 Lying & Romans 12 Any scripture referenced in the text is attached at the bottom of the page in mp3 format for your listening pleasure. The picture above tells a story. It's on a beach where glass bottles of all sorts have washed up. After a while the broken glass gets smooth down by the water and the friction of the things around it. You can see this one of two ways, a persons lies are like broken glass, after a while even though it's an ugly sight, it starts to look beautiful to us. The other way is, if we cause enough friction upon those who we know are liars, they will change and start to look beautiful to us instead of like a broken piece of glass. You be the judge! Romans 12:9 Says to abhor that which is evil! 1st Thessalonians 5:22 tells us to abstain from all appearance of evil! Under the old covenant Proverbs told us in Proverbs 4:27 to remove thy foot from evil! Now, what does this have to do with our conscience? Read Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13, They talk about serving two masters. Are we serving our self-will, or are we serving God? How does our conscience guide us in this area of our lives? Before I go into the conscience, I want to talk about how our acceptance of the world’s standards, have slowly infiltrated our lives. Our consciences have been re-programmed to accept sexual contents that are abhorred by God, I.E. the movies and sitcoms that emulate live-in situations and out of wedlock sex. Although they may be fun to watch and romantically stimulating, in God's eyes that is the appearance of evil. We should remember that we are now programmed to even lie when our conscience tells us we are just being courteous or using etiquette. How is this so? Here are examples. Conversations go like this... Your life is in total chaos, you are miserable and you need prayer, you get the picture! Someone who
is a friend, but not a Christian friend, asks you how are you doing today? You
say, I'm doing fine! ........................Are you? Some one
asks you how a situation is they know about, but you don’t want to talk about
it right then, you say fine or its OK! ..............Are you telling the truth? Then there’s that person that for some reason we have not learned how to love and we may even dislike or despise, but they don't know it. We run into them after some time of not seeing them, and our first comment is, hey, it's nice to see you again! ..........................Is it? Or hey
we'll have to get together sometime! When you know it won't happen. These are just examples of our seared conscience. They are a problem though because we think we are just telling little fibs, but there is no little fib, we are either in the truth, or we are in a lie. There
certainly are better and totally honest responses in these situations! Can you think of any? Lying, being evil and those that perpetrate it, are equal to murderers and adulterers, where does that put us? You see our consciences have been affected by the general lowering of moral standards in the public sector and we have begun to think that certain things are maybe not as bad as we thought they were! Can you think of things that would appear to be evil that we now seem to tolerate and even usher into our lives under the guise of entertainment? How about
action movies with multiple blood shed scenes? Incorporated into that are themes
like extortion, conspiracies, drug related scenarios, the lists go on! Is this entertainment? Now, is
stealing evil? Is the event of taking a pencil home from the office, stealing? (which I think were all probably guilty of at one point in our lives or another) As an electrician working for a company, I felt guilty if I accidentally carried a wire nut home in my pocket. How often
do office supplies end up in our personal possession? If we work for a
restaurant, are we allowed to fill up our cups with soft drinks for free? Have
we used the company car for personal business? Have we used company time to surf the internet, check our personal e-mail, etc. etc. etc. This is all
considered stealing. But, our consciences have been dulled in these areas to be
ignorant of the offense. God sees all!
April 18th, 2009 - 18 rev. |
