Message Description

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund looks at Matthew 5:33-37 on the topic of oaths, 4 aspects of integrity in the commitments we make to others, and the importance of keeping our word when the culture considers truth relative.

Message Notes & Study Guide

Message Transcript

Hey, welcome again to Orchard Hill. We are grateful that we can all be together in different means and different ways. I just want to remind you again as we have more and more people coming back, it’s a great time to register. The Chapel service is a great mask expected option in Wexford at 10:30 am. Again, the Chapel service is a lot of the same music and a little more acoustic. There is communion weekly. The 11:15 am has some spaces, and there are spaces in Butler County, and in the Strip District as well. And we look forward to great days ahead.  

Let's pray together. Father, thanks for a chance to gather, and God I pray that wherever we're coming from, whatever has been part of our week, that you would just once again, speak to us in this time. God if there are things that I've put together for this that don't reflect your truth, I pray you keep me from saying them. God, if there are things that would be beneficial that I haven't prepared, I pray you'd prompt me even in these moments. We pray this in Jesus name, amen.  

When I was in college, my sophomore year, my parents made one of their cars available for me to take back to college with me. And I remember the feeling of driving to college and feeling like this is awesome, I am on my own, I have a car, and the world is in front of me. And as I was driving, the little light on the dashboard came on that said that the car was overheating. And I'm old enough that this is pre cell phones. So, you don't call and talk to your mom or dad and say, hey, here's what's going on. So, you know, I'm trying to figure this out. You didn't have the internet in your hand at that point, so you look in the owner's manual and you do some things. And I finally got to school, I called my dad, and I said, hey, what should I do? He goes, well take it to the dealer. 

So, I went to the dealer that was close by. And when I got there, they looked at it and a person came out and he said, yep, it looks to me like you have a head gasket that's blown and cracked, and you need to replace it right now. And it's going to be about $1,000. Now, this is a few years ago, and I looked it up. $1,000 then would be about $1,700-$1,800 dollars now. This was a big bill when you're in college, and the deal was that once I took the car, I was in charge of the maintenance. And so, I'm looking at him like, there goes my semester, I am sunk. There is no way that this is going to work. I can't afford $1,800 dollars, or $1,000 at the time for this. And the guy said this, and I'll never forget this. He said I would not drive this car off this lot because there's a chance that if you drive it off this lot that the engine will seize up, and you will have ruined your entire car. It'll be just gone. Again, no cell phone, and no way to call and get wisdom. I'm, you know, 19-20 years old saying I don't know how to manage this. And I decided to drive off the lot. I said I've got to get another opinion. I can't trust this. And so, I drove off the lot, went to another mechanic, who took a look at the car and said, oh, yeah, your temperature gauge is broke. And I can replace it for about $30. And he replaced it for $30. And I was done.  

Now, the reason I tell you this, is because I felt more cheated against in that instance then I had probably felt up to that in my life. I had a moment where I felt betrayed. I felt like somebody had done something wrong on such a huge level to try to take advantage of a college student like that. And so, I drove back out there, confronted the management, and that didn't go so well. But just in that, they didn't do anything, not that there was any big scene.  

Now, here's what Jesus is talking about. We've been in this series Upside Down Living, and we're in the Sermon on the Mount. This is the section where Jesus talks about let your yes be yes. And here's something that's true, whether you're Christian or not, whether you've been around church or not, there's just a natural law that says telling the truth is a good thing in our world. All the world religions agree telling the truth is good.  

But what happened in Jesus day was that some of the scribes and Pharisees came up with an elaborate system of talking about only certain oaths really counted. In other words, if you swore by the temple, if you swore by Jerusalem, if you swear by this, swear by that, then it really counts. And if you don't swear by those things, then it doesn't count.  

And, when Jesus says, you've heard it said, do not break your oath, but fulfill your vow to the Lord. This is not the quoting of an Old Testament commandment verbatim in the exact same way that the last couple have been. We'll see this here in a moment. Here's what we read Leviticus 19:12, it says, "Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of the Lord. I am the Lord God." And then Numbers 30:2 says it this way, "When a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word, but must do everything he said." So, we're getting this idea of keeping oaths. And then Deuteronomy 23:21 says this, "If you make a vow to the Lord your God do not be slow to repay it, for the Lord your God will certainly demand it of you and you will be guilty of sin."  

And so what happened was that the religious establishment said these are the commands, but then they found ways to basically get around it by saying it only matters if you..., and then they would add these layers to these kind of vows. This would be like when you were a kid, and you would say something like, do you swear? So, you pinky swear, you know that kind of a thing. You had to wrap pinkies with another kid, and all of a sudden, that meant that you really meant it, is what they were saying. This is what they were doing.  

And so Jesus comes along, and he says, you've heard it said, and then he does what he's been doing in all of these sections and that is, he says, but I say to you, I'm going to tell you something that's much more intense than what you have believed. And he says, this, I tell you, do not swear an oath at all, either by Heaven, for it is God's throne, or by Earth, for its his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it's the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot even make one hair black or white. He lived before hair coloring, quite obviously. All you need to say is simply yes or no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one. And so, Jesus is simply saying this, and that is don't make these grand oaths and all these stipulations, simply let your yes be yes, and your no be no.  

Now, this raises a couple quick questions. And that is, does this mean that we should never make contracts an oath? I don't believe that's true. I believe that we see that there are oaths even in the Bible. And even God made a covenant or an oath. And we see this in Genesis 22:16. I'm not going to take the time to read it, but simply to say, I don't think that this is saying never make a contract and never make an oath. What this is driving at is Jesus saying, don't make it so that you have to make an oath to keep your word. Your word should be good. You should be able to speak things, and people should know that what you say is true. Here's why this is upside down in our world today. And that is because for many people, truth is fluid. What we do is we change what is true based on what we think we need in a moment or what our standard for truthfulness is. In fact, I saw one survey that said 97% of people lie regularly at work. In other words, what they do is they either say, hey, I did this when they didn't, or they say I took care of it when they did not. They lie about their amount of work, their productivity, and all these things. 97% of people, basically, according to this one survey, lie at work on a regular basis. In other words, truth is fluid. And Jesus says, I don't want truth to be fluid. I want you to be somebody who when you say something, it's accurate and it's true.  

And here's how this works for us today. And I have a little picture, this bad hand drawn picture, I apologize. But that is we say something, and there's truth, but then there's what is basically perceived. And sometimes those two things are askew of one another. We may have technically told the truth, but at the same time, what we've actually done is through our word said something that was misleading, so that we don't feel like we said anything untrue, but we didn't actually communicate truth. 

I remember this happened in my family years ago. My mother-in-law is an amazing pie maker. And so, every time we go somewhere, or she comes to our place, she brings a pie, usually two pies. They're phenomenal. They're wonderful. But the only exception being that every now and then she'll get on a health kick, and instead of putting sugar in the pie, she'll put like turmeric or something. And it's still really good, but not quite as good as when it's filled with sugar. And I know you're watching mom, so thanks for all the pie. But what happened in my family is my wife also became really good at making pies. And my sister-in-law became really good at making pies.  

When my brother- in-law first married, his new wife wanted to become also good at making pies. And I remember there was one family gathering, where that we all came and she said, I'll bring the pie. And she brought the pie. And when she brought the pie, it was not very good. And it was just one of those things where she tried, and she just missed a little. And I'm not sure exactly what was wrong. And so, everyone's eating the pie and going, this is really good. This is really good. And I'm just sitting there not saying anything, because you know, I didn't want to be that guy. But I also didn't want to want to lie. And I understood it's a social setting where it's like, we want to encourage this. And by the way, she's now excellent at making pies also. Just so we're clear, all of them make pies. This is part of my issue in life. But what happened was, she turned to me and literally said, Kurt, what do you think of my pie? And I'm sitting there saying, well, I can either say something that is kind of true, and can be perceived as it's okay, or I can speak the truth. And so, I, in that moment, spoke the truth.  

My wife later told me it was a bad choice. But I said, you know, I'm not sure this is quite the best pie I've ever had. And you know, I tried to soften it. But I said what I believed was true. And she actually appreciated it because she knew it wasn't good. And she was like, okay, finally somebody told me the truth, this was not a great pie. And here's my very simple point, and that is we're often in situations where saying something or not saying something is not actually contingent on, did I actually technically tell the truth or not, but did I lead to a perception that was untrue, in what I said. Now, maybe and I'm not sure about this, so you can debate this in your life group, maybe it's okay when somebody brings a bad pie to a social gathering to say you like the pie when you don't. I'm not sure that that falls under lying here. I'm not sure that it doesn't. I I'm just saying, maybe that's just being polite. But here's what I do know, and that is you and I can often mislead while technically speaking the truth. Jesus here isn't saying that you have to tell all the truth, but he's saying that your yes needs to be yes and your no needs to be no. In other words, when you say something, it has to lead to the right perception of truth. Or you don't say anything. 

And so, here's what I'd like to do. Just as a way to explore this today, I want to use a rubric that I got from a book by a man named Jim Dethmer, and it's on conscious leadership. He talks about making commitments. And the reason I want to use this is Jesus teaching here is so straightforward, so simple, that sometimes we just go okay, so I should tell the truth. I get it. And when I don't tell the truth, I get it, I need the gospel. Okay. I understand the message. And that is, if I understand that sometimes I'm sinful and therefore I need a savior, that's what Jesus is driving at, is that sometimes we don't.  

But that doesn't mean that we don't say how do I become a person who is truly one whose words mean exactly what they say and who's filled with integrity. And so, he offers four things that we need to do to be people of integrity. He says we need to make clear agreements. And again, this is where we're very clear in what we say. So that we know that when we say something we've communicated clearly, and it's been heard clearly. It used to be that you would make an agreement with a handshake. Now, I don't know if we do it with the fist pump or what exactly, but it was like, okay, we're going to shake on this as if we've made a clear agreement now. But here's where a lot of times we get skewed on this. And that is we don't actually make clear agreements, and sometimes we don't want to be clear, because fuzzy gives us more options. In other words, if somebody says to us, hey, would you do x? And we're like, well, yeah, you know, I'll get to it. Well, I've made no clear agreement, because I get to it means I'll do it whenever I feel like it, which means I haven't really committed to anything.  

Just recently, my wife came in from outside and said, we need to do the garage. You know, the garage needs a workover. And maybe you've had to do this before because your garage just starts collecting stuff. So, let me give you an example here that's very tangible. If I say, well, you know what, you're probably right. It'd be good for us to do the garage. Let's do the garage sometime. Let's clean the garage. Alright. Fuzzy agreement. I've not made any agreement there. I've not made any commitment. But if I say let's do the garage this Saturday, and here's what it means that we'll do it. Now I've made a clear commitment. And what some of us do is we constantly make fuzzy commitments because we like the options that they give us. And therefore, we don't come across to people in our lives as people of integrity because they constantly feel like we've said, we're going to do something when we've made an intentionally fuzzy agreement so that we don't actually have to do what we want to do. Jim Dethmer in talking about this says, even in meetings at work, that what we're called on to do is often lean in a meeting with a wholehearted yes, and say, I'll do this, instead of a corporate nod. But what we do instead is we simply say, here's my corporate nod, like sure. And then we passive aggressively go back to our places of work. And we don't work for the end because we didn't really want it to be. In a sense, what we're doing is making a fuzzy agreement, like sure, I'm in on that. But we aren't really, and we might even work to undermine the very idea that was presented as the thing that we need to do. Patrick Lencioni talks about this in one of his books, and he says that this is actually dishonesty, to agree to something and not follow through in a business setting. And the reason that we often do this is because we do it out of the guise of a fuzzy agreement. We can do this in our personal lives, and we can do it just in any way that we come around.  

Here's the second thing that Dethmer says and that is, we need to keep the agreements that we make. And this is really obvious again. And that is, once we've made a clear agreement, we need to say okay, I'm going to keep the agreement. Now, here's what Dethmer says. He says that about a 90% success rate of keeping your agreements is acceptable. He says, in other words, if you're really a person of integrity, you're going to keep about 90% of your agreements, and then about 10% of the time, you're going to realize I can't clean the garage on Saturday, I can't finish this project on time, or I'm not going to be able to do this. And he says that's an acceptable rate, as long as we do what he talks about in number three, and four.  

Now, here's what I would like to just simply say, and that is for Jesus, he doesn't say 90% is good enough. He says, let your yes be yes and your no be no. And so there's a difference here between understanding that the message of Jesus and how to function in integrity, not that we should never have a disagreement that we don't keep because sometimes you're not going to be able to keep even your best agreement. And what Jesus again here I believe is doing is, he's showing us, helping us understand that this is exactly why we need a savior. But at the same time, if we come to understand what it looks like, to really keep agreement, sometimes we'll understand that we may not be able to keep a clear agreement that we made.  

And so, here's the third step, and that is we need to renegotiate the agreement that we can't keep. And sometimes this is going to be around time. In other words, I can't do it on Saturday, or we decide that we don't actually want to do it, or maybe we change the scope. Or maybe we change the when and all of that becomes part of the way in which we try to say okay, what I'm working on here, I've realized that I can't keep it so I'm going to change it. I'm going to renegotiate it immediately.  

And then the fourth step is basically this and that is clean up the broken agreements that you've made. And what he says here is that we should take responsibility without giving an explanation. In other words, don't make an excuse in the moment and then say, what can I do to make this better when we've broken an agreement. Now that is former pastor, turned business coach, writing how he thinks integrity works in life. And the reason that I bring this up here and talk about it here, is because what I believe happens way too often for many of us when it comes to this idea of our word and integrity. And that is, we say, oh, yes, I should tell truth, but we don't have any clear rubric for how to do it. And what I think this does by just simply saying very simply make clear agreements, keep your agreements when you can't renegotiate as soon as possible, and clean up the broken ones. Immediately. What it does is it says, If I could do these things consistently, then I would be much closer to the standard that Jesus gives well recognizing the need for a savior.  

And here's what I hope you get, as we're talking about this today. And that is, when we talk about not keeping agreements, you may say, well, you know, it's kind of the way of the world. This happens. But here's what happens to you and to me when we don't keep agreements, and that is, ultimately it will deaden our soul to the idea of integrity to such an extent that we will tend to project onto other people and say it's their problem, when I'm actually the one who can't or hasn't kept my agreement. It's a little bit like getting a sunburn. When you get a sunburn, what happens is, it's not the end of the world. I mean, it's not great. But the real problem from a sunburn comes when 20 years later, when you get cancer, or you have some kind of a skin issue. It isn't the sunburn today or tomorrow, that hurts you, it's way down the road.  

And here's what happens when we don't practice integrity in our relationships. When you, with your spouse, with your kids, with your parents, with your coworkers, with your boss, say one thing and don't follow through, it's not exactly what happens in the moment but it's the fact that the next time there's a big project, you're not asked at work. Or when the list is made about whose job to cut, your name gets to the top of the list because you haven't been the person who can be counted on. It's when your spouse says you know what, I know that when you say something to me, it doesn't mean anything, or your kids say when you say something to me, it doesn't mean much. Then all of a sudden, they start saying, how can I trust you in anything, and you're not somebody who I'm going to believe. So, when you go to say something that matters, all of a sudden, you have to try to ramp it up. And this is the whole point of the oath. The oath is an indication that you don't have integrity. Anytime you find that you are saying this is what I'll do, isn't enough for somebody, when you say, I promise, or I guarantee, or I..., what we're doing is we're indicating that we actually have been so poor at keeping our word that somebody else says I need some kind of validation if I'm actually going to believe you.  

Now, some of us may say, what happens if I've made two contradictory commitments? What if I've committed two things to people, and I can't keep both of them simultaneously? That's a good question. Obviously, if you can be clear in your commitments in the first place, then hopefully you'll never get to that point. Because then you'll know that if you've committed to somebody, something that you've already committed to somebody else, that you can't keep both of them, so you'll never make it. But once you've found yourself in that place, maybe the thing to do is to go back and say I have to renegotiate as quickly as possible. And I want to keep the commitment that it was either made first or was more significant. And I'm going to renegotiate today in order to make those changes. And Jesus is really driving at this and that is by nature all of us will find ourselves in a place where we can't keep truth, be truthful, perfectly. And again, what he's driving at here isn't just tips on how we live with more integrity, but he's driving at this at this idea that says no matter how good you are, no matter how well you navigate your commitments, you will fall short and therefore you need Jesus to fulfill the law.  

Matthew 5:17-20, Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. He didn't come to say the Old Testament law doesn't matter. What he did is he fulfilled it. He raised the bar and says, I'm the answer. I am the truth. I am the way, I'm the one who makes it possible for you to be right with God. So even though you're going to blow it, Jesus has paid the way and what this can do if you and I get it, if we understand it, is lead us to absolute worship of who God is. Because even though I won't keep every word, every promise that I make, there's a God who does. And who in spite of my failings has loved me and said, Jesus has done for you what you can't do. And that moves me to worship and motivates me to say, I want to live with integrity in this world as best I can, so that I'm a reflection of this great God. And that'll be the call of people who have genuine faith to live upside down in a world in which truth can be fluid.  

Father, we thank you for your word today. We thank you just for the strong not just admonishment to truth, but the comfort in knowing that Jesus has fulfilled the law on our behalf. God, I pray that for those who may be today are just recognizing for the first time that their lack of truthfulness isn't just a minor thing, but before God, it matters. I pray that there would be a recognition and a willingness to turn to Jesus as their Savior. And God maybe for those who have believed in Jesus as their Savior, but have recognized that they've been fuzzy with commitments, haven't been keeping commitments, even simple things, being on time, returning calls, things like that, God, I pray that there would be a recognition that these things are still part of what it means to be a follower of you, being a person whose word means something. And that you would just rewire some of us to be even more intent on honoring you, even in the smallest things of our lives. And we pray this in Jesus name, amen.