To Tell the Truth

One of the fundamental problems with the sin nature is "the suppression of the truth" (Rom. 1:18). Yeah, nice phrase, but what does it mean? It means we lie. We lie in what we say. We lie in what we don't say. We know the truth and we don't tell it. We attempt to deceive others in what we say and in what we withhold. Worse, we deceive ourselves. Of course, that's not just my opinion. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jer. 17:9).

The thing I find most disturbing is that part about deceiving ourselves. We are often conscious of the deceit we feed others, and if we are conscious of it, we can work on it. We can repent of it. We can stop it. We can correct it. It is the deceiving of self that is the problem. We often aren't aware of it. Being unaware means we can't do anything to fix it.

We lie to ourselves in all sorts of ways. We lie about how we feel. We lie about what we believe. We lie about how we see ourselves. This one is a big problem. We lie about ourselves to ourselves all the time. We lie in both directions. We tell ourselves that we are better than we really are ... and we tell ourselves that we are worse than we really are. It's as if we do all we can to avoid the truth about who we really are.

We are encouraged to lie to ourselves positively. The "Self-Esteem movement" tells us, "You need to tell yourself that you can do anything you set your mind to." Have you heard that one? Have you told others that? Have you told yourself that? Do you know it's a lie? I can demonstrate it so that it is undeniable. If I am stuck in traffic (like I was this morning) and I set my mind to turning myself and my car into a dragon to fly over this mess and get where I'm going, no amount of positive thinking will accomplish it. That's simply a lie. It is not true that I can do or be anything that I set my mind to do or be.

Why do we encourage one another to tell ourselves this lie? Well, it's to counteract another lie. The other lie says, "I cannot ..." when no such impossibility exists. My junior high coach told me, "'Can't' means 'didn't try'." My junior high coach was wrong, but his intent was to motivate me to try. I still can't jump 10 feet into the air and slam dunk the basketball, even though I've tried. But the coach wanted me to try, so he lied to me. We don't want people to put artificial barriers in their way, so we lie to them. "You can be whatever you want to be." You see, one of the most common lies people tell themselves is that they cannot do what they actually can do.

According to Paul, the opposite is also true. Perhaps the most common lie people tell themselves is that they are better than they really are. Paul never warned about low self-esteem, but he did say, "I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned" (Rom. 12:3). You see, we often tell ourselves lies about how good we are. We tell ourselves we're good wives and it's that rotten husband who is the problem. We tell ourselves we're good fathers when we're not. We tell ourselves we're good spouses, good parents, good students, good Christians ... when we're not. You know these lies. There are those folks who tell themselves, "I'm a great singer" and try out for shows like American Idol only to demonstrate that they can't locate a musical note twice on the same day. There are those folks who tell themselves, "I'm too sexy for my shirt" while not a single person of the opposite sex can tolerate their presence. I am thoroughly convinced that we lie to ourselves in the positive far more than we lie to ourselves in the negative. "That doesn't bother me." "I don't have a problem with that." "I have that sin under control." Lies, all lies.

The answer to self-deceit is not another lie. We don't solve the problem of telling ourselves we are better than we are by telling ourselves that we're no good at anything. We don't solve the problem of lying to ourselves about being awful by telling ourselves the lie that we can do anything. Paul's answer was this: "Think with sober judgment." That's what we really need. We don't need "self-esteem training." We don't need to get pumped up. We need a dose of truth. We need it now. And we need it far more often than any of us likely realize.