Truth is an important part of what we're about as followers of
Jesus Christ. Jesus said, I am the way, I am
the truth. I am the life.
All three of those things were important.
But tonight we're going to be talking about truth.
The truth Scripture tells us can set us free.
Truth is is like a sword that can Pierce us to the deepest
parts of our being, dividing truth from lie, fact from
fiction, reality from fantasy, and truth Truth can bring us at
times it seems that it can almost force us to confession at
a friend years ago. I'm going to call him Bob.
Way back when Amy and I were living in Tiffin and, and I, I
got to experience something sort of that I thought I would never
really experience. And I didn't, still haven't
experienced it to the full sense in which I would like to.
But I was conducting, I think it was a confirmation class at our
church building in the evening and the power went out and, and
the storm sirens started going off and the kids said, should we
go down into the basement because we were on like the
third floor. I was like, Nah, that's never
means anything. So we stayed up there.
Oh, it did, in fact mean something.
There was a tornado that went through Tiffin that night.
And I had a hard time getting back to the house.
There were so many trees and branches down in the way I
missed it. It, it, it passed about 1/4 of a
mile from where our house was. We had no day.
I don't we didn't have any damage at all.
I don't think. I'm not even sure there was any
debris in our yard. But it, it had its own
devastation and destruction. But a friend of mine who had
seen movies like Twister, who had, who had fancied himself a
storm chaser, decided that he wanted to go out and see the
tornado. And he did.
And he got in the way, and he almost didn't get out of the
way. And the reality, the truth of
that tornado wrecked my friend in some pretty significant ways
for a while. He became terrified of storms
when he was confronted with the truth of just how powerful a
tornado is, of just how small and helpless and insignificant
he was beside it. It really undid him in some
significant ways. Truth is like that, and
sometimes, maybe even most of the time, it takes far more than
hearing the truth to have an impact on ourselves on to some
or someone else. It takes experiencing the truth.
The the child that burns their hand on a hot stove is much more
likely to believe it when their parents tell them something else
is hot than the child that just listens to the words.
Reality and experience make all the difference in the world.
We We've seen that in the story of Tamar and Judah in Genesis
38. How Judah was condemning Tamar,
Judah had. Whether it was superstition or
just stupidity or ignorance or what, we don't know.
He decided his daughter-in-law was a jinx.
She was bad luck. She'd married two of his sons.
They both died. There was no way he was going to
let her marry his third son. He might die too.
We sent her away. When he found out she was
pregnant, he concluded she was evil, was going to burn her
alive to punish her. There was no truth in any of it.
None at all. He'd concocted a narrative in
his head and he believed it as if it was real, as if it was
God's honest truth. He was convinced of it.
Every bit of it was a lie. Every bit of it.
And how did he come to know it was a lie?
No one argued Judah into the truth.
No one sat down with the Judah and said hey, let's talk about
this. No one said to Judah, hey, I got
a three-point outline here and a nice PowerPoint presentation to
explain to you why you are wrong.
None of that happened. This is what happened as she,
that is Tamar was being brought out, she sent a message to her
father-in-law, Judah, I'm pregnant by the man who owns
these, she said. And she added, see if you
recognize who's seal and cord and staff these are and they
were Judas seal and cord and staff.
He was presented with the truth. He was confronted with the
truth. He wasn't argued into it, He
wasn't explained into it. He wasn't guided gently into it.
It was just pushed in front of his face.
Here is the truth, Judah, see for yourself.
Take a good, close, hard look at the truth.
And he did look and he did see. And it did change him.
It is what brought Judah to confession.
His confession. We're not burning Tamar.
She's more righteous than I am. Bring her home where she should
have been all along. I'll care for her, and I'll care
for my children and her children.
There was no argument. There was no debate.
There was no public humiliation, no public shaming.
Tamar simply presented Judah with the undeniable truth, and
that truth brought Judah to confession and to repentance.
And Judah, as well as Tamar, became one of the ancestors of
the Messiah, Jesus our Lord, who we remember today.
The truth of the circumstances of Jesus's death brought the
centurion to confession. That centurion and the soldiers
that were working with him to crucify Jesus and the other two
that were being crucified to that day, there is approximately
0% chance that those were the first people they'd ever
crucified. Romans crucified a lot of
people. It was.
It was one of their chief tools of power and intimidation.
It was the way they showed who was in charge and who wasn't,
who had the power and who didn't, who needed to get along
and go along and who got to say where we were getting and going
to. And they used it extravagantly,
crucifying thousands and thousands of people.
So at least 10s, probably dozens, maybe hundreds of
crucifixions, the Centurion and those soldiers had not just
witnessed but perpetrated themselves, been part of in one
way or another. And yet there was something
different about this one. This guy, they knew the charges.
The charges were insurrection. He's claiming to be king when
only Caesar is king. That was the charge trumped up.
Well, it was true. Jesus did say he was king.
He also said, you know, my Kingdom is not of this world.
Pilate didn't care, but that Centurion and those soldiers
that this was just another local yokel knucklehead who needed to
be taught a lesson about what he couldn't couldn't do and become
an object lesson for everyone else around about what you can
and can't say. And you can't say you're a king
when you're in the Roman Empire unless you're the emperor.
You don't get to do that, or you've been deputized by the
emperor. Someone like Herod, they beat
him and he bled like every other man they ever beat.
They told him to carry the cross, and he carried the cross
just like every other man they told to carry the cross.
They nailed him to it and he stuck just like every other man
they'd nailed or tied to a cross.
There were a couple things he didn't do the same way.
He was not screaming and cursing and complaining like the other
two that were being crucified with him.
He wasn't hurling insults at them for doing what they were
doing like the other two were doing.
Bizarrely, he was praying for their forgiveness, asking God to
forgive them for what they were doing, saying they didn't really
understand what they were doing. I knew what they were doing.
You know, they were. This was their job.
They were experts at killing people.
They were killing a guy. How could he think they didn't
understand when they offered him the wine mixed with gall?
It's a it's a bit of a painkiller and Jesus turned it
down. Also a strange thing to do
because with all the bleeding, he would have not only been in
great pain, but also significantly dehydrated.
But it seemed like this guy didn't want any relief at all
for the pain that he was going through.
He heard the other people mocking him.
He heard the other people insulting him.
They heard, they heard all that was going on.
They heard and saw, I'm sure Mary and Jesus's mother and Mary
Magdalene and others that that were there watching and crying,
heartbroken, agonized themselves.
But then when Jesus died, well even before he died, the clouds
of the sky got dark. It was the middle of the day,
and it became dark like night. You don't have to be an
astrophysicist to know that's not normal.
Some speculate there was a lunar eclipse that day.
There's different science says different things about that.
We don't really know, but we know the sky got dark and that
doesn't normally happen in the middle of the day.
We know that when he died, the ground shook, and that doesn't
happen with everyone you crucify.
I suspect the Romans would have crucified fewer people of every
crucifixion led to an earthquake.
They wouldn't have known it then, but they would have heard
about it later, about the curtain in the temple.
Said temple was the most important building for a long,
long, long, long way. And, and even they would have
known that in in the Jewish tradition and Jewish belief that
curtain separated the Holy of Holies, separated God from
mortal flesh. We call it God himself is too
powerful for mortal flesh. And that curtain has to be
between God. When God is present in the
temple, that curtain has to be between God and the people, or
God's power and glory will simply overwhelm the people to
death. And that curtain, which was way,
way tall, was torn in 2. Not from the bottom to the top,
like folks had come and grabbed a corner and started pulling,
but from the top to the bottom where no one could reach.
And if that wasn't strange enough, there were all these
folks that were walking around town.
The people said, you know what, that guy was dead 2 days ago.
How this happened I'd never noticed before.
It says that the moment he died, they came back to life, but they
didn't leave the tombs till Jesus resurrected.
That must have been an interesting couple of days for
them. I'm just saying God does things
in weird ways sometimes, you know, wake up, spend 2 days and
a hole in the ground and oh now I get out Lord, you know, could
have woken me up right before would have been OK with that.
But they heard these things and, and these battle hardened
soldiers, these men who were strangers in a strange land, who
I, I, I got to think, wanted nothing more than just to finish
their time and this, this Judean countryside and then get back to
their wives and their children and their families and their
businesses doing the things that they really want to.
They can just get done, serve their time, get done with this
and then get back to those things.
That's all they really wanted. Do that without dying.
Can we get home without being killed?
And we'll be all right, Hardened killers.
The Roman soldiers were the they were the elite soldiers in the
world at that time. They killed, they killed a lot.
They killed Mirth mercilessly. They killed ruthlessly, and they
were killing a couple more today.
But all of this that happened, all of this that happened, it's
almost like and the, the scripture doesn't use these
words, but, but I, I get this and this is me.
I, I just get the feeling that that Centurion and it said the
others that were with him crucified that, that they felt
compelled to say what they said to that to not say it would have
been such a horrendous denial of reality that they couldn't
remain silent that they're standing confessing.
This must have been truly, this man was the son of God.
We've just killed the Son of God.
And again, they weren't argued into it.
No one gave them a tract, 14 Easy Ways to know Jesus is the
Son of God. No one's invited him do a Bible
study. No one sat him down and said,
well, let's walk through the Roman.
Hey, your Romans, let's do the Romans Rd.
We'll do it. It'll make sense to you.
They were just confronted with the truth.
The earth shook, the sky darkened, the temple was torn,
the dead came back alive, compelled these Pagan Roman
killer soldiers to confess Jesus, the crucified slave is
the Son of God, the Son of God. That's the power the truth has,
undeniable truth has that power to evoke confession in people,
even people who might not want to do the confessing.
Now we've got to be honest. Lots of people saw all that
happen that didn't issue that confession.
The chief priests saw everything that those, the centurion and
the soldiers saw the the Pharisees and the Sadducees saw
everything. Herod and them, they, they, they
all saw it. So when I say truth can force
confession, and truth doesn't mean it always will, but truth
has a power that argument and persuasion and reason and logic
is important as they are. Truth has a power that those
things simply don't. And of all of the people that on
that day that would have a motivation to say this was just
another scumbag that deserved to die.
The people that killed him would have been the ones that least
wanted to say this was the son of God who we just put to death.
We literally with our hands put to death when the centurion and
those who were with him who were guarding Jesus saw the
earthquake and all that had happened.
They were terrified and exclaimed surely he was the Son
of God. Once again I've gotten ahead of
my slides. So all that have happened,
Curtain of the temple was torn, the earth shook and rocks split.
Tombs were open and only people were raised to life.
That truth and those circumstances at Jesus death
brought the centurion to confession.
The question that this raises in my mind is how often do we
present people with the truth? We often talk about and focus on
telling the truth, and it's important.
Telling the truth is important. There is no denying that telling
the truth is important. How often do we present people
with the truth of the gospel? Not by what we say, but by how
we live. It's easy to say God wants us to
show mercy and compassion and forgiveness to others.
It's really hard when someone is cheating us or lying about us or
or hurting us or harming us or stealing from us or manipulating
us in some way and love them anyway and forgive them anyway.
It's easy to say. The truth is that God owns a
cattle on 1000 hills, and God who fed the 5000 on the hillside
can feed me as well. It's harder to give
extravagantly to those who have less, especially if you're
giving enough that you don't know where your next meal is
going to come from. That's harder.
The church grew in extraordinary ways in the weeks and months
following Jesus's resurrection, thousands and thousands and
thousands of people in Jerusalem and in and, and other parts of
Judea and Samaria and other parts of the Roman Empire.
People were flocking to Jesus. And, and you can read through
the the stuff in the scripture. I mean, there were there were
some. Good things being said.
I mean, you know, it wasn't golden tongued oration that
brought people to confess Jesus as their savior.
It was when they saw those following Jesus and realized,
you know what? There's not a single hungry
person among them. And I know some of them are
poor. They were my friends.
They didn't have any more than I had, or I know something more
poor. They were people I walked past
on the street all the time. They had nothing.
Now they look like they're eating OK.
They got clothes on their back. They're being taken care of.
They saw the truth because Jesus's followers were living
the truth, and seeing the truth has so much more power with the
centurion and those soldiers. Would they or could they ever
have come to faith in Jesus as Messiah if Jesus had not been
willing to die for them? But he was.
He'd been teaching and preaching for years.
He'd been telling the truth for years.
They saw it that day, and that's what convinced them.
This man surely was the Son of God.
Jesus told us to deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow
him. If you want to be my disciple,
it's not just about believing the right things.
It's not just about having the right doctrines.
It's not just about telling the truth.
It's not just about saying good things.
It's about living a life of self denial and ongoing sacrifice for
the sake of others. People need to see it.
Cliche has been around for years and it's as true now as it ever
was, and it's always been true. People don't care how much we
know until they know how much we care.
People don't care what truth we have to say if we're not living
the truth ourselves. This is why I think Jesus told
his disciples and and Luke and an Acts.
You're going to be my witnesses. You need to tell people what you
have seen so that those who didn't see it for themselves can
see it through your eyes. Help them see the truth.
Help them hear the truth, not just hear about it.
Live in a way that shows the truth of what you believe about
me, that I really am the Messiah, that I really did die,
that I really did come back to life, and that I hold the keys
to hell and to death to the grave, and that the reason I
came so that y'all could be reconciled to each other and
reconciled to God. Go out and live it.
How often do we act and live in such a way that people are
forced to confess that Jesus must be the Lord and Savior?
If those folks at Chester and Rock Springs and New Beginnings
United Methodist, my goodness, there's there's no way those
people could live the way they lived of Jesus.
If what they were talking about was a lie, there's no way they
could do the things they're doing.
If Jesus wasn't really the Son of God, there's no way.
There's no way. How often, how often do we live
in such a way that people are forced to say that Jesus must be
the Savior and he must be the Lord?
The simple truth is this truth can force confession.
Truth, when we're confronted with it, can bring us to confess
the reality of God, the reality of Jesus.
Two things to take away, maybe. One, to make sure we're not
cutting ourselves off from the truth that we're listening to
things and seeing things for what they are, not just what we
hope and want them to be. And the other is, is that we're
living in such a way that other people, when they encounter us,
are encountering the truth of what we believe, not just our
words about the truth of what we believe in.
Jesus name, Amen. Amen.