The Sin of Lying

We're in our sermon series on sin, and today I'm going to tackle the sin of lying. Oh, lying, how terrible it is. One of the Ten Commandments tells us, Do not lie, yet many of us do it all the time and think nothing of it.

But God's word in Colossians 3.9 declares, Lie not to one another, seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds. Nobody likes to be lied to. Lying is a grievous sin.

Revelation 22.15 warns against lying. For without are dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolaters and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. That alone should make every single one of us quit lying, friends.

I'll never forget how I lied to a friend of mine, and he was a church friend on top of that. I was his Sunday school teacher in a big Baptist church, and we were playing a game of racquetball one evening. And he asked me where I went to college, and I told him.

And he said he'd gone to that school, too, and we were close to the same age. And he asked me when I graduated. Well, at the time, I was a college dropout, and I was embarrassed by that.

So when my friend asked me what year did I graduate, I gave him a year, and I lied. And all that week, I just felt awful under the conviction of sin. I was his Sunday school teacher, and I had lied to him.

I could hardly wait for Sunday to come as I cornered him in a hallway at church, and I confessed to him how I lied to him, and I asked for his forgiveness. Well, he was shocked, and even though he said he accepted my apology, he changed Sunday schools right after that. I don't blame him.

There's enough hypocrisy in the church already. Oh, I have a hand in it. Sometimes we lie, and we don't even realize it until later.

We tell the pastor we can't attend the prayer meeting for some kind of illness or some other excuse, and our little white lie is really a whopper in the sight of a holy God. If you want to know how God feels about telling lies, then go reread John 8, 44, where Jesus says, Ye are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.

When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar, and the father of it. You can't make it any stronger than that, friends. Basically, when we lie, we're full of the devil.

There's a great danger in lying. We see the outcome of lying in the book of Acts, where Peter is confronting Ananias for lying. In Acts 5, 3 we read, But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled thy heart to lie to the Holy Ghost and keep back part of the price of the land? Well, we all know how it turned out for him and his wife as they dropped dead as cold as stone.

I wonder if we carried a pad and paper with us every day, and each time we told a lie, even a little lie, we'd make a hash mark on that pad. I wonder at the end of the month what that pad would look like if we wrote it down every time we lied. Even if we don't keep records ourselves, there is one who does, and the day is fast approaching where the books will be opened, and our lives will be reviewed by the one who has eyes of fire, and his gaze will scan the record of our lives, and whether they be good or evil, and he'll look at that record with his intense scrutiny.

Listen, friends, the sin of lying makes us act like the devil.