PURPOSE: To help listeners appreciate the danger and damage that can be done by bearing false witness.

Do you like dolphins? Do you know that dolphins can communicate audibly with one another? Why is that fascinating?

Do you think that dolphins lie to one another? Do you think they are more truthful than people are?

What’s so wrong about lying?

I. When we lie, we distort the image of God in us.

Lying distorts our relationship with God whom we are to love.

There is no falsehood in God. God doesn’t merely possess the qualities of light, truth, goodness, and love.

What does 1 John 1:5 mean when it states that "God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all"?

God is incapable of lying:

"God is not a man that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?" (Numbers 23:19).

"In hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began" (Titus 1:2).

In contrast, the devil is described as "the father of lies" (John 8:44), a title he earned from his first encounter with men and women.

Because God cannot bear false testimony to anything in any way, we who are made in His image were created to live truthful lives.

Whenever we lie, we move away from what God designed us to be to become like the Enemy who majors in lies.

II. Lies distort the relationship we are to have with neighbors whom we are to love.

Dishonesty undermines our personal relationships.

Have you ever had someone you trusted let you down by lying to you? What does that do to your friendship?

Have you ever had someone you trusted cheat you? What happens inside of you?

Gossip destroys not only the trust you had in a friend but in other people as well.

Have you ever found that someone in whom you confided has told your secret to others? What happens in you and in your relationship to that person?

Gossip ruins both the gossip and the person who is the object of the gossip.

A gossip values the attention he gets so much that truth doesn’t matter much to him any more.

The individual whose trust has been betrayed finds it much more difficult to trust anyone else. As a result, he or she finds it more difficult to relate on a deep level to others through his or her life.

III. The problem doesn’t center in what we say, but in what we are.

"The heart is deceitful above all things . . . who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9). Because we have deceitful hearts, we speak and live deceitfully.

Jesus asked, "How can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks" (Matthew 12:34).

If we really are people of integrity, it must mean that God must deal with our hearts