Focus on These Things: Whatever Is True
July 8, 2018
Dr. Tom Pace
Ephesians 4:21-25; John 8:31-32

We begin a new sermon series today and really we’re going to focus on one verse of Scripture for six weeks. We’ll take it apart and learn what it’s really trying to say. There’s sort of an overarching theme.
It’s Philippians 4:8 and it’s on the front of your bulletin. We’re going to say that single verse together in the sermon time. Let me just say that I hope you’ll memorize it before it’s over. But each week we’re going to look at one or two of the words that are in that verse to really see what they mean. Today we’re going to be talking about truth. We’re going to look at this passage from Ephesians as well as just a couple verses from the Gospel of John.
For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus.You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts,and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Ephesians4:21-25
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples;and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” John 8:31-32
We came back from vacation a couple of weeks ago and I would run across people and they would say, “Hey, welcome back!” I’d say, “Thank you, glad to be back.” They’d say, “Yeah, right!” We had been in Colorado and I love Colorado. It’s just gorgeous but I mean it - I’m glad to be back.
There is that moment when you step off the plane from the jetway and you can feel the humidity right in that very moment. Yeah, there is humidity, and there are mosquitoes. Lots of mosquitoes. And there’s traffic. Lots of traffic. All those things are real.
But I am glad to be back because you all are here. This church is here. A job I love is here. This is an amazing city, incredible city. With incredible diversity and incredible prosperity. And I would tell you the only city in the entire world that couples those two in the same way we do. This is an incredible place. And I’m glad to be back.
Now let me tell you that part of that is a decision that one makes about whether one is going to think about, focus on, humidity and mosquitoes and traffic. Or whether one is going to focus on all of the blessings that are part of being in this wonderful place. That’s a decision we make.
I am a person who likes to go to work in the morning. I get up in the morning and I’m anxious to go. I do my Bible study and my work at home and then work out but I’m always thinking, “I have to get to work! There’s stuff to get done! I’ve got to get there!” I have that sense of “I want to go! Let’s do it!” And then at the end of the day I want to go home.
I’m so blessed that my life is such that in the mornings I go to a job I love and at the end of the day I go home to a family that I love.
Part of that is that I’m blessed with an incredible job and an incredible family. But part of it is because I’ve decided that I’m going to love the job God’s given me. And I’m going to love the family God’s given me.
Maybe I’m oversharing here, but it’s not always been that way and it isn’t always that way. There are some periods or times in my life when that isn’t the decision that I make. But through good counseling and medicine and all sorts of things you can get to that place where you build that discipline into your life to say, “I’m going to look at the way God’s blessed me. That’s what I’m going to focus on.”
That’s what we’re going to be talking about for the next six weeks. This one verse of Scripture that I believe we can begin to put into practice. It can be life changing for us. “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is beautiful, whatever is commendable, if there’s any excellence, if there’s anything worthy of praise, focus on these things.” Each week we’re going to say it together and we’re going to look at the concept and then we want to look at each of the individual words, and see if we can see what the Scripture might be meaning about those.
So, look at the front of your bulletin and we’re going to say it together in unison. We’re going to begin with the word “finally.”
Let’s read together, “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is beautiful, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, focus onthese things.”
Let’s join together in prayer. O God, open us up, open our eyes that we might see, open our ears that we might hear, open our hearts that we might feel. Then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
Whatever is true. I think this word true or truth has two basic meanings and I want us to look at both of them and see how Paul might be meaning this.
On the one hand truth is whatever it actually is; truth is what actually is the case. I grew up with my parents watching the CBS Evening news and at the end of broadcast Walter Cronkite would say, “And that’s the way it is on…” Whatever date it was.
Oh, that we could really believe that when we read something or hear something, that’s the way it is.
So, here’s the deal. Paul says in verse 25 in Ephesians “So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.” We are to seek the truth and speak the truth, to deal with things as they actually are.
I will tell you that I don’t think our culture is in that place. When I was in high school I was on the debate team. My kids say, “You shouldn’t tell people that.” But I was on the debate team and I remember early on in my career that I was working on a case or argument and I said to the coach, “This stuff isn’t true.” He said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It matters only if we can build enough evidence to support it.”
That just didn’t seem right to me. In fact, what we would do was try and come up with the weirdest cases we could think of, that we could find all the evidence to support, because the other teams would never have thought of it. And they’d have nothing to refute it, even if it were so clearly untrue. But that didn’t matter. It only mattered whether it helped me win. We were pretty good, by the way.
I don’t know how many of you have been following the World Cup competition. Probably the best soccer player in the world is a man named Neymar. He’s Brazilian and an incredible player. One of Neymar’s greatest skills is that he is an incredible flopper. Someone can come by and brush him and he’s lying on the ground holding his ankle and moaning and rolling back and forth. He’s hoping to get a yellow card or a foul on the other team.
In fact, I found a YouTube video on the Internet that shows a kids’ soccer coach showing his kids how to flop. They’re all running down the pitch, kicking the soccer ball and then he says, “Neymar!” And then they all roll on the ground and scream. Come on!
Now we’re all self-righteous about that but we love it when James Hardin does it on the basketball court. He’s one of the best and all that we care about is that he gets the foul and he makes the basket. It’s part of the game. Deception is part of the game. And we begin to apply that to our lives.
There are a couple of good books on this concept of deception. One of them came out in 2009 by Robert Feldman and it’s called The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships. Let me read to you from that book and this is his summary: “A wealth of psychological research has for decades provided evidence that it’s not only the atypically immoral who lie frequently. Indeed, my own research which has spanned more than four decades now has repeatedly shown lying to be more common in daily life than we think. All told I found …” (And this is going to blow your mind!) “…All told I found that most people lied three times in the course of a ten-minute conversation. Some lied as many as 12 times.”
What he did was introduce two people, videotaped their conversation, then went back afterward and said, “Show me the places where you either might have stretched the truth or you weren’t quite accurate.” He goes on. “Bear in mind too that after the fact participants might be reluctant to confess to their inaccuracies. This would only lead to an under-reporting of the incidents of deception though. In other words, it’s possible that the frequency of lies was even higher than three lies per conversation.”
Here’s what’s funny. In addition, he found that women tended to lie in order to make the people they’re talking to feel better, whereas men tended to lie to make themselves look better. How come all the women reacted like that? I’ve got all these heads shaking – this is a sad thing.
Friends, we have to face the truth that all of us are involved in deception. A six-month-old baby will fake cry to get parents to come. Acting as if there’s something terrible wrong when all they did was want someone to come and give them attention.
You know the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and going to his father. His father said, “Did you chop down my tree?” And George said, “I cannot tell a lie – I did it with my little hatchet!” It’s a lie. It didn’t happen. It came out in a book in 1800 by a fellow named Mason Locke Weems who, just by the way, happened to be a preacher. The story that is to be the pinnacle of honesty is a lie told by a preacher about a politician. How about that? That’s who we are I’m afraid.
Part of the truth is that we tend to deceive in order to make ourselves look better, to feel better about ourselves, to not hurt other people’s feelings. We tend to not be fully honest, and at some point, we have to seek the truth.
Here at St. Luke’s we had a group of consultants come and do “secret shopping” at St. Luke’s over a period of four weeks. They came to all of our services; they participated at children’s check-in, parking, finding their way around, the signage to the worship services, to where they were welcomed, if anyone talked to them and they seemed to know what was going on. Was there a lot of inside talk that guests wouldn’t know about? All sorts of things and it was great to hear some of it when they gave their report. Do you know what they called their report? They called it “The Giant Mirror.” They were helping us look at who we are and see the truth. Some of it was hard to hear but most of it was great. At some point we’ve got to stop pretending.
Are there things going on in your financial life that you’re pretending aren’t true and one day will come back to bite you? Are there things going on in your marriage or your family that you just keep pretending but you actually need to look at the truth? At some point we have to stop speaking falsely to one another and deal in the truth.
Now there’s another meaning for truth and it is truth as not the way it is but the way it can be. A standard to which you are reaching.
About 20 years ago I decided that for my summer project I was going to build a deck in the back yard. It was fun some of the time but it was a long summer and it was hot. But early on one of the first things I found out was that boards are not true. They’re not straight, they bend. You’d think, “I’m just going to put all the boards down in a line and they’re all going to line up right next to each other.” But no way. It doesn’t happen that way – they’re not true.
And corners aren’t true. What you have to do is when you put it together is to get something as a standard. You take a square, which is a tool, and put it on the inside of the two boards to make a 90-degree angle. You put it there and you move the board and they call it “truing up the corners.” You’re going to make them fit the standard of the truth of reality. You use a level. Some of you have tried to hang a picture and when you hang it, you say, “Oh, I think that looks straight.” Then you put a level on it and find it’s not straight. Then you must fix it. You must “true” it up.
In the Scripture it uses an image of a plumb line. That’s a string with a weight on the end – that’s called a plumb. And this is the truth – this is vertical. You put a post in the ground and you want the wall or post to be directly vertical you put it up to the truth standard. That’s the plumb line. Or a compass. A compass is that way’s north. So, I’m going to work my life toward that north. That’s the truth.
I don’t know how many of you are baseball fans, but many years ago they introduced Stat Cast. It’s a little box on the television screen or on the computer that defines the strike zone. The umpires hate it because it’s the truth. That used to be a ball or a strike was what they called it – that was what it was. But now, they say that there’s some objective truth that they can measure how good an umpire they are. They can measure it against the truth. It’s a standard.
So, what’s our standard? Here’s what the Scriptures say: “For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus.” Or in John 8: “Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples;and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’”
The word know there in Greek it’s not the word for knowing knowledge, it’s the word for knowing a person – as if to say to someone, “I know you.” The truth is Jesus, he’s the standard. He’s what we try and measure our lives against.
Friends, we are bombarded daily by all sorts of voices telling us, “This is right! This is wrong! Do this! Don’t do this!” Moreover, we are bombarded by voices telling us what matters, what’s real. What matters is how big is the house you live in. What matters is what kind of car you drive. What matters is how successful you are at work. What matters is whether people think well of you. What matters is what you look like. What matters is how much you weigh. What matters is what you wear.
There are all sorts of voices that come at us saying, “No, this is the truth. This is really what life is about right here.” What this is saying is that Jesus is the truth. That’s the standard against what we judge our lives.
So at least in my life I don’t throw very many strikes. There’s a standard and the standard is Jesus, and there is the truth of my life, there’s a gap that needs to be closed somehow. So how does that happen?
I think when Paul tells us “Whatever is true – focus on that” he’s not saying, “Keep your focus on all the mistakes you make, and all the places where you fall short.” You can acknowledge those, that’s what confession’s all about. But I think what he’s saying is, “Keep your focus on the truth of Jesus. What you’re trying to become, who you’re trying to reach, what that standard is. Find that and reach for that!”
Listen to how the Scripture goes, “You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts…” Deluded as if you didn’t know the truth. It thought something was the truth but it wasn’t the truth. It was deluded.
He goes on, “…and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
He’s saying, “Look, this is the true you. This is who you can be.” This is the transformation by the power of Spirit from the inside out. So, we hold on to that. And that’s what changes us. That’s how we begin to become more like Christ. The religious word is “sanctification,” to be sanctified, to be made more like Jesus. To close the gap between the reality of our lives and the truth, the standard of Jesus.
Here’s the cool thing about the Christian faith. This gap gets closed two ways. On the one hand the Holy Spirit works within us to make us like the standard, like Jesus. But Jesus also comes down to meet us right where we are. That’s grace. That’s what’s amazing. Almost every religion says, “Here’s the standard. Keep being a better person! Keep being a better person!” But the Christian faith says, “I’m not going to have you do that on your own. I’m going to come down and meet you right where you are.”
Mike Graves is the Emeritus Professor of Preaching at St. Paul’s School of Theology in Kansas City. He tells a great story I want to share with you. He told it to John Ortberg so I’m going to read it directly to you. It’s a great story because that way if it’s a lie then it’s their lie and not mine.
My wife and kids on Sunday afternoon after a sermon will ask “Was that story true?” They’re my family, so why would they ask something like that? I usually say, “It’s mostly true.”
Here’s the Graves story: “When a colleague and I were invited to be part of a former student’s installation service we agreed enthusiastically and traveled together to his town. Joe had many family members coming to the service so we were surprised when he told us that we were all going to eat out that evening. I wondered how 19 of us were going to get in and out of a restaurant in time for church. I suggested that my colleague and I go ahead to the restaurant and put our names on the waiting list. The restaurant was packed. I wiggled through the crowd to the front of the line and found an Amish man standing behind an old pulpit. Next to him was a hand-carved sign that said, ‘Please do not give your name till everyone in your party is present.’”
“I understood the reason for the restaurant’s policy but I also knew that it would take a long time for a table of 19 to be ready. I said, ‘Yes, the name is Graves, party of 19.’ The Amish man, with his beard and hat looked at me and said, ‘And is your whole party present?’ Haltingly I said, ‘Yes.’ Okay, I lied but it wasn’t as if I was trying to beat the system. After all even the smaller parties were waiting thirty minutes so we’d be putting in our waiting time too. No big deal. Oh, how can we rationalize?”
“But my colleague disagreed. He said, ‘You lied to the Amish? You shouldn’t lie to the Amish.’”
I guess if you lie to a Methodist it’s all fine, but don’t lie to the Amish.
Graves goes on, “’Well, by the time they call our name, I said, Joe and his family will be here. Two minutes later came the announcement. ‘Graves – party of 19.’ I went back to the Amish man and said, ‘Yes, Graves party – we’re not all here yet.’ I was nervous now and may have giggled a little. The man looked at me in the eyes and asked, ‘Did you lie to me?’ This was a restaurant, the lobby of a restaurant. Dead silence. It was as if we were in church. The people immediately around us waited wide-eyed and wondering. Everybody was watching me and the Amish guy. I replied softly, ‘Yes, I lied.’ ‘Come with me,’ he said. I couldn’t imagine what he was going to do. What kind of punishment do the Amish hand out to liars? I picture stocks or caning or both. We followed him through the restaurant to the back where he opened the door to a banquet room. A huge table was set with bread and jams. He offered a gentle smile. ‘Have some bread while you wait. You are forgiven.’”
I think that’s what Jesus says to us. “Have some bread, you’re forgiven. I know who you are. I know your deception. I love you anyway. I’m going to work in your life to change you to be more like me.” That’s the grace of God.
Let us pray. Gracious and loving God, we confess to you that we deceive others, try and pretend that we’re better than we are, we try and make them feel better, we try and fit in. So many reasons we choose not to tell the truth, sometimes even to ourselves. God, help us to face the truth of our own lives, but not to let it own us. Instead, God, may your truth own us. Help us to focus our hearts and our minds and our lives on you. Your amazing Son who is the truth, the standard. Take us over and change us. By your grace and the Holy Spirit. In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen.