Deuteronomy 5:20
The Ninth Commandment

I. Do You Believe the Truth Is Good For You?
A. The Story of Ergun Caner
1. Caner claimed to have been a devout Muslim, trained to be a terrorist, from Turkey.
2. His claims were lies. But those lies opened the doors for him to be a seminary president.
3. Even after was exposed in 2010, he was made president of a Baptist college.
4. He looked like he was going to get away with it when, in 2014, his son committed suicide.
5. It is an fantasy that people will love truth and not tolerate lies. We should make it reality.
B. Do Not Bear False Witness Against Your Neighbor
1. Don’t commit perjury, like the “worthless men” who accused Naboth (1 Kings 21).
2. Over and over again in the Bible, God is telling us to tell the truth.
a. In Proverbs 6, the Lord hates a “lying tongue”, “a false witness who breathes out lies.”
b. Revelation 21:8, “all liars” “will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur”.
3. It forbids injustice. It doesn’t allow us to ignore the truth to get the result we want.
II. Loving the Truth In a World That Doesn’t Believe the Truth Is Good For Us
A. Taste and See What Is Good
1. Put away “all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander” (1 Peter 2:1-3).
2. We love the truth – especially the truth of God’s Word – just like a newborn baby loves milk.
3. If you like lies, flattery, malicious gossip, etc., you don’t just have a bad habit.
4. You need to really taste that the Lord is good. Once you do that, then you’ll love the truth.
5. “Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.” (Leviticus 19:17.) Failing to rebuke him when he is in sin is to hate him.
6. You can destroy someone’s spiritual health by giving them too much flattery.
B. The Commandment Violated in the Omission
1. We need candor. Not telling unpleasant but vital truths is not loving the truth.
2. In Leviticus 5:1, refusing to give evidence is like giving false evidence.
3. Like a doctor must sometimes tell people hard truths, we have to tell hard truths.
4. Being a Christian does not mean always being positive and encouraging (Matthew 10:34-36).
C. Love for the Truth: The Foundation of our Community
1. It doesn’t allow us to ignore the truth to get the result we want.
2. Our church must have at its center a belief that the Truth is good for us.
3. The body is built up by “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4).
4. We grow up to be grounded and mature by having the truth spoken to us, in love.
5. Real relationships depend on integrity. You can’t trust the two-faced person.
D. Love Our Neighbor Enough to Tell Him the Truth
1. Our refusal to tell people the truth keeps them from the opportunity to repent.
2. Being a truthful community means we love the truth so we listen when corrected.
3. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck (The People of the Lie) says evil people avoid the truth.
4. The most offensive thing to them is the light of truth exposing who they really are.
5. Churches have become magnets for those who think they can say anything about anyone.
6. The Lord Jesus said that Satan is “the father of lies” (John 8:44). He begets lies.
7. We are all born liars. So we reveal our true parentage.
E. If We Love the Truth, We’ll Give It to the World
1. The world does not love the truth. A deceitful world is threatened by a life lived truthfully.
2. The world killed the One who is “The Way, the Truth, and the life.”
3. But we owe it to them anyway, especially our honesty in explaining the Christian message.
4. Satan bore false witness against God. He snidely implied something slanderous about God.
5. Our first parents believed that lie; and we believe that lie every time we disobey God.
6. The hard truth is we disobey God because we have inherited the same nature distrust of God.
7. We also owe the world a marvelous truth: the truth that there is hope, the gospel.
III. Invitation: The Father took our idolatry, and murder, adultery, and thievery and placed them on the sinless Son; He took our mountain of lies and laid them on the Truth Himself; the Truth in the flesh paid for our lies. If we will but believe that, then we can start loving the Truth, and taste that the Lord is good.