When I was little, my parents taught me to always tell the truth. But somewhere along the way to adulthood I learned to do otherwise. I learned about “little white lies” – lies to not hurt other people’s feelings, lies to cover for my friends and siblings, lies to avoid confronting and sharing my true thoughts or emotions, and somewhere, in all those socially acceptable lies, I began to think it wasn’t possible for me to tell the truth all the time. Nobody wants to be the girl who says, “I’m not coming to your party because I don’t want to.” Instead, we’d rather make up some lie to excuse ourselves. I like to think that I was telling these lies out of love for people – to not hurt their feelings – but I was wrong.

I’ve come to realize that when you truly love people, you tell them the truth – even if that truth jeopardizes your relationship with them. God’s Word is the purest truth on Earth. It is the unwavering standard that we can rely on for truth every time. And we are living in a time where we as Christ-followers can’t afford to have any lies come out of our mouths. God the Father is looking for people who are honest and willing to be truthful in worship of Him.

Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. JOHN 4.23

Oftentimes I feel stirrings in my heart or red flags of discernment in my spirit and but I am not conscious enough to realize that God is asking me to be a bringer of truth in that situation. When I delay telling the truth, I open myself up for deception to creep in. One of the most prevalent forms of deception that I’m seeing today in my generation and the generation after mine is tolerance. It’s sweeping our nation and our world as we tolerate sin in the lives of our Christian brothers and sisters that we are called to sharpen as iron sharpens iron.

Beth Moore spoke to it at the Passion 2017 conference saying, “You will watch a generation of Christians – OF CHRISTIANS – set the Bible aside in an attempt to become more like Jesus. And stunningly it will sound completely plausible. This will be perhaps the cleverest of the devil’s schemes in your generation. Sacrificing TRUTH for LOVE’s sake. And you will rise or fall based upon whether you will sacrifice one for the other. Will you have the courage to live in the tension of both TRUTH & LOVE?”

I want to be the girl that God can count on to stand firm between both truth and love. I want to become more like Christ as I speak the truth in love. And I want the kids that I’m responsible for in the next generation to be aware and not abandon truth for love. But if I don’t know the Truth (God’s Word) forwards, backwards and inside out then I won’t be properly equipped to speak it when the time comes.

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of Him who is the head, that is, Christ. EPHESIANS 4.14-15

So I’m committing to getting the truth through my head and into my heart. I’m committing to telling the truth, to recapturing that life lesson that my parents tried to teach me all those years ago before the world got in my way, I’m going to become a truth teller, one response at a time, little by little until I’m exactly who God created me to be. He promises us:

You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. JOHN 8.32

Now, go pick up your Bible and get some truth in you – let’s get free and then allow God to use us to free those in our lives that are still ensnared in lies.