Originally posted on July 21, 2019 @ 6:30 am
John 8:31 – “To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
The truth will set you free. Yahusha said that, yet most people either reject it immediately as a religious platitude, or misunderstand it, thinking that it means that Yahusha (the Truth), will free us from our life of bondage to sin.
There is more to it.
Yahusha knows all things, both forward and backward in human time, and throughout all eternity, with one known exception: When He will return to earth as Mashiach. Only His Father knows that, and He will reveal it about one second before Yahusha appears in the sky.
What a good day that will be.
The Truth is a path. It is special. Truth is a way of life, and indeed is a core component of The Way. In fact, it is impossible to walk in The Way without speaking Truth, for walking in The Way is walking in obedience to The Truth.
Yahusha said “If you hold to my teaching, then…”
Certainly The Way is critical to our relationship with Yahuah. It is central to our holiness. At this moment I am particularly grateful to Paul (Sha-ul) for confessing “what good I want to do, I do not, and what evil I do not want to do, I find myself constantly doing.”
Don’t we all?
But the Truth is a very special companion. Certainly people say that they want to hear the Truth, and we all love to think that we speak the Truth, but the truth 🙂 is somewhere in the middle, isn’t it?
We want to hear Truth which makes us feel better, or stronger, or wiser, or more appreciated. We also often want to tell truths which “correct” others, truths which remake them into an image more in conformity with our own opinion of what their image should be; more like us; more aligned with our personal comfort zone.
The truth that I write of today is the kind of truth that comes from our lips when we would prefer to lie. The hard truth. Truth with consequences.
Lying is easy. Lying can help us navigate around uncomfortable situations, or help us avoid having to face the music. Lying can help us evade responsibility, buy time, or curry favor.
Yet in the end, lying takes us where lies want us to go. We end up living a lie. Our lives reflect the lie. Our relationships become living lies, supported only by other, newer, fresher lies. We build on those lies until the roof falls in on us and destroys our life of lies.
So we start over, telling new lies to evade the truth that our former life was built on nothing but lies and deception, with enough truth intermingled with the lies to give us some modicum of ethics. A whiff of honesty smells good, and lends credibility to the lies that will come along later.
As I tell my children constantly – “Tell the truth. The Truth has a destination for you. The Truth will take you where only the Truth can go. Trust the Truth”.
Truth-telling keeps the truth-teller on the straight path. Life becomes easier, not harder; simpler, not more complicated, and very solid.
This is truth I teach you. The truth, the words from your mouth, have a destiny. Those truthful words, like celestial beacons, will lead you through your day. There are results, or consequences, from telling truth. The words we speak create ripples in human lives, causing other people to speak words and take actions.
Telling truth makes the world a better place for all people. That is quite important. But for you, or for me, telling truth is vital if we are to get where the Truth intends to lead us. There is a human reality waiting for us every moment, every day, week, month, year, decade, lifetime. And a lifetime of telling truth is a very special lifetime.
Truth has no interest in wealth. If you are interested in worldly gain, best stick with lies, because liars are most adept at stealing money and creating wealth. Lies work well in contracts. Lies imply outcomes that are stillborn in the finer print of most “Agreements”.
Consider how many times you have been swindled by some kind of Agreement, or Contract, or personal promise or the appearance of a promise. Many, I bet.
Telling the truth in all of your relationships is your guarantee of success. No matter what the immediate outcome of your truth-telling, and it might be quite painful at first, that truth will lead you to the next truth, and the long chain of truth coming from your heart, through your mouth and into your life will take you, step by step, to the place where Truth wants you to be.
Trust the Truth. Place your fate in honesty. Be truthful to yourself and face whatever hurt arises from your commitment to the truth. Soon enough, the light of truth will illuminate a new life for you. It will be an adventure, for sure, but an adventure you can believe in, for in the truth we abide in Yahusha, for He is both The Truth and The Way.
You are my brothers and my sisters. You are my encouragement, and my fellow sojourners as we walk the last steps of our human lives together.
Trust Yahuahs’ love for you. The truth is clean, the lies unclean. One is the language of Heaven and the Holy, the other, of Satan.
Thank you, Jerry. Your message was timely for my entire family.
You have a beautiful family, David. Remember that the imperfect cannot perfect the imperfect. When you and your wife feel overloaded, try to do something together with no kids. Take her dancing. Drink a little too much and laugh. I love you brother. Andy wants to sit with us Wednesday. He is an ideal third member.
Ahmein = I believe that to be truth .
Amen!
Alright! 🙂