The Lie of Living Your Truth | Kingdom

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Welcome to the Kingdom Podcast. I'm your host John Moffitt. I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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This podcast is about the Kingdom of God and making it a reality in our life every single day.

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And part of that is understanding truth. We are definitely in a truth war, and it didn't start with media or social media or liberalism or whatever political party that you want to pick.

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It's been going on since the garden. I mean, we all know this phrase, what does Lucifer say to Eve?

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Has God not say, did he really say you will die? He takes the truth and he alters it and ends up giving her her own truth, right?

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You can become like God. Listen, nobody knowingly wants to believe a lie.

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No one wants to do that. So it became truth for her. Eve believed it was true.

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She could become like God and her actions then followed. Well, that's what we're gonna talk about today.

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How we can believe lies and be convinced they're truth and our actions then follow.

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I'll give you an example of this. People are told all the time, live your truth, whatever your truth is.

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Or you'll even hear as they disagree with you, that's not my truth. As if truth is subjective, right?

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And you'll see the results of it because live your truth. If we were to reword it, it really means do whatever makes you feel good.

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Do whatever you like, do whatever you want. And then you'll justify it by using a very powerful word called truth.

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Because if you don't know the truth, you're a slave, right? You're blind. You're in captivity.

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And this is a problem, not only just in our world in general, but it's a problem spiritually.

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Satan is called the father of all lies. Jesus describes himself as, I am the truth. I am the way, the truth, and the life.

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And what does Jesus describe Satan as, right? What is he wanting to do? He wants to steal, he wants to kill, and he wants to destroy.

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And he will use deception to do that. I wanted to think about this from an apologetic standpoint.

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Look at the Bible and how the Bible describes truth. And then use it to guide us because you have to have a source of truth.

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There has to be a place that we can go to and say, this is true.

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In many ways, the way we've said it in the Bible is, thus saith the Lord.

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And because God is not the author of confusion and he is only holy, therefore what he gives us is true.

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So I just want to give us—this will be a two -parter. We're going to talk about what is truth from a biblical standpoint, and then we're going to talk about how it applies to our life next week.

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And I think you're going to want to hear that. First of all, truth is not mutable, which means it doesn't change.

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One of the attributes of God is immutable. He's immutable. God never changes. And if truth comes from God, therefore it's not going to change with circumstances.

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At times we believe this to be true, but it's not. James 1 .17 says it this way, Every good and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the

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Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Well, how do we learn about these gifts?

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God proclaims to us the truth of his nature, who he is, and what we can expect from him.

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And he says, listen, these truths don't change because of our circumstances change, or our actions may change.

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Or Isaiah 40, verse 8, The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of God, which is where we learn truth from, the word of God will stand forever.

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You know, I preached a sermon recently, and you can—we'll connect it to this episode. But in the sermon,

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I mentioned how it feels like truth, when it comes to health, changes every other six months.

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Coffee's really bad for you. You should never drink it again. Coffee is really good for you. You should shoot it into your veins. You know, it's like, well, which one is it?

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Or, you know, eggs are killing you. Don't eat eggs. Now it's like eggs is the best source of protein.

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Did it change? Like, did the concept of eggs change? You know, no, we've known about eggs for thousands of years.

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But our understanding of it has changed. This, when it comes down to the spiritual world and what we know to be true about God and their human relationship with God, we have to sit back and say, this cannot change.

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Because if it's changing, it means God's adjusting to us. And it should be we're adjusting to God.

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So first of all, we change. We adjust our life to the truth. The truth does not change.

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So the moment you say, well, that is my truth or live your truth. It can't be true for one person and not true for another, unless we're talking about genders.

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You know, if you're a male, you're a male. You can't be other than a male or a female. And even that, that's an idea where we can just make it change.

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If you, like, I love this question that seems to be hard for our world to answer. What is a woman? So we have a hard time answering that.

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But there's a truth about what a woman is, and it can't change. It's not mutable. It's not open for discussion.

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Secondly, what we know about truth, and this is very common in our culture today. It's not subjective, right?

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It's not open for personal opinion. This is probably the one that comes out for the most when we're talking about your truth.

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It's subjective. The Bible has warned us about when this happens.

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You know, everyone was wise in their own eyes. Well, Proverbs says it this way,

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Proverbs 3, 7. Be not wise in your own eyes, which means don't determine what is best in your own way.

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That's your own truth. Fear the Lord and turn away from evil. Well, then people didn't listen to Proverbs 3, and they decided that they were going to go ahead and do it in their own way.

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And so Paul wrote Romans 1. Let me just read this to you, because it's a perfect example of subjective truth.

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A perfect example. Romans 1 .22. So he's saying, all right, if this is true, you believe this

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God, these idols are true for you, then I'm going to let you have the results of your truth, right?

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The results of your own wisdom, which he calls foolishness. So he says this. Not only that, offensive and condemnable.

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So the moment you say, well, just live your truth, God says, that's foolish. You're denying my truth because there can't be two truths, right?

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Black and white can't be the same color. They're opposites. So there's either

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God's truth or the opposite of God's truth, which is foolishness and lies. That's just how he describes it.

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So first of all, God's truth does not change. And I would say truth in general does not change.

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Number two, it is not subjective. It's not based upon what you believe to be.

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And I think this really plays into the last one. It's not a consensus, which is if you look at all three, you will see over time in history, what we would say is true will change based upon the amount of people who agree or disagree.

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So there's a subjectiveness to it. And that subjectiveness really is controlled by the dominance of a culture of power.

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You talk to atheists and they will say, what is good is really acceptable by culture. Like what does everyone agree upon?

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And so whatever is the most dominant right now, it's obvious the most dominant view is that killing a baby in the womb is not murder.

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That would be the consensus of our country because we keep doing it and we can't stop it. So the consensus is, and as a believer in God's word, we know that's a lie, right?

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Sex before marriage. It's very clear in scripture that that should not be acceptable, but even in the Christian world, it's acceptable.

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That the consensus, and again, it's all about consensus. I'm not going to get into the full story, but if you know anything about germ theory, we didn't use to wash our hands before surgery.

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In the 19th century, we still weren't washing our hands. And so you are having people who are literally putting their hands into a cadaver, dissecting a dead body, taking all of the germs from that, and then helping the baby be delivered.

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And that those women were dying up to the point of 18 % of the women were dying. And so you have this scientist who's finally, his name is,

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I'm gonna try and pronounce it. It's a complicated name, but it's Ignis Sommelweis. And he finally discovered what was happening.

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It was germs. There was no way these doctors were going to admit it was their fault of dirty hands.

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And so they fought back against him and said, we're not washing our hands. He was so overwhelmed by this.

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He ended up going crazy. They put him in an asylum and he ended up dying at the age of 47.

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And just a few years later, people started paying attention to his research. And that's where we have germ theory today.

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We wash our hands. But the consensus was because we didn't agree with what we saw, we didn't like the results of it.

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And this is how we are today. You know, abortion really is, it's the result of promiscuity.

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We want to be able to play the way we want and not deal with the consequences of it. And God says, this is not how this works at all.

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It's damaging on every level. You could rewrite Romans 1 and just add in abortion in there if you wanted to.

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So when we're thinking about truth and the nature of God, God, he's not a tyrant.

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He's not trying to control us because he has a controlling issue. If you think about the nature of God, right?

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He wants to give us things that are pure and honorable and beautiful and enjoyable.

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He created us with senses, right? So that when we eat things, we enjoy them. When we have sexual relationships, it's enjoyable for both people.

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But in a harmonious, monogamous relationship that God has designed for his glory, like all of these things are

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God. I mean, when he created Adam and Eve, he's like, be fruitful, right? Enjoy this and be fruitful and populate the world.

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So there's a purpose behind the truth. And so as Christians, we need to step back and allow these truths about scripture.

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God's truth does not change. It's not subjective and it's not based on consensus. It's based upon his word.

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Then we will live in freedom. We will not live under the lies and we can proclaim the truth of the gospel and everyone around us can be set free from the bondage that they live in.

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Stay tuned for next week when we talk about now how truth becomes super powerful for us in the way in which we live for God and for one another.