Following Christ means learning to live an honest life …

Imagine you’re a manager in a mid-sized company and you’re rummaging through resumes of applicants looking for someone to hire. In the process, you come across this statement:

“Single-handedly managed the successful upgrade and deployment of a new environmental illumination system with zero cost overruns and no safety incidents.”

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?

That sentence is actually a convoluted way of saying, “I changed a lightbulb.”

Why write it that way?

To deceive hiring managers into thinking you’ve accomplished something greater than you have and to give you greater credit than you have earned.

It’s an effort to deceive.

People do it on resumes all the time. In fact, I once had a fellow pastor tell me I should “stretch” my resume when I was unable to find work during a time of transition.

Surveys of American opinion about lying and deception over the past couple of decades have revealed an openness to deception when people think it’s beneficial.

But deception is not beneficial. It’s lying, and lying is a sin.

That’s why the Apostle Paul wrote to the Colossian Christians, “Don’t lie to each other, for you have stripped off your old sinful nature and all its wicked deeds. Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him,” (Col. 3:9-10) and to the Ephesian Christians, “So stop telling lies. Let us tell our neighbors the truth, for we are all parts of the same body” (Eph. 4:25).

To follow Christ is to learn how, through the empowering of the Holy Spirit and guidance from the Word of God, to speak the truth in love to everyone, to surrender any desire to deceive and instead, as Paul wrote, to “Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him.”

Our Creator isn’t just truthful, He IS TRUTH! If we’re going to become like Him, that means learning to live an honest life.

Scotty