Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

Well, good morning, everyone.  If you have your Bibles, let’s turn to Matthew 5 again.  I don’t watch much television other than sports and news, but I understand that the Fox channel has a relatively new program titled Lie to Me.  The main character in the episode is considered to be the world’s leading deception expert.  He’s a psychologist who apparently is able to detect when people are lying or lacking in integrity.  And so he works with law enforcement to try and help solve crimes.  And he does so by watching facial expressions and listening to the tone in a person’s voice and by watching body language.  It’s kind of an interesting concept for a television show.  Well, apparently this program had a series of promo videos.  And at the end of these promo videos, they offered up a number of statistics related to lying.  And I thought that you might find these interesting this morning.  42% of Americans think it is sometimes okay to lie, 42% of Americans.  Only 54% of lies are accurately detected.  37% of adults think it’s okay to lie about your age.  Now, I thought that was a little personal.  Two-thirds of adults think it’s okay to lie to avoid hurting somebody’s feelings.  98% of teenagers lie to their parents.  They say the other 2% lie to people who conduct surveys.  Not your kids though, maybe mine.  40% of parents think it’s okay to lie to their children about the trouble they got into when they were younger.  How about this one?  In a conversation, the average person will lie three times every 10 minutes.  And then finally, 44% of adults will exaggerate when they tell a story to make themselves sound cooler.  I figure that has something to do with age.  The other we get, the more exaggerated the stories get.  I don’t know, because we feel like we have to be cooler.

0:02:37.0

Dr. Gillian Foster is one of the main characters in this television program.  She’s played by actor Kelli Williams.  And in one of the promo videos I thought something she said was rather insightful.  Now, this is Hollywood.  This is television.  But she says, “When you’re lying, it’s hard to tell the story backwards because there’s no real memory of what happened.”  That’s pretty insightful, isn’t it?  But this is television.  This is Hollywood.  But lying really does happen in real life doesn’t it?  And oftentimes we like to call it something other than it is.  For instance, we like to say, well, we’re spinning the truth.  Or we’re telling a white lie.  Or we tell part of the truth, but not all of the truth.  We fudge the numbers.  And one of my favorite euphemisms today is we misspeak.  Yeah, we hear that a lot today, don’t we?  We misspeak about something.

0:03:32.1

Well, all of that brings us back to the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:33-37.  And if you follow along, I’d like to read these for us together.  Jesus says in verse 33, “Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform your oaths to the Lord.’  But I say to you, do not swear at all: neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne; nor by the earth, for it is His footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.  Nor shall you swear by your head, because you cannot make one hair white or black.  But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’  For whatever is more than these is from the evil one.”  Now, we’ve been studying through the Sermon on the Mount.  And one of the things we’ve been learning is that Jesus is more interested in heart modification than behavior modification.  The Pharisees were just the opposite of that.  They were all about externals.  They were all about behavior modification.  But they missed the issues of the heart.  And from the Beatitudes all the way through Matthew 5, 6, and 7 and the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus keeps drilling deeper and deeper and deeper into the heart.  And as He does so, He raises the bar on righteousness.  Do you remember early in chapter 5 when He said to His audience, “Your righteousness must exceed the righteous of the Pharisees or you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven,”?  And you can almost hear the gasps on that hillside overlooking the Galilean sea 2000 years ago, because all the people who were listening then believed that the Pharisees and understood the Pharisees to because holiest men around.  And if they didn’t meet the standard, then what hope would they have of exceeding the righteousness of the Pharisees.  But Jesus kept drilling deeper and deeper into the heart and raising the bar on righteousness.

0:05:35.5

A couple weeks ago He addressed the subject of anger.  And as He did so, He reminded us of the sixth command regarding murder.  And He says if we have anger in our heart toward another person, that is equivalent to murder, and we’ve violated the sixth command.  He goes on to the seventh command regarding adultery.  And He says it’s not just about, you know, the act of adultery itself, the physical act.  It’s even about a man lusting in his heart after another woman.  And if a man does that—or vice versa, a woman lusts in her heart after a man—we could say you’ve already broken the seventh commandment and violated that.  And now we come to verse 33-37, and the third commandment is the background to this.  This is the one that says, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”  And He begins to address this matter of the giving of oaths, the taking of vows.  And there is a lot of, kind of, strange language in here and hard to understand stuff until you kind of understand the background.  The punch line in all of this is verse 37 where Jesus says you’ve got to let your “yes” be “yes” and your “no” be “no.”

0:06:50.4

Now, let me give you the big idea, just kind of a big idea statement concerning this passage.  And then we’ll kind of work out way back into this.  But the big idea of these verses is simply this.  That kingdom living demands the kind of integrity that doesn’t require an oath to strengthen one’s commitment to truthfulness.  Let me say that again.  Kingdom living—and that’s what the Sermon on the Mount is all about is kingdom living, the ethics that are to be lived by as kingdom citizens—kingdom living demands the kind of integrity that doesn’t require an oath where I say, “I swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”  It doesn't require an oath for me to say to you or you to say to me, “Hey, now I’m really telling the truth.”  He just says with an oath, without an oath, just be a person of integrity where your “yes” means “yes,” and your “no” means “no.”

0:07:53.1

Now, the word integrity is a Latin term.  It comes from the word integritas.  And it means “whole” or “entire” or “complete.”  For those of you who might have taken Latin many years ago in school, you may see the root word there.  It’s the root word integer.  And you may have stumbled upon the word integer or the concept of an integer in math class.  Do you remember that in maybe grade school or junior high school?  You learned about integers.  Integers are whole numbers as opposed to fractions, okay.  That’s about all the math I know.  It’s all the math you’re gonna get this morning.  There’s really a spiritual principle out of this.  It’s the idea that God wants to make integers of us.  He wants to make us whole and complete, an entire people of integrity.  But our adversary the devil is trying to make fractions of us.  He’s trying to tear us apart and destroy us and do everything he can so that we don’t become the people of integrity that God wants us to be.

0:09:00.8

Now, let’s back into this idea by giving it a little bit Old Testament background on Matthew 5:33-37.  In verse 33 Jesus basically summarizes a number of passages and verses of scripture in the Old Testament regarding the giving of a vow or the taking of an oath.  The first of course is what I mentioned earlier in the third command, Exodus 20:7.  “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”  Leviticus 19:12 says, “You shall not swear by my name falsely and so profane the name of the Lord.”  How about Numbers 30:2?  “When a man vows a vow to the Lord, he shall not break his word.”  And then a couple of these relate to, we could say, our financial life.  It relates to money perhaps.  Deuteronomy 23:21, “When you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not be slack to pay it.”  And then Ecclesiastes 5:4-5.  “When you make a vow to God, do not delay to pay it, for He has no pleasure in fools.  Pay what you have vowed.”  And then I love this, “Better not to vow than to vow and not pay.”  Now, all of these kind of taken together have to do with false swearing, or we might say perjury.  And what is especially egregious, especially as it relates to the third command, is to vow a vow or to take an oath and invoke the name of the Lord.  It’s particularly egregious when we do that, invoking the name of the Lord, and then we do not speak the truth.  It’s egregious because the God of the Bible, who reveals Himself as a God who cannot lie, does not want His name associated with any falsehood.  And so that’s why when you step into a court of law and you say, “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me, God,” invoking the name of God, if you perjure yourself, not only does the State have something to say about that, but it is particularly egregious in the hallways of heaven.

0:11:29.2

Now, the Pharisees, as we’ve come to understand, well, they were sort of like government regulators when it came to the perfect, pure and unadulterated Word of God.  They would take passages like this, and they would add to them.  Regulation after regulation, rule after rule, pages after pages of loopholes and backdoors and explanations.  And they did this with the matter of oaths.  They were masters at splitting theological hairs, we might say.  And they had basically created kind of two categories of oaths.  They said there are those oaths that are binding, and those are the ones that invoke the name of God.  If you’re gonna invoke the name of God in a formal kind of way, say in a court of law or even as you give your vows at the marriage altar and you do so before the Lord, or even in casual conversation—you want to kind of bolster up your truthfulness to the other person, and you say, “I swear…,” and you invoke the name of God—that would be a binding oath.  You better be truthful, the Pharisees would say.  And to their credit, they took very seriously the third command that says, “Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”

0:12:46.2

But they also created a category of oaths that were non-binding.  They said, “Well, you know, we want to be really careful about invoking the name of God, so maybe we should swear by heaven or swear by earth or swear by Jerusalem.”  Or if you’re from New York or Philadelphia and your name is Vinnie, you might swear by your mother’s grave.  That was a joke, all right.  Or you might say, “Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”  You know, those kinds of oaths that we take and say in casual conversations.  And they had these two categories.  This non-binding category, if you didn’t invoke the name of God then…well, what they were doing was creating a loophole, a backdoor, some wiggle room.  And they really…you know, if they didn’t want to follow through on their promise, they didn’t have to.  And Jesus would have none of that.

0:13:52.1

In fact, turn with me to Matthew 23.  And I want us to read just an expanded conversation Jesus had with the Pharisees where He held nothing back.  And there are some pretty harsh words that He says to them, and in particular in verses 16-22 regarding oaths.  And you get some sense of how the Pharisees were theological hair-splitters.  Listen to this.  Verse 16 of Matthew 23, He says, “Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obliged to perform it.’”  Theological hair-splitting.  Jesus says, “Fools and blind!  For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?  And, ‘Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obliged to perform it.’”  Again, theological hair-splitting by the Pharisees.  Jesus call them, “Fools and blind!  For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift?  Therefore he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by all things on it.  He who swears by the temple, swears by it and by Him who dwells in it.  And he who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by Him who sits on it.”  Jesus wasn’t about to let the Pharisees get away with their theological hair-splitting.  He thought it was absolute craziness, theological poppycock, to suggest that you can vow a vow, not invoking the name of God, and somehow have an opportunity to not fulfill it.  He says a truthful person, a person of integrity, would not do something like that.  In fact, He goes on to say that if you swear by heaven, just remember, heaven is God’s throne.  If you swear by earth, remember, earth is God’s footstool.  If you swear by Jerusalem, well, Jerusalem is the holy city of God.  So every vow, every oath eventually comes back to God.  The Pharisees would even swear by their own hairs on their head.  And Jesus reminded them that they couldn’t turn one of their hairs white or black.  It was before the days of Just For Men and Clairol, but you get the idea there.  If you swear even by the hairs of your head, know that your creator God put those hairs there.  So all vows eventually come back to the Lord and to His integrity.  And so don’t vow a vow, don’t make a promise, don’t take an oath invoking the Lord’s name or anything about His creation and do so falsely, because it’s egregious to the name of God.

0:16:39.1

Now, back in Matthew 5, you would think that at this point Jesus would encourage His listeners and us to make sure whatever we vow and whatever oath we take, that we would keep it.  But He really doesn't do that.  He tells us not to swear at all, but just let our “yes” be “yes” and our “no” be “no.”  Now, it’s interesting that some groups of folks throughout church history, namely the Anabaptists and the Quakers, have taken this so seriously that they really will not, say, take an oath in a court of law.  But I don’t think that’s what Jesus is saying.  I don’t think He’s saying it’s wrong to take an oath, even to invoke the name of God, because even later in the Gospels when Jesus was before Caiaphas, He was under oath.  Twice Paul placed himself under oath in the book of Acts.  And so it’s not about placing yourself under oath or not placing yourself under oath.  It’s about being the kind of person that is so full of integrity that you don’t need an oath to strengthen your commitment to truthfulness in the eyes of others, is what He’s saying.

0:17:49.6

Haddon Robinson writes and says it this way.  “In a world that uses oaths to assure that we speak the truth,” he says, “we need to have an inward truthfulness that doesn’t depend on oaths at all.”  He says, “When I give my ‘yes,’ it is ‘yes.’  When I give my ‘no,’ it is ‘no.’  Oath or no oath, when one says something, one can count on it.”  He says, “Men and women who are truthful will be truthful whether they are under oath or not, so we ought not to swear in order to say, ‘Hey, everyone, now I’m telling the truth.’”  And he’s got a point there.

0:18:30.6

Now, there are many places where we could go to apply a message like this.  And I thought of a few of them this week where integrity really does matter.  For instance, it matters in our vocation, doesn’t it?  You as an employee or an as employer, you representing your company, your business to another business, a contract that you might sign.  You know, we used to do business on a simple handshake.  Now we write contracts (0:19:00.1) with fine print and loopholes.  But integrity in your word really does matter in the marketplace.

0:19:07.8

What about integrity in our marriages?  Remember the vows that you took at the marriage altar?  You probably said something like this to your spouse.  “For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health ‘til death do us part.”  That’s a pretty strong vow, isn’t it?  And you say it in the presence of God and the many witnesses there that day.  You said yes to your spouse on that wedding day.  Does your “yes” mean “yes?”  Does your “no” mean “no?”

0:19:43.7

Let me meddle a little bit further, if you don’t mind.  How about in our finances, integrity in our personal finances?  I think of tax season and preparing our taxes with integrity, the kind of integrity that would pass an audit if the IRS showed up on our (0:20:00.0) front doorstep.  What about the kind of integrity that takes out a loan, a mortgage loan, or maybe just reaches into your pocket and pulls out a credit card and says, “I promise to pay this.”  My “yes” is “yes.”  My “no” is “no.”  The Bible says, “The wicked borrow and do not repay, but the righteous give generously.”

0:20:22.6

I think of integrity in our parenting.  It’s important for our kids to know, parents, that our “yes” means “yes,” and perhaps even more so that our “no” really does mean “no.”  And kids are pretty good at detecting, maybe, when “yes” doesn’t mean “yes” or “no” doesn’t mean “no” and playing those games of divide and conquer with mom and dad some. We could talk about integrity in school for students and the many different ways that kids can cheat today and the opportunities to do so.  Maybe you have somebody in your house that’s getting ready to go off to college.  And their integrity is going to be tested as maybe a test is passed around that the teacher didn’t intend to be out there.

0:21:07.7

You can look inside the sports world and see integrity just crumbling with steroid scandal after steroid scandal.  And we have a crisis of integrity in our world today, don’t we?  And that’s not even beginning to talk about the crisis of integrity sometimes even in the church.

0:21:25.7

So where can we go for some help?  Well, let me just leave you with two or three integrity principles, kind of some take-home principles for us today.  And the first one simply says this.  That we learn integrity in the small decisions we make in the small places.  I get this idea from Psalm 78:70-72.  It speaks of King David in the Old Testament.  And the scripture says this, that “God also chose David His servant, and took him from the sheepfolds.”  Then in verse 72 it says that, “So he [David] shepherded them according to the integrity of his heart, and guided them by his skillful hands.”  That’s a great verse of scripture, and I love the combination in there, the idea of integrity of heart and skillfulness of hands.  It’s a great combination to have in somebody, isn’t it?  And one without the other just creates an incomplete picture.  You can have a person of integrity and a person who is honest.  But if they don’t have the skills to get the job done, you know, you’re kind of stuck with a nice person.  Or you can have somebody who has great skills, but they lack integrity.  And you end up with a train wreck.  David was…at least the broad-brushed view of David in the scriptures, albeit his lack of integrity with Bathsheba, the broad-brush view of him is that he led Israel.  He shepherded Israel with the integrity of his heart and the skillfulness of his hands.  Where do you find a person like that today?  Well, go back to verse 72.  It gives us a clue.  God found David and took him from where?  The sheepfolds.  In a small, obscure, out of the way place that didn’t show up on anybody’s radar.  And it was there in that small place as David was shepherding his father’s sheep that he learned integrity.  That he learned how to make decisions full of integrity in those small places and even with those small decisions.

0:23:50.2

I remember when I first came out of seminary.  And Cathryn and I were recently married, and we went to Houston, Texas to serve our first church.  And I had always been a part of large churches from the time that I was growing up in Indiana to the time that I interned at one of the fastest growing churches in America while I was at Dallas Seminary.  And God, in His humor, took us to a church that was about two weeks away from closing its doors.  Small place on the west side of Houston surrounded by giant churches.  I mean, there was a church over here with thousands of people every weekend and a church over here with tens of thousands of people that were showing up every weekend and all kinds of churches in between.  I think there were 70 or 80 or 90 churches in our community.  And we were just this little, kind of, restart of a church plant in a junior high school.  Small place.  Longing to be kind of like the big guys sometimes and have all the resources and wonderful people like you who can serve here and serve there.  Felt like a one-armed paper hanger just doing everything in the church.  But it’s in those small places where you’re making smaller decisions that you learn things that you can’t learn any other place.  And in time, God gives you a new assignment.  Maybe you're in a small place longing for a bigger assignment right now, a promotion or something.  You learn integrity in those small places and in the small decisions that we make.

0:25:25.6

Well, here is another principle to take home.  God invites people of integrity into intimate fellowship with Him.  I’m gonna stay in the Psalms and this time go to Psalm 15.  And David asks a couple of penetrating questions here.  He says, “Lord,” Psalm 15:1-2, “who may abide in thy tent and who may dwell in thy holy hill?”  In other words, Lord, who are the people who really get close to You?  Who are the people who really experience an intimate, personal fellowship with You?  He goes on to answer the question in kind of a broad-brushed way.  He says, “He who walks with integrity and works righteousness and speaks truth in his heart.”  Jesus would say it’s the person whose “yes” means “yes,” and his “no” means “no.”  And he doesn’t need to say “I swear.”  He doesn’t need to take an oath to convince everybody that he’s being truthful.  He’s just a person of his word.  These are the people that God says, “Come on in a little bit closer.  I want to get close to you.  I want to share some intimacies with you.”  And if you read on a little bit further in Psalm 15, it goes into some detail.  And one of the things it says is that person of integrity is somebody who “swears to his own hurt and does not change.”  That’s a little convicting, isn’t it?  Because sometimes I say, “I promise this,” or “I vow this,” or take an oath over here.  And circumstances change as time goes on, and it becomes less convenient for me to fulfill the vow or the promise that I made way back here.  And the scripture says that that person of integrity who gets to climb the holy hill of God and be the Lord’s presence is the person who swears, even to his own hurt, and does not change.  His “yes” is “yes,” and his “no” means “no.”

0:27:28.2

And then finally, last principle we’ll take home with us today is that we need the righteousness of Jesus to make us people of integrity, right?  To make us whole, entire and complete.  And that’s the whole point of the Sermon on the Mount here.  That’s the whole of “your righteousness has to exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees.”  I mean, after a little bit of commentary on the sixth commandment about anger and murder and a little commentary after that about adultery and lust, now on integrity, you’re beginning to feel, as least I am that I’ll never measure up to this.  And when you fast forward to the end of chapter 5 and Jesus says, “Therefore,” in summary, “you shall be perfect just as your Father in heaven in perfect,” who can do that?  The answer is not one of us.  That’s why the overarching theme, especially of chapter 5 of the Sermon on the Mount, is we need the righteousness of Jesus credited to our account by faith in Him to measure up to any standard that God has for righteousness.  And we need His righteousness to make us whole and entire and complete, a people of integrity.

0:28:46.0

And so I wonder today where you are in your relationship with God.  Maybe you are somebody who received Christ as your savior many years ago, but you’ve made some small compromises along the way.  And as you look deep inside your heart, you say, “I’ve not been the person of integrity I should be.”  Or maybe you are somebody here today and you hear the holy standard of God, and you realize, “Boy, do I fall short of that.”  Yeah, the Bible says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  We’re all in the same boat that way.  And that realization is what drove many of us in this room to the cross of Jesus Christ.  The wages of sin is death, the Bible says, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.  And when you invite Christ into your life by faith and acknowledge Him as your savior, His righteousness—the One who perfectly fulfilled the law of God and didn’t break even a bit of it—His righteousness is then credited to your account and to my account.  Do you fall short?  You bet you do.  Do I fall short?  You bet I do.  But Jesus paid it all, and all to Him I owe.  Let’s pray together.

0:30:12.8

Father, thank You for Your Word.  And I thank You for this instruction from the Sermon on the Mount.  And, yes, Father, it gets very convicting for all of us in the room when we see the righteous standard of God and we realize just how much we fall short of it.  But, oh, how quickly it makes us run to the cross of Christ and to thank You for our savior Jesus, who perfectly fulfilled the law, who perfectly lived up to the standard, and who died a perfect death, was buried in the ground and rose triumphantly from the grave three days later to purchase our redemption, to deliver us from the penalty of sin—those wages that lead to death—to deliver us from the power of sin so that we could be people of integrity and live an overcoming kind of life.  And, yes, Father, we look forward to the day when He comes again to deliver us from the presence of sin, because this world is winding down.  And it’s wearing on us.  But, Father, we are people of hope today because of who Jesus is and who He is in our lives.  I pray for anybody here today who hears a message like this, and they feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the still, small voice of God, their creator, calling them home.  Calling them to the cross of Christ, where His blood cleanses us and washes us from all of our sins.  Father, we pray that You would do Your work among us and that today would be another day of salvation and a day when all of heaven rejoices.  In Christ’s name, amen.

0:32:34.1