Keeping Your Word

We live in a litigious society. America has more lawyers per capita than any other nation on earth. Why? Because honesty and integrity have become scarce in our society, and trust is no longer the basis on which people deal with each other. When two parties enter into a legal agreement, whether it’s a marriage, or a mortgage, or a multi-year contract, both parties bring along their lawyers. Those lawyers are there to build an airtight legal wall around that agreement on the assumption that the other party is going to want to break it at some future date. Mistrust is the whole basis of modern relationships.

Like schools of sharks in a feeding frenzy, there are whole classes of lawyers today who thrive on this. They are the attorneys who specialize in finding legal loopholes for their clients to slip through. Attorneys like Bruce Cutler and Barry Slotnick and F. Lee Bailey are paid mega-bucks for their expertise in getting around the spirit of the law while keeping the letter of it.

The result today is that we have more law being practiced than ever before in history, while at the same time, people are less trustworthy and less honest than ever before. Our society is drowning in a sea of litigation.

Two thousand years ago, in China, the people wanted to protect themselves from the barbaric tribes that lived to the north of them. So they built a wall. It was quite a wall! Ranging from 15 to 39 ft. high, it was up to 32 ft. thick in places. It had a total length of 6,200 miles. The Great Wall of China was too high to climb over, too thick to break down, and too long to go around. It was the most amazing feat of building in human history. And when they completed it in 200 B.C., the Chinese people rested behind that massive wall certain that their security was achieved.

Except that in the first 100 years of the wall’s existence, China was invaded 3 times by the barbarians! What happened? Was the wall a failure? Not really. Not once did the barbarians climb over it, break through it, or go around it. No, they got past the wall because of human nature.

In that wall were several gates. Each was guarded by a gatekeeper. The barbarians simply bribed the gatekeeper, and then they marched right through the gate. The fatal flaw in the Chinese defence strategy was that they relied too much on the wall but they didn’t put enough effort into building character into the gatekeeper.

The Pharisees had built a great wall of legal interpretation, hoping to keep righteousness in and unrighteousness out. But they were unsuccessful because of human nature. Unrighteousness came flooding in in spite of the legal wall they had built, because sinful human nature is simply unable to keep the gates shut. That’s why Jesus came. He came to deal with the hearts of the gatekeepers - you and me.

Jesus’ teaching did not contradict the Law of Moses. It didn’t contradict it; it fulfilled it. We’ve seen it in the area of anger and reconciliation. We’ve seen it in the area of sexual purity and divorce. Now, we’re going to look at the area of honesty and telling the truth.

The OT Law has much teaching that deals with the subject of honesty. Telling the truth was as important then as it is now. Specifically, the law said that there were certain very important and serious occasions when it was appropriate and good for a person to swear an oath. That oath would establish the truth of what he was saying.

The Pharisees were the students of the OT law. And the people in Jesus’ day were much like they are today - they were prone to be dishonest, they broke their word, they didn’t trust one another very easily. So the Pharisees tried to establish a way to discern whether a man was telling the truth. Did he swear an oath about it? They zeroed in on this one narrow aspect of the OT’s teaching on honesty, and they took that teaching and wrote about it and debated it to the point where they created a whole section of the Mishnah that dealt just with that subject: the swearing of oaths. You see, what they were trying to do was make this whole subject of honesty and integrity come down to the matter of swearing oaths.

And they created very complex rules to decide which oaths were binding and which oaths were not. For example, they said that any oath that involved the name of God was absolutely binding. So if a man swore by God’s name that he was going to do something, then he had to do it. And he could be legally held responsible if he didn’t do it.

But there were other oaths that were not so binding. For example, if a man swore by the city of Jerusalem, that was not binding. But if he swore toward the city of Jerusalem, that was binding. And there were all kinds of other oaths. You could swear by your own head that something was true. Or you could swear by your ancestors. You could swear by the Temple, or the gold on the Temple. You could swear by the altar or by the sacrifices on the altar. And under the Pharisees’ complicated legal system, all these oaths had varying degrees of credibility.

So oath-swearing became very common, as people tried to convince each other that they were telling the truth. It became everyday practice in conversation for people to swear oaths about what they were saying. Oath- swearing became something of an art form in that society. You had an oath for every occasion and the sophisticated people knew when to use which.

But the tragic thing was that, for all this oath-swearing, honesty took a back seat. You could go into the market place in Jerusalem to buy a basket of dates. The date-seller would swear on the tomb of his great grandmother that his dates were the freshest available - just picked yesterday. And you’d get home and find out that he had sold you stale dates. But you couldn’t go after him legally, because the oath he had sworn wasn’t a legally binding oath. He knew the loophole that you didn’t know, and he exploited it at your expense. Sounds a lot like today, doesn’t it?

This was the situation into which Jesus stepped and said “This has got to stop. Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

Matthew 23:16-22 “Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred? You also say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gift on it, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind men! Which is greater: the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred? Therefore, he who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And he who swears by the temple swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. And he who swears by heaven swears by God’s throne and by the one who sits on it.

Jesus said if you’re going to be a citizen of the Kingdom of heaven, you are going to be a person whose word is his bond. None of this evasive swearing of oaths. No more using God’s name in a frivolous way. No more pretending to tell the “truth” while you’ve got your fingers crossed behind your back. You are going to have to be a person of absolute integrity and honesty, even in situations where it hurts.

Let’s look at some examples. There is perhaps no more painful process by which we tell the truth than when we pay our income taxes. The whole process runs on the honor system, but the IRS is finding that because fewer and fewer people willingly tell the truth about their actual income, they are having to get more and more aggressive about auditing and enforcing violations of the tax code.

A Christian who sits down to fill out his 1040 faces the question “Am I going to tell the truth?” There is a place at the bottom of the form where you put your signature. It says that by putting your signature on that line, you are swearing that you have accurately represented the truth about your finances on that form.

Now you can, like millions do, fudge a little bit on your income taxes. You can leave out certain sources of income, knowing that there is little chance that the IRS is going to get around to finding you out. But what about God? Doesn’t He know what you’ve done? Hasn’t He already audited you, even as you’ve completed that form?

Or how about the area of our commitments? When we say that we are going to do something, do we do it? This is important in the big things as it is in the small things of life.

As a minister, I have the privilege of uniting couples in holy matrimony. As such, I lead them in expressing their marriage vows. They go something like this…

I, John, take you, Mary, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance, and thereto I pledge you my love.

We ministers would like to give a lifetime guarantee on the weddings we perform, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Tragically, many couples who solemnly swear to love each other till death do them part find themselves a few years later standing before a judge in a divorce court taking a different, but no less momentous oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

They’re taking that second oath, because they haven’t carried out their first oath. If you are a Christian, Jesus says, you’re going to be a person whose Yes is Yes when you take your marriage vows, as well as in all the other commitments of life.

And you’re going to be a person of integrity in business.

You can’t open the pages of the newspaper today without reading about dishonesty and corruption in business. The high flying economic climate of the 80’s brought us the likes of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken - men who put financial gain above personal integrity.

And when you turn to the sports section, you read as much about lawyers and agents and contracts as you do about home runs and touchdowns. Almost every day, we are treated to the spectacle of some star athlete whining and carrying on about the refusal of his team to renegotiate his contract. He originally signed a multi-year deal, which is exactly what he wanted at the time. But now, he finds that salaries have gone up, and he’s getting less than he thinks he deserves. So he pouts. He wants to be let out of his contract. Nowadays, personal gain comes before personal integrity. But it wasn’t always so.

Back in 1959, Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox suffered through the whole baseball season with a pinched nerve in his neck. It was so bad that when he stepped up to the plate, he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. For the first time in his splendid career, he hit under .300, batting just .254 with only 10 home runs for the season. Williams happened to be the highest paid player in baseball that year. The next year, the Red Sox offered him the same contract, but Williams refused. He said he wouldn’t sign unless they gave him the maximum pay cut allowed, 28 percent. Williams said “I have always been treated fairly by the Red Sox. They were offering me a contract I didn’t deserve.”

In our business dealings, are we people of integrity? Does our “yes” mean “yes” and our “no” mean “no”? Or are these commitments qualified by what happens to be to our advantage at any given moment?

The Bible says “Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill? He whose walk is blameless and who does what is righteous, who speaks the truth from his heart and has no slander on his tongue, who does his neighbor no wrong and casts no slur on his fellow man, who despises a vile man but honors those who fear the Lord, who keeps his oath even when it hurts…”

Even in small commitments, like punctuality, are we people of integrity? Can we be depended on to show up when we’re supposed to? If we say that we’re going to be at such and such a place at 2 o’clock, do we show up at 2 o’clock, and not 2:20 or 2:30, or whenever we get around to it? If we’re lackadaisical in this matter of punctuality, we’re communicating to people that we may not be trustworthy in other areas as well.

The word integrity means whole, or one. It comes from the Latin word “integer”, which we use in mathematics to describe a whole number. When you are a person of integrity, it means that you are undivided. It means that you are the same person at work, or at home, as you are at church. You’re not living a double life. And you are the same person before God in all those areas.

Just last week, Time Magazine did a feature article on a prominent U.S. Senator with a very well-known name. It hailed him as one of the greatest legislators of the 20th Century, a champion of liberal social reform, a man of intellect and high purpose. Yet in the same breath, it described this man’s private life as erratic, and quite often sordid. His drunken binges and moral failures have become a mainstay of Washington gossip over the years.

The writer observes that this man seems to have two personalities - one while he is in the public limelight, and another when he is in private. The Senatorial champion of the rights of the underprivileged becomes the careless abuser of rank and privilege at home. The devoted and affectionate father becomes the boozy womanizer after hours. The Time article concludes by admiring the way this man is able to manage the double life he leads.

Well that may be food for admiration in the eyes of the world, but that, I submit to you, is not what integrity means. And that is not the sort of person whom Jesus wants as his disciple. When we come to Jesus Christ, He lays claim to our whole lives, not just a convenient part that we want Him to have.

His righteousness permeates every nook and cranny of our lives. From the most important commitments of life down to the very smallest, Jesus Christ wants us to be people whose Yes is Yes and whose No is No: People who can be counted on, people who can be trusted, people whose word cannot be bought by money, by fame, or by power. The Lord knows just how much the world needs people like that. The question I leave with you this morning is “Will you be one of them?”