we made this promise. When we are willing to engage in falsehoods, that means that we're also willingly exiting the kingdom of God. This is why this was so serious to Jesus, that this is something that why on earth would anybody who's claiming to follow me just engage in falsehood. But think about this, what's so revolutionary about living a truthful life?
The last week I talked about the fact that in a later on in the storm of the Mount, Jesus says why does the past that leads to destruction narrows the way that leads to life? We're familiar with this analogy and the thing about narrowness is not narrow because only a few people will find that they'll be filtered out of it, but it's narrow because this path is pretty clearly defined. This is one of the ways that Jesus is clearly defining it. In all six of these passages, they're always there about the fulfilling of the law.
Jesus says this in Matthew 517, people asking why he is here, they've heard rumors about him that he's trying to destroy everything that they knew of religion, but Jesus said this instead, don't misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets, but no, I came to accomplish their purpose. The law to a Jewish person, I was an extremely important thing. It was a revelation of God that was given to them.
The prophets that they're about the action of this life that has lived out. The law is how their life is meant to be lived and meant to be filled. The prophets were how they were supposed to do it and how this thing was interpreted. Jesus came here and said, I'm not trying to destroy every single thing you've ever heard before.
I'm actually going to show you what it looks like for this to really be lived. It's really to what this happens not just to live in your head, but to live in your heart and to live in your actions and to live in your lives. Our faith is supposed to be elevated higher than this law. That means these ethical statements that Jesus is saying here, they don't serve as the ceiling as the end.
They serve as our beginning. They're the bottom floor of what all of this is. When our beginning point becomes our ending point, we inadvertently end up missing the point. That's what Jesus is saying here.
The starting point is where you'll stop. There's a life that can be lived as much stronger, much healthier and much more fulfilled in this. Jesus talks about this just simply saying don't attach God to something that you're choosing to live in falsehood about. He's pretty cut and dry in these issues.
He's saying that in my world, in my life, by following me, this is a black and white issue. My people don't live in falsehood. My people live in truths. Simply think about what happens or what could happen or what will happen if we don't have to worry about not trusting people anymore.
Think about how that could change things. Think about how revolutionary trust is and what it means for us to live lives that are trustworthy. If that's the beginning point, if that's our foundation, then we grow in our relationship with Jesus Christ. We grow in our discipleship with Jesus Christ.
We have the ability to start fleshing that out more. You've heard me say this before, sometimes reading the scripture is peeling on how there's multiple layers to it. If these words of Jesus about truth and falsehood are the center point of that, one of the layers we can peel off, I want to talk with you today, you might say this whole oaths and vowels thing, that doesn't really apply to me. I can understand what you might be trying to say.
I get the point that Jesus is making across about it, but how do I bring this into my own life? If just simply telling the truth and we can't follow Jesus, we don't tell the truth, is black and white, the gray area that we can live in sometimes. I think this is where Jesus' message of trustworthiness and truthfulness can legitimately change things and our lives and the lives of those around us is realizing where our trust worthiness and our truthfulness has the biggest effect in our life. When I was a kid, me and my sister who did not get along very well, we partake in this childhood ritual of telling the truth called the pinky swear.
You all remember the pinky swear? You probably have pinky sworn in the last couple weeks. That part of childhood does not go away in adulthood. I promise you.
I promise you. You think about the funny thing about the pinky swear is this. We're not going to make some big, huge life decision based off of a pinky swear, are we? We're not going to buy a car with a pinky swear.
Wouldn't you love it if you went into the car dealership with as easy as a pinky swear? That's Meredith and I made the mistake a couple of years ago. It was the best idea for us to do financially. We bought two cars at the same time.
Have you ever done that before? Don't. I wish it was easy to think about it. Pinky swears are when these tiny little consistent everyday moments of truthfulness happen.
We also typically don't make a pinky swear with someone we don't know very well. Just that whole action of this is intimate. These are the things we do with the people we know the most. The people we in theory trust the most.
It's everyday normal things. Think about how truthfulness can be eroded in your life. If tiny little things are consistently not done. Meredith is fantastic at this.
I am horrible at this. I'm pretty sure she has a tick mark on how many times she has to ask me about things sometimes. I realize that that's as damaging, if not more damaging, then big, huge statements of untruth that I can make in that relationship. If we want to talk about truthfulness in our life in a real, in a present way that lines up with what Jesus talks about, we have to admit the fact that sometimes we have a dependability issue and we have dependability issues with those that we care about the most.
They're not evil. It's not bad. It's not malevolent. And most of the time it's not even intentional.
I know that in my life, and it might be the same as in some of your life, the reason that we unintentionally find ourselves in falsehoods is simply because we are too overcrowded. We have a relationship with the person that we want to be dependable with. We simply just say things that we do not do. And if we ask that question of where is Jesus doing?
If we realize the kingdom is calling us to live life differently. And we ask you specifically, I talked about earlier in our time together today, that Jesus is one of the things that you would care about. I really think in our day now specifically that Jesus would care about our own lack of margin in life and how that leads us to living in a way that is less than flourishing. That's one of the things that we would be passionate about.
Our falsehoods happen because we've lost the margin to be trustworthy and truthful sometimes. Think about it. You tell somebody you care about, you want to take care of that. I'm going to do that.
And either you forget about it and that relationship becomes a road. Then you remember, oh, I've got to do this thing and my life will spin into further chaos because I forgot to do this in a time we made our and now it's the last minute and I take care of this. I take care of ourselves like more and more and more and it goes to sound familiar to anybody else. It's kind of the thing to deal with right now a lot.
Because we care about that person, we want to do what we say we're going to do. We've got so much junk going on in our lives. It actually doesn't matter that we struggle with being truthful with the people that we often care about the most. I think the best way for us to kind of extract ourselves from this life of falsehood that we can live without realizing that we're living is this is that we have to have a clear belief that Jesus calls us to a mission and to a ministry.
As Christians, that's the thing that we order ourselves around. I have a clear picture of the life that Jesus is calling me to a clear picture of where I am of who I have in my life of the physical ways he's asked me to live this out. Jesus says do not swear falsely. Then he's using legal language.
It says to commit perjury. If any of y'all are involved in the legal community, you know how serious perjury can be. It's when a lie becomes a chargeable offense. It says don't willingly lie.
Don't put yourself in these situations. And one of the ways we do this is we exercise out how we live and who we are inside of a community that's focused on bringing this kingdom in together. And our membership vows, we went to our charter member meetings a couple of months ago. A member class coming up later on the year, but there's five vows to membership.
We upledge our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service and our witness. The five parts of our life that we pledge to God, we also pledge to the spiritual community where we feel called to work out his mission. Jesus said this in Matthew 5, 14 through 16, he said you are the lie of the world, like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket.
Instead a lamp is placed on a stand where it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all the seas so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father. This is just a restating of the original mission that God gave his people thousands of years before this. So your job, you've got one job.
It's to simply be a beacon of my goodness, to be a beacon of my truth, to be a beacon of my faithfulness, to be a beacon of my trust wordsiness. That's your job. To be in a place where this has lived out in public. It's not a private thing, it's a public thing and it's going to shine for all to see.
So think about this. What would happen if we realized how we inadvertently can be living false lives simply by having just too much junk going on for us to always be telling the truth? This is one of those mature discipleship conversations that we get to the point where we're going to continue to dig deeper and deeper and deeper into what Jesus is asking us to do. But think how this type of truthfulness can transform your life, can transform the lives of those you love the most and it can just transform the lives of those you work with and are around.
Imagine how powerful just doing what you say you're going to do can change things. Just think about that. It's huge. We can't crawfish out of this.
It's a public commitment that we make to adhere into this way that Jesus says to live this life out. We are going to show the truth of who God is by acting out that truth in our own life. If we say God is trustworthy but we're not trustworthy, how good of a job are we doing showing that up? Our greatest threat.
I've learned this. In about 20 years of working in churches, I've learned this. Our greatest threat behind the idol of just personal preference is our failure to create a kingdom priority in our life. Understanding this public commitment that we've made to Jesus, this public commitment to bringing this kingdom forward.
That's what it is. It's there. It's the center point of our life. It's that thing that we revolve around.
When Jesus asks us and calls us to live out a life of greater righteousness, that means that that's going on inside of us that we were called to be a people who were single-minded, who were focused on accomplishing one thing, who know what that thing is and know how to do it. We're focused on being whole in a heart, meaning that they're working their junk out in the ways that it can affect them and affect other people. But the last thing is they're just exercising integrity. This is this whole righteousness that Jesus speaks about with his people.
So there is a transformative power of being truthful. Jesus says at the very end of the passage we read today, just as simple as I will or no I won't do. Anything beyond that is from the evil one. And sometimes all that is is just us filling our life up with stuff that is not going to make us to be the person that Jesus is.
It's one of the ways that we continue to try to strive to create our own world. Ways that we behave or we act because we have some brokenness left in our life and we feel the need to try to accommodate for that or to hide that or to conceal that. Well-meaning people can destroy their life in well-meaning ways. As we grow deeper in this life with Jesus, we realize our yeses and our nose are about how aligned we are to his mission and the way that we have understood that.
There's always a so that to this. There's always a so that. We do this so that we can be that light on a hill so that we can be that bright beacon. So we can be that person that is firm enough and is anchored enough in the truth of who Jesus are for when people need to build in their lives for them to anchor themselves to us.
One of the scariest things in scripture Paul says at four different times, he says you want to follow Jesus, just follow me. Is that not terrifying? Can you imagine telling somebody that? He's like, hey listen, what I'm going to follow Jesus, just follow me, because I'm following him.
That means the way that we're following has to be pretty stable, doesn't it? We're given this call in life and this is this mission so that we can be that firm reality for other people as well. So let your SBS, let your know, be know. Let's pray together.
Father.