Yes be Yes and No be No

Summary:

The sermon explores a personal transformation from a fear-based faith to embracing the unconditional love of Jesus. The speaker reflects on a trip to Washington, D.C., which inspired hope and reflection on the nation’s history and future. It contrasts fear-driven religious teachings with a life of peace and freedom through understanding God’s love. The sermon critiques the practice of making elaborate oaths, as taught by Jesus, and stresses the importance of honest speech. In a world where truth is often unclear, living truthfully is seen as a revolutionary act. It discusses the challenges of honesty, such as fear of disappointment and societal pressures, and suggests that slowing down and seeking God’s grace can help foster integrity. The sermon concludes by encouraging prayer and trust in God’s love to live truthfully, thereby acting as salt and light in the community.

Transcript:

I want to take just a quick moment and say thank you for letting Kelly and I be gone last week. Kelly had a work trip at the beginning of last week, and then I was able to fly out and meet her, and we got to explore Washington, D. C. It was my first time to actually be in Washington, D. C. , and this time last week we were rushing through the last bit of the monuments that we wanted to see, and it really was a great time. We went to the monuments and the museums and even went to a baseball game, which is one of my favorite things to do when I visit a city.

It was a great time, but as I was exploring all of the things there to see and to think about our nation's history and how far we've come and then also thinking forward about how far we have yet to go, I was captured with a great sense of hope, and I don't know about you, but sometimes hope can feel sort of futile these days when you, especially I feel that way if I ever am unfortunate enough to turn on the news, but I was reminded that this country that we live in with all of its flaws and all of the things that can be difficult for us to work through, that it began with a great promise, and sometimes it is good to remember back to those moments in our country's history, also in our own lives, where we can reflect on where we've been to see how far we have come and in hopes that that will propel us forward in the future. And as I was watching back the service last week and watching those new baptisms, I always love Baptism Sunday because it is a calling for me back to when I was baptized and the significance of that moment in beginning my journey with Jesus. And it's something that oftentimes I think we would be better if we could go back to that moment and to recall the way in which God captured our attention and set us on His path. And so I wanted to just sort of offer that, that maybe today, regardless of if you are feeling hopeful or hopeless, that God is with us all and that what happens in the past does not have to dictate what happens in the future. I grew up in, mostly in Kansas City, Kansas, and I had a loose connection with church. My grandfather is a minister, and we, my family valued going to church for the most part. But when I became a teenager, I sort of rebelled against that and found every opportunity I could not to go to church.

When I was coming up in youth group and different things like that, one of the primary ways in which the church sort of sought to disciple teenagers was through fear. The idea was that if we could make you afraid enough of God, then you would for some reason become obedient to God. And so things like hell houses popped up. They were around Halloween time. Churches would rent out warehouses or sometimes transform their actual church building into sort of a Christian haunted house where you would go through and you would see all of these different scenes of sinfulness, and they were designed to scare you into obedience. We were constantly asked the question, if you were to die tonight, where would you go to heaven or hell? And as I was coming up, that fear approach really didn't sit well with me.

I was kind of, I have sort of a go-against-the-grain personality in general, and the fear tactics just really were a turnoff for me. I decided as a middle school student that if that is who God is, then I don't want anything to do with God. And then I even resolved that if all of these things that I have been taught are true, then if I were to die in this state, then I would go to hell. And that wasn't something that I was upset about. I sort of accepted it. I remember having many conversations with my friends about that. I would tell them that, and they would kind of look at me funny, but it was sort of something for me that I was really rebelling against.

I remember one conversation in particular with my friend Jason. I loved going to Jason's house. His family, he was an only child, his family had converted the whole basement to his bedroom, and we would hang out there for hours and play video games. And I remember one time we, over Cool Ranch Doritos and hot sauce together, we were having a deep theological conversation. We all know that middle school boys' rooms with Doritos is where all the real theological work happens. And I told my friend Jason, I said, you know, because of the things that I'm choosing to do with my life, if I were to die, I would go to hell. To my surprise, my friend Jason, who I didn't even really knew, went to church, said, well, I'm not.

I said, well, Jason, I'm sorry to tell you, but you do all of the same bad things that I do, you definitely are going to hell if you die. And he said, no, because after I'm done doing bad things, I repent. Now, there are lots of different conversations that we could have off of that particular conversation. But what I wanted to bring that up is for us to say this. As a teenager, hearing these ideas about God just checking boxes and waiting to write a red mark through my name and send me to hell for the rest of my life, that became something that I ran away from. And what I know now that I didn't know then is that I had a lot of unhealed wounds in my life. And that fear-based faith did not resolve those wounds.

But also, neither did the things that I was turning to resolve those wounds. And so, I was kind of left in a state of constant frustration, reaching for things to fulfill my teenage life, but never fully finding satisfaction or healing. That is until I was a senior in high school. In fact, spring break of my senior year of high school, I met Jesus for the first time in my life. And all of that frustration and fear just sort of melted away. And I decided in that moment to follow Jesus. And it was truly this miraculous thing.

It was nowhere on my radar. It came out of nowhere for me. I decided to follow Jesus. Several of my friends saw this incredible change in my life, and they decided to follow Jesus. The church that I was a part of went through a bit of a revival because of all of these teenagers deciding to follow Jesus. And it was truly this incredible time. But what led me to that point was not that I finally developed a healthy fear of God, but it was the unrelenting love of Jesus.

I was living my life in such a way where my expectation of God was that he was ready to put me in my place and send me to hell. And when I thought that I would receive damnation, what I received instead was unceasing love. And it captured my attention and compelled me to follow Jesus. The truth is that love has far greater potential to compel us in the way of Jesus than fear. I know that there are many scriptures that talk about fear of God and fear of the Lord, but that was never meant to be utilized as a fear tactic to make us afraid of God. Those verses are about respect and about reverence and about trusting God, not about being afraid of him. Love has always been God's motivation.

From the foundations of the world, love has been God's motivation. And that's what we're focusing on in this series. Our response is simply to live into being the beloved children of God. One of the things that we do in our house as we try to parent our kids well, whenever they have temper tantrums or they're frustrated or they act out, eventually, once the dust settles, Kelly and I have committed to every time, no matter what has happened, that we will pull them in close and we will say to them, there is nothing that you could ever do to stop me from loving you. And that is how God loves us. And when we learn to live as God's beloved and trust God's love, we can begin to live relaxed and peaceful lives. And why I think that is important for us to discuss this morning is because as we read through this section of the Sermon on the Mount that we are in, it can begin to feel like that Jesus is just giving us all of these boxes to check.

And that if we mess up, we're going to end Jesus's love for us or Jesus's affection for us. But nothing could be further from the truth. This is not about checking boxes. It is about living into the freedom that results from God's love and us doing what God has called us to do. So in those moments when we feel a bit weighed down or we feel a bit heavy, my prayer for us is that we would trust Jesus enough. Trust that what he is calling us to do will result in the satisfaction that we are pursuing, regardless of what else occurs around us. So two weeks ago, we talked about our anger.

And today we're going to talk about our words. We are in the part of the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus is beginning each section by saying, you have heard it said, but I say. And so we're going to jump into verse 33 here today. Here is what Jesus is teaching. Again, you have heard it said to the people long ago, do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows that you have made. But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all. Either by heaven, for it is God's throne, or by 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, which obviously this was written and taught before L'Oreal came on the scene.

Jesus says, all you need to say is simply yes or no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one. Now, each time we jump into one of these sections, we need to recall the part of this teaching that Jesus offered before he went into each of these ideas. He talked about the righteousness of the Pharisees and the calling for the people following the narrow path of Jesus to be salt and light. The righteousness of the Pharisees. The Pharisees were the religious leaders at the time. They were people who thought that they had done enough to earn God's love. And as a result, that they then could pass judgment on people.

And Jesus is contrasting that idea with this calling to live as salt and light, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. Salt preserves, salt flavors, light illuminates. And he's talking about living according to this narrow way will result in us being salt and light, individually and collectively as a community. So Jesus is comparing and contrasting these two approaches to faith. In the ancient world, they didn't have written contracts like we have today. They were an oral society. Their word entered them into an agreement.

And agreements then, like today, can sometimes be difficult to fulfill. But if you were going to be a person of upstanding status in your society, you had to fulfill those contracts, just like what it is for us today. So because of this burden, and nobody wanted to go back on their word, they began developing all of these different sort of flowery add-ons that they could use to add a little bit of emphasis to their promises after they had been broken, or to be able to give them sort of a loophole in the future if they were unable to to live up to their end of the bargain. Which is why Jesus goes into all of these things like swearing by heaven, or by earth, or by Jerusalem. He says, don't do that. Those are those sort of loopholes. Jesus says, all of this fancy talking and this swearing of oaths, you don't need to do that.

You just simply need to be truthful and honest, saying yes when you mean yes, and no when you mean no. When we look at our society today, in our postmodern context, philosophers would tell you that truth is relative. I would say that truth today, for a variety of different reasons, is ambiguous. What is true today tends to be what enough people believe to be true. And then all of a sudden, that becomes true. Particularly when you're talking about social media in those types of spaces. If enough people will believe something, regardless of if it's true or not, it becomes true. This was apparent to me this past week.

I was watching highlights. I didn't get to watch the vice president debate, but I caught it afterwards and went back and watched some of the highlights. And when I do watch a debate like this, I will do the whole fact-checking thing, right? Now you can text numbers and they'll send you real-time fact-checking. You can watch recap shows afterwards, and they'll go over a fact-checking of all of the things that both candidates said. It's really great to help understand what is truthful and what isn't. But the fact that we have to have fact-checkers for debates in the highest offices of our country should tell us, should signal to us, that perhaps we have gotten things a little bit off base.

What tends to tip the scale in today's political sphere about winning or losing is whether your set of alternative truths or fake news or whatever you say, whether it's more believable than your opponent's. Right? We and those that are running for the highest offices in our society, it's not even expected necessarily that they will tell the truth. They just have to do better at misrepresenting the truth than their opponent. Misrepresenting the truth in our society can have successful results. It can result in you achieving whatever it is that you are setting out to achieve. And in this type of world, a world that is immersed in lies, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

One of the ways in which we live as salt and light, as we become a salt and light community here in East Dallas, and ways that we live as salt and light in our contexts, is by being truthful and honest. And that's what Jesus is presenting to us here in these verses that we read. In fact, the degree to which we live in truth is the degree to which we live in the way of Jesus. The degree to which we live in truth is the degree to which we live in the way of Jesus. Jesus calls his followers to a very high degree of trustworthiness, that their yes means yes and their no means no. And when we tell the truth, we know that we are telling the truth when our yeses mean yes and our no means no. And when we do that, when we say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and we fulfill those promises, whatever situation unfolds as a result of those promises, we receive a piece of the kingdom of God that we are able to otherwise not attain. You know, a lot of my spiritual growth in my life, I relate to my relationship with my kids. And oftentimes something takes place in our house, which maybe you can identify with.

I will be in the middle of something, whether it be working or watching a Mavericks game or, you know, just doing something. And my kids will come up to me and they'll say something to me like, Hey, Dad, can we go outside and throw the ball? Or, Hey, Dad, can we go get dessert today? Or, Hey, Dad, can we go swimming? And I will, because I'm focused on what I'm doing, I'll say something like, Yeah, I'm sure we can do that. What I am intending to say or what I am actually saying when I say that is, maybe if everything works out, if we have some extra time, if things go a certain way, then we will consider at that point whether or not we get dessert or go swimming or something like that. What they hear is, You promised. Right? And so they'll come back later on and they'll say, Okay, Dad, now is it time to go and get dessert?

And I'll say, Well, what do you mean go to get dessert? We're not going to get dessert. And they'll say, Well, Dad, you promised that we would do this.

Like, No, I didn't promise. But to a kid, when you say yes, particularly when it's in their benefit, they understand that as a promise. Now, Jesus oftentimes references children and calls us to a faith like that of children. And I think in this area, we can trust God's promises as yes and amen, as the scriptures tell us. But Jesus also is compelling us to live in this way, where our yes means yes and our no means no. If we are serious about walking the narrow road, where we will seek to live our lives with this kind of integrity and truthfulness, when it comes to keeping our promises. I would venture to say, though, that for all of us, we struggle with this at times. I know for myself, if you were to get a Webster's Dictionary or Google the term people pleaser, you won't see a definition of people pleaser.

You will see my face. Right? I am a people pleaser to the core. And sometimes, in efforts to please others, words will just come out of my mouth before I have even had an opportunity to consider what it is that I am saying. Some of us might struggle similarly to me. And that way, others of us, we might say things that are sharp or poignant. And those things just sort of come out before we've had a moment to think about it.

But if we aren't careful, we can get into the point to where things just immediately come out of our mouth with no filter. One of the prayers that I pray more often than just about any other prayer is this simple prayer. God, grant me pause between impulse and action. So many times in our lives, we'll just say something. We'll say yes to something we didn't really want to say yes to, or we'll say no to something that just came out that way. And then we have to go back and try and correct ourselves or try and work our way out of what we said or apologize for having said something that we didn't mean. And if we could learn to have a moment of pause in our lives, especially when it comes to the words that we speak, we would have to do that a lot less being that we're seeking to be people of honesty and integrity following the way of Jesus.

So pause between impulse and action is something that is definitely our friend in this area. I think that there are a variety of different reasons why we might struggle with honesty and trustworthiness. But as I think through, like most of us, I would say, are people who desire to be honest and people of integrity. And we might struggle with that to different degrees. But as I think about that, there are many things that might contribute to that. But I wanted to just point out on three that I thought of for us this morning. The first one is we struggle to be honest for the fear of disappointing others.

As I told you, I'm a people pleaser. I don't know if that's how you are or not. But there are moments where the only thing worse than untruthfulness is disappointing someone. And so we say things or we use flowery language to try and not disappoint someone too bad. But we can never keep people happy forever. And eventually, those moments of untruthfulness will catch up to us and we'll end up doing more damage control than we will do anything that is life-giving. And we have to backtrack from that.

Another reason that leads us to dishonesty is that we live life at such a fast pace. We go from thing to thing to thing. And our lives are full of everything but margin and the ability to do the things that we intend to do or even the things that we want to do. For some of us, it even goes to the point to where we idolize our busyness. I know that for some of us, it can be sort of social status to have to go back on a promise or to change the plans because we have overscheduled ourselves. We need to accept Jesus's invitation here in honesty by slowing down, which will allow us to create margin in our lives. But it will also give us the pacing that we need to, when we say yes, be able to fulfill it.

And when we say no, to do so, so that we don't become over... so that our schedules don't become overfilled. We need to learn to slow down and to live relaxed in the kingdom of God. And then the last thing is the culture that we live in. We live in a very superficial culture. People spend a lot of time and energy and effort to put forward a version of themselves that may or may not be true. And in a society of superficiality, honesty can be a risky... business. The trouble, though, for us gathered here today is that sometimes the church can be the place where we feel like we can be honest.

That's one of the reasons why we lean into confession here at Journey, because we want to begin from a point that says we need God's grace in our lives. We cannot fulfill the things that God has called us to without God's grace. And so we begin by that confession of God's need together, so that we can all recognize that we are in the same spot. Rich Valotas, who's a pastor and author, wrote this. He said, As we follow Jesus closely, we are given a new place to live from. As you slow your life down to be with Him, your words will come from a stable place. And as you live in God's love, you will grow in honesty about how you are really doing.

Another something that we talk about in reference often is God's grace. And we know that as we go along the way, even for those of us who are committed to this narrow way, there will be moments of weakness. There will be moments where we say yes when we mean no and no when we mean yes. But always in those moments, we receive grace. And when we invite Jesus into those moments, they become opportunities for the kingdom of God to solidify in our lives that in the future, we might be able to actually mean yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no. Jesus said anything less than yes being yes and no being no is from the evil one. So He is drawing for us here the understanding that if we are on the narrow way, our yeses will mean yes. But if our yeses don't mean yes and our nos don't mean no, then we are on the broad path, which leads to destruction.

Not only destruction for ourselves, but destruction for all of those around us. So we are either living from the narrow way of truthfulness or the broad way of dishonesty. So as we think about this, there are a few things that I want to inspire us to as we wrap up this conversation today. First thing is to be an honest person. Just say what you mean, right? Say what you mean. So many times we say things that we don't mean, whether it be to soften some sort of conflict or we're just speaking from the firing off things that come to our mind.

But slow down enough to be people who say what we mean and mean what we say. Next thing to consider is just do what you say. If you say that you're going to do something, do it, right? If you have committed to something, go through with that commitment. The other thing is speak consistently. Sometimes we have the temptation that when we're with this group, we speak one way. When we're with another group, we speak another way.

Take that out of your life. Try and speak consistently. Speak the same no matter who you are with. And last but not least, understand that truth is always combined with love. Truth is always combined with love. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this, the truth for oneself, truth spoken in enmity and hate is not truth but a lie. For truth brings into God's presence and God is love.

Truth is either the clarity of love or it is nothing. Seek to be people who speak truthfulness and who do it in love and never from a place of fear or hate or judgment. For those of us who are committed to the narrow road, we seek to speak with honesty and integrity because this is the language of heaven. And when we seek to live in this way, we become the salt and light people and the salt and light community that Jesus has called us to and slowly but surely as Jesus works in the depths of our lives, our yeses and our noes become words that you can count on and take to the bank. I'm going to invite John to come forward and we're going to sing together as we prepare to into communion. I know that for a lot of us, we can be in a variety of different places. I want to encourage as we sing together, be in a spirit of prayer, invite Jesus in this moment to capture your attention.

Maybe every single word that comes out of your mouth is honest and upright and full of integrity. If that's you, spend these next moments praying for your community here, for people who might have that struggle in their life of honesty. And if you are a person who wants to be honest, but sometimes find yourselves in situations where it just doesn't come out that way, don't be ashamed of that. Instead, invite Jesus into that moment to give you the strength and the perseverance to be able to become a person of honesty and integrity. Let's pray together. Jesus, we invite you in this moment to capture us wherever we are today. We know that in our society, words can be cheap.

And we want to live in the revolutionary way of your kingdom where our words mean everything. So God, in this moment, capture us where we are and show us the way that we are to move forward by identifying the next step for us. We ask these things in your name and for your sake. Amen.