Getting Honest About Being Truthful

In my last few posts on how love is shown by truthfulness we looked at how being truthful and trustworthy (or not being so) was illustrated in the lives of Eli, Samuel, and Saul. How about you? Do you identify more with Eli and Saul, or with Samuel? How much can God trust you with?

One of the most important things we need to do as the body of Christ, is to cultivate the atmosphere where it is safe to be truthful. Let me tell you what I mean by that. By “safe” I don’t mean we need to be only being truthful about things that are pleasant and easy. What I mean is we need to make it safe for people to be honest about their hurts, their pains, their struggles, and their sins. We need to have a place where we can be honest and people will be honest to us. One of the reasons there is so much dishonesty in the church is because we are afraid of what people will think of us, say to us, or do to us, if we were really honest.

There is more honesty and trustworthiness in your average AA meeting than there is in the average church. The only way to come into an AA meeting is to be honest that you have a problem, that you have not been trustworthy and that you are admitting it and asking for help to be kept accountable so that you can become trustworthy. If we want to become truthful people, we need to be a place where we can be honest about where we are weak and with our failures.

Too often we look at people like Eli or Saul in the Bible and say, “They got what was coming to them. If they really loved God they never would have failed like that.” Friends, that kind of thinking is neither truthful nor loving. David sinned big too. He lied too. He rationalized too. Yet God forgave David for lying, lust, coveting, adultery, and for murdering of one of his mighty men so he could have his wife for himself, because he did finally get honest about his sins and honestly repented of them.

Who do you have in your life who keeps you accountable for being honest and trustworthy?

A couple of years ago, I attended a retreat for pastors. There were eleven of us there. One morning we had a talk on accountability. Do you know that out of the eleven men there, only two of us had at least one person with whom we were completely honest with? Several of the pastors shared that while they had been looking for such a relationship, most of the time it backfired right in their face.

The irony is that the reason we are often so poor at growing truthfulness in one another is that we are not showing the fruits of grace to one another that encourage us to be truthful. We not only need to work at telling the truth in love, we need to work at hearing the truth in love.

Let me encourage you to do this one thing: find a person whom you trust, who is honest and trustworthy and ask them to be an accountability partner for you. This may be a two way relationship where the truth telling and accountability goes both ways. Or it may be a one way relationship where one person agrees to allow the other to be honest and they hold them accountable to growing in the truth. Commit to working towards being able to be totally transparent to them. Let them have permission to speak truthfully to you.

To be asked to be an accountability partner is an honor and a privilege. It is an opportunity for you to show love in a way that the world does not offer. A love that reaches out in the power of divine grace to lead another into that place where they can be learning to live in divine truth, where they can begin to grow to be honest and trustworthy.