Are You Believing a Lie? Do You Want to Know the Truth?

“If what you believe to be true is not, would you want to know?” A friend posted this as her Facebook status after our pastor posed the question in church. Here were a handful of the responses:

“It depends on what it was.”
“Yes, I’d want to know.”
“Probably not.”

The starkness of the confession in some of the replies–and publicly, no less–was staggering. It revealed something very unflattering about this generation: many would rather be ignorant and wrong, than truthful and righteous in our thinking. Why? Probably because it means we’d have to change something in our lifestyle if we knew without a doubt we’d been living a lie. At the very least, we’d be uncomfortable.

Massachusetts Democrat and senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren was discovered to have lied about her ethnicity to get a job with Harvard, claiming on her application that she was part Native American. The discovery in 2012, that she was a liar and a cheat did not deter people in Massachusetts from voting her in that year to represent them.

NBC news anchor Brian Williams was humiliated earlier this year when it came out that he’d fabricated a story about his involvement in an Iraqi RPG helicopter hit. Williams not only lied various times about this story, but his stories about being part of SEAL Team 6 (bin Laden’s assassins), his experiences while reporting on Hurricane Katrina, and his alleged rescue of a puppy–or two puppies–have been widely disputed. Nevertheless, after a six-month suspension, NBC decided they could not afford to lose their liar, and instead moved him over to MSNBC, in a move that pundits refer to as “passing the trash” rather than emptying it.

A sizable number of Americans evidently are willing to vote in liars to represent them and allow liars to report their news. Jesus called the devil “a murderer from the beginning and . . . the father of lies” (John 8:44).

In this same passage Jesus said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). So to resist the truth is to choose willful slavery.

I know people who have patterns of sickness, accidents, and all-around misfortune in their lives. These are the folks who are chronically getting sick, their appliances are breaking down, their kids are in the ER, and their vehicles are getting totaled.

By way of example, two of my friends, one whose father was a mason and another whose father was part of a church cult, freely admit that they’re “living under a hex.” When asked if they’d like some biblical teaching on what has been personally helpful in the way of breaking free from curses, they were quick to say “yes.” But a follow-up later revealed that they “never got around” to listening to the teaching or reading the material.

Will you embrace the truth–about yourself, about your circumstances, about the kingdom of heaven–even if it means change? Will you leave behind the shackles of slavery in which you’ve grown comfortable? Would you ask the Lord to highlight an area of your life, even something subtle, that needs brought into the light of His truth?