Make a pact with the truth
Pablo Dupuy
(: )
: Brother Pablo Dupuy, a missionary who has worked in some of the poorest and most difficult neighborhoods in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, shared a meditation on the importance of listening to God's voice and speaking the truth. He referenced the story of Samuel in the temple, where God spoke to him as a young man. Brother Pablo emphasized the need for humility in order to hear God's voice and the danger of lies in the modern world. He also spoke about the importance of guarding one's tongue and not speaking falsely about others. Brother Pablo ended with a story about a woman who gossiped about her neighbor and was advised to throw feathers to the wind, symbolizing the spreading of her negative words.
The sermon is about the importance of speaking the truth and being honest with God and others. The speaker shares stories and examples of how lying and speaking negatively about others can have harmful consequences. He encourages listeners to make a pact with the truth and to be careful with their words, speaking only what is uplifting and affirming. The sermon ends with a prayer of repentance and a call to be more generous, merciful, and truthful in all aspects of life.
The sermon is about the importance of speaking the truth and being honest with God and others. The speaker shares stories and examples of how lying and speaking negatively about others can have harmful consequences. He encourages listeners to make a pact with the truth and to be careful with their words, speaking only what is uplifting and affirming. The sermon ends with a prayer of repentance and a call to be more generous, merciful, and truthful in all aspects of life.
Now I want to introduce someone who is going to bring us a meditation this morning. You have seen a person normally dressed out of the ordinary, brother Pablo Dupuy, who is here with us this morning. Brother Pablo for me is a prophetic character here in the midst of our church.
He arrived many months ago, several months here to the congregation, he came,... his most immediate stay had been in the Dominican Republic, as a missionary there in the Dominican Republic working in some of the poorest and most difficult neighborhoods in the capital, Santo Domingo. He is a man who has a heart for the poor, he has a heart for evangelism, he has a heart for Jesus Christ and I have had opportunities to talk at length with brother Pablo and feel his love for the Lord, the integrity of this man, his evangelical mind, solidly biblical, and for me, I say that he is a prophetic character because brother Pablo represents that union of the evangelical church and the catholic church that I believe that God wants for the last times, that his church, which has been divided between these two great sectors, the entire world Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Episcopalian to some extent and the Roman Catholic Church, the East and the West were divided centuries ago, and that division of the Church has never been repeated. heal. They divided in the 16th century again and all that Protestant reformation with all its different denominations was given place and on the other hand the Roman Catholic church remained, and that division has not yet been healed either. And I believe that God wants to heal the divisions among his people, I don't know how he is going to do it, but God is going to do it. And I am glad that in our church there are people like brother Pablo who represent our openness to the mysteries of God and our knowledge that God speaks in all sectors of his church in different ways, and that we all need healing.
The evangelical church today needs healing and the Catholic church needs healing too, and the Orthodox churches need healing too. So this morning we had been talking about him having the opportunity…he is in a transition stage in his life and ministry and God is speaking to his heart. He has been affiliated for decades with a Catholic order, but not a Roman Catholic, not affiliated with Rome, but another Catholic order, because there are such orders. They have had missionaries in different parts of Latin America and brother Pablo is in transition and in search of God's will for his life, if I can put it that way, right? But he is a man with a very clear definition in terms of his faith and trust in the Lord and many other things.
I believe that for us it expands and blesses us to hear from this servant of God and that he also has the opportunity to find his place in this stage of his spiritual journey, of his pilgrimage, his apostolate, we could say in a sense So I have asked brother Pablo to share a meditation with us this morning and I hope that you will receive him warmly and hear from the Lord. Give a round of applause to brother Pablo. Come here brother.
Dear brothers and sisters, may God bless you all. I wanted to speak for a few minutes this morning on the word. I'm not used to having a microphone... modernity. So, everyone who has a Bible, and I hope many have their Bible because it is very important to walk, to use your Bible at all times, to not be ashamed of having your Bible.
It can be opened to the First Book of Samuel, Chapter 3, verses 3 to 8.
“...Samuel was sleeping in the temple of Jehovah where the ark of God and before the lamp of God was extinguished, Jehovah called Samuel and he answered, 'here I am', and then running to Eli he said, 'here I am, why did you call me?' and Eli said, 'I I have not called. Come back and lie down. And he turned and lay down. And Jehovah called Samuel again and Samuel got up and came to Eli and said, 'here I am, why have you called me?' And he said, 'my son, I did not call. Come back and lie down. And Samuel had not yet known Jehovah, nor had the word of Jehovah been revealed to him. So Jehovah called Samuel the third time and he got up and came to Eli and said, 'here I am, why have you called me?' Then Eli understood that Jehovah was calling the young man. And Eli said to Samuel, "Go and lie down, for if I call you, you will say, 'The Lord speaks, for your servant hears.' So Samuel left. He lay down in his place and Jehovah came and stood up and called like the other times. ‘Samuel, Samuel,’ then Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant hears’....”
You see that you don't have to be old to hear the word in the voice of God. One can be young, we have seen right now an example of how there are young people who capture God's message and who know how to transmit it. It is not necessary to have a gray beard or gray hair to hear our Lord Jesus Christ and God. Because Samuel is a teenager, he is young. He is still not used to hearing and capturing the voice of God, to such an extent that he thought it was Eli calling him, and he got up 3 times to talk to him and says 'here I am, here I am'.
And Eli was the first to understand why adults, the oldest, have to teach the youth how to capture the voice of God, because God speaks to the young as well. Samuel was in the temple, and God spoke to him in the temple.
And here we are in the temple and here too God speaks to us, both to the young and to the old. God speaks to us and we must know how to listen, we must understand when it is the voice of God and say, 'here I am, Lord, I hear your word, I am willing to do whatever you want'.
But many people do not know how to discern the voice and many times it can be because of pride. Pride is an impediment to our grasping the word of God. Remember the story of the tower of Babel, men wanted to build a great city and a tower to reach the sky. They thought they could scale heaven and force God to come to them by their efforts and not by God's grace.
And what was the punishment that God gave? You remember that God came and confused the languages, he divided the languages in such a way that among them, men no longer understood each other. They did not understand each other because they had not understood the will of God that we always be in humility.
It is humility that will give us the possibility of hearing God and the possibility of speaking worthily to God. And it doesn't matter if we know what things we should say or not say, because we have received the promise that the Holy Spirit himself will come to pray from among us with groans knowing what we need.
We have to entrust ourselves to God. And if we don't know the words to say, the Holy Spirit will say them. Because we can be in direct communion with God. But as I say, there is confusion and there is also a lot of confusion because there is a lot of lies. There is a lot of lying, we can easily lie to ourselves and to others. And the modern world today is an ocean of lies. Lies on television, lies in schools, lies many times even in families, lies in certain churches, lies among politicians. We swim in an ocean of lies.
But who is the father of lies. We know, I don't want to pronounce his name, so he has no glory or that. But there is a father of lies, our Lord Jesus Christ, what has he said about himself, 'I am the way, the truth...'
It is the truth. Christ is the truth and every time that we speak the truth, that we tell the truth, we are speaking in the spirit of Christ that through our tongue, that God, to put it that way, is incarnated through our tongue. While when we tell a lie, who is speaking through our mouth? Not the one who should have power over us.
And we are easily fooled. I remember once a family called me, they said, well, the doctor that our grandfather is not going to last the week, that he is going to die, but we don't dare tell him, the doctor didn't say it either, but we are a little restless for his eternity because he does not understand well the things of God, if you can come and talk with him to prepare him to present himself to God.
So, I came and I talked to him, and I told him, 'Don Tomás, I have to tell you something that is not easy but that is necessary, that no one dares to tell him, is that during the This week he is going to present himself before God, it is the moment when he still has a conscience, he still has the possibility of thinking about everything he has done wrong in his life to ask God for forgiveness. You have to ask for forgiveness for not leaving this world without God's forgiveness. You have to ask for forgiveness for your sins. Nobody wants to talk about sin today.
And he told me, 'but I've never sinned.....' 90-odd years.... 'I've never told a lie.' I said, 'and the lie, have you never told a lie?' 'No, I have never told a lie... Me, a lie.' I tell him, 'well, at least you can ask Christ for forgiveness for the lie you just told.'
He says, 'what lie?' He still understood, that is, that you have never sinned, ... it is known from the Gospel that the just, not the sinner, the just sin 7 times a day, and you have never in your life of ninety-something years or so never sinned... Blessed are you. But think about it, think about it,
Because what happens? If we are not souls of prayer, however intelligent we may be, our mentality darkens, our intelligence darkens. That is why we can see brilliant people in the economy, in politics, in universities, very gifted people intellectually and they talk nonsense. They do not understand the truth, because God has taken away their light, because they do not have the humility to get on their knees and ask for God's light. They think that all their intelligence comes from themselves. But it is God who gives the talents, it is God who gives the possibility of speaking, it is God who gives the word of wisdom, it is the Holy Spirit who enters within us so that we can speak as if it were Christ himself speaking, because we are extensions , if one may say, to complete the work of salvation that Christ has begun on this earth. We are instruments and we must act as instruments.
So when we really started to speak the truth. Do you remember what happened with Solomon? Solomon had asked for wisdom. God told him what do you want, what gift am I going to give you? And he said, 'wisdom', he asked for a very important gift. Then God gave him wisdom and he did not keep it for himself, he began to speak wisely, to judge wisely, to reign wisely. And it is said that people came from all nations to hear him speak, they came from everywhere. So, if we are truly men and women of God, if we really have this spirit of God with a word of truth, a word of wisdom, people will listen.
There are people who will listen because there is much thirst and hunger today because there are so few who are teaching the truth that when sincere souls hear it, they are happy, they are satisfied, they feel very happy. You must always guard your tongue, because we, as I say, easily lie to ourselves. We say that, well, a little lie, a white lie, which is not serious, right? It's not important. Me to defend my reputation, as it remains the reputation is sacred. In justice I have a right to my reputation, so if I am going to say a word that is not totally in accordance with the truth, it doesn't matter, at least I retain my reputation. Reputation of what? Of liar.
Once there was a lady, not only ladies who behave like this, men too, but there was a lady who really liked to talk about her neighbor. You know, my neighbor did this, and my neighbor did the other and at 11 at night I saw a man who is not her husband enter her house and ta, ta, ta, ta, talking. But at a certain point they realized that she really shouldn't talk like that, so she went to see a man who had just the light of the Holy Spirit and she says, 'what should I do that maybe, maybe, I shouldn't do that? So the man said, 'okay, go get a pillow, come with me to the crossroads and open the pillow and throw all the feathers to the four winds.'
So, she says, 'so what about that? After a week go back to collect the feathers. She says, 'but that's impossible, how am I going to pick up the feathers that have been blown away by the wind a week later?' And he said, 'so the words that you have said against your neighbor have blown away, where... .. God knows where they got to. Those feathers have multiplied, those words are walking everywhere.
And only at this moment did he understand the seriousness of speaking badly, he understood the seriousness of speaking badly. And sometimes it can become very, very serious. You remember the story of Ananias and Sapphira, right? That they had sold their properties, they had the money and they wanted to put everything in common, they said, and they came to the Apostles to deposit the price of their gain, of their sale. And Peter, by the light of the Holy Spirit, understood that they had not brought everything. They were not obliged, it was not an obligation to bring all the money from the sale and give it to the Apostles, this is still much more than the tithe. We can't complain about tithing when the early Christians gave everything, not just 10%. The tithe is little.
So, they said, well, here's all the money from the sale. And Peter said, 'it is not to men that you have told a lie but to God himself', And Ananias fell silent and died suddenly. You see that I lie to God....
There are many people who, when the time comes to confess their sins, say, oh, Lord, I have not done anything wrong against my neighbor. I have not stolen anything, and they list their virtues and their qualities. But not the list of their sins, they are confessing to God, trying to convince God, oh, I am very patient with my children, and I am very tolerant of my wife's vagabondage and this and that.... Lie. They are telling lies to God.
And they think that God, I don't know, is kind of stupid.... that God doesn't know... So, brothers and sisters, we have to develop a cult of truth, be very, very people , very true. This comes to us for the love of Christ, for the love of the Holy Spirit, it comes to us... God gives us that reverence.
I remember a man who was somewhat lacking in judgment. He made mistakes of all kinds: he lost money, accidents, many things, but frankly, frankly, true. I believe that in his life he has never told a lie, so whatever he told us, we had the confidence that he was telling the truth.
If we can give this impression to others, it is always telling the truth, when we speak about the things of God, they will listen to us, in the sweet name of our Lord Jesus Christ, love and thank you.
Glory to the Lord. Simple, but profound and biblical and it is a call, brothers, to all of us. I am going to ask the musicians to come in, please, there is no need to add more to this. It is a call for everyone, starting with me to be careful how we use our mouth, to be honest with God first or perhaps with ourselves first. Because before being honest with God we have to know what we are going to confess to God and what we are going to share with God; and to marry the truth, to make a pact with the truth.
The truth, within ourselves, the truth when speaking to others, the truth also in how we treat others, may there always be truth in our relationships, and if we don't have an uplifting word to say let's not say it. If we are in an environment where they are talking about a person we know, let's not be a part of it. And let's be careful not to say things that destroy the reputation of others as well.
As Christians, I believe that we should distinguish ourselves by that integrity that we must always have with God and with our brothers. That people say, there is a man, there is a woman that I can put my reputation in his hands, I can put my life in his hands, I can make a mistake and put that mistake in his hands too and he will handle it correctly. May God make this church always a church where the truth in all its manifestations, all its expressions prevails, even from this pulpit always also, brothers.
This will keep us healthy and will not allow the enemy a chance to accuse us and do damage to our lives.
Let's stand up. We are going to make a pact with the truth this morning. Amen. If you have spoken ill of someone, if you have damaged someone's reputation. Sometimes with a slight comment, a word, a look, a gesture, a quick comment with someone passing by and that word did not have the seasoning of Christ, it would not have come from the mouth of Christ, we are going to repent of that at this moment , amen.
If our habits of speaking to our children, to our spouse, in moments of socializing at work do not reflect the healing that befits a child of God, they do not reflect love, mercy, grace , looking first at ourselves and knowing that if it were not for God's mercy we would not be able to be in his presence. If our words do not reflect affirming others, lifting up the fallen with a word of encouragement, comforting someone who is in need and in trouble, let us repent in the name of Jesus.
If we speak more than necessary many times, there are more words of criticism than of affirmation that sometimes come out of our mouths, let us ask the Lord to heal our attitude, and make a commitment to be harmless people . Harmless means incapable of doing harm.
Now, if you have to speak the truth, you speak the truth, but you always speak the truth with mercy and love. A small insulation is placed on the sword so that it does not hit, does not kill, does not cut, but if it hits, it hits in a way that strengthens and edifies and does not leave the person falling and lying on the ground.
So let's receive this call from the Lord. Father, we repent of idle words, we repent of cruel words, we repent of words lacking in mercy, we repent of words that hurt the image of people who are not present to defend themselves or present their case, we repent at times that we have not said good things when we could have said them, Father. We regret sometimes not affirming others, our children, our spouses and we ask that you help us to be more generous and more merciful and more fearful before you and before our brothers.
Thank you for this sweet reminder, Lord, that you have given us this morning. Thank you for everything that has been done today, for the presentation of the young people, for the praise, Lord, that has flowed among us, for the prayers that have been made, for the intercession that we know has come before your throne and for the privilege of being in your house, Lord, today, in this Christmas season and remembering our Lord Jesus Christ who always spoke the truth and who always embodied the truth.
Take us out of here now with your blessing, Father, with your very strong presence within us because we ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen. I bless you in the name of Jesus.
He arrived many months ago, several months here to the congregation, he came,... his most immediate stay had been in the Dominican Republic, as a missionary there in the Dominican Republic working in some of the poorest and most difficult neighborhoods in the capital, Santo Domingo. He is a man who has a heart for the poor, he has a heart for evangelism, he has a heart for Jesus Christ and I have had opportunities to talk at length with brother Pablo and feel his love for the Lord, the integrity of this man, his evangelical mind, solidly biblical, and for me, I say that he is a prophetic character because brother Pablo represents that union of the evangelical church and the catholic church that I believe that God wants for the last times, that his church, which has been divided between these two great sectors, the entire world Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Episcopalian to some extent and the Roman Catholic Church, the East and the West were divided centuries ago, and that division of the Church has never been repeated. heal. They divided in the 16th century again and all that Protestant reformation with all its different denominations was given place and on the other hand the Roman Catholic church remained, and that division has not yet been healed either. And I believe that God wants to heal the divisions among his people, I don't know how he is going to do it, but God is going to do it. And I am glad that in our church there are people like brother Pablo who represent our openness to the mysteries of God and our knowledge that God speaks in all sectors of his church in different ways, and that we all need healing.
The evangelical church today needs healing and the Catholic church needs healing too, and the Orthodox churches need healing too. So this morning we had been talking about him having the opportunity…he is in a transition stage in his life and ministry and God is speaking to his heart. He has been affiliated for decades with a Catholic order, but not a Roman Catholic, not affiliated with Rome, but another Catholic order, because there are such orders. They have had missionaries in different parts of Latin America and brother Pablo is in transition and in search of God's will for his life, if I can put it that way, right? But he is a man with a very clear definition in terms of his faith and trust in the Lord and many other things.
I believe that for us it expands and blesses us to hear from this servant of God and that he also has the opportunity to find his place in this stage of his spiritual journey, of his pilgrimage, his apostolate, we could say in a sense So I have asked brother Pablo to share a meditation with us this morning and I hope that you will receive him warmly and hear from the Lord. Give a round of applause to brother Pablo. Come here brother.
Dear brothers and sisters, may God bless you all. I wanted to speak for a few minutes this morning on the word. I'm not used to having a microphone... modernity. So, everyone who has a Bible, and I hope many have their Bible because it is very important to walk, to use your Bible at all times, to not be ashamed of having your Bible.
It can be opened to the First Book of Samuel, Chapter 3, verses 3 to 8.
“...Samuel was sleeping in the temple of Jehovah where the ark of God and before the lamp of God was extinguished, Jehovah called Samuel and he answered, 'here I am', and then running to Eli he said, 'here I am, why did you call me?' and Eli said, 'I I have not called. Come back and lie down. And he turned and lay down. And Jehovah called Samuel again and Samuel got up and came to Eli and said, 'here I am, why have you called me?' And he said, 'my son, I did not call. Come back and lie down. And Samuel had not yet known Jehovah, nor had the word of Jehovah been revealed to him. So Jehovah called Samuel the third time and he got up and came to Eli and said, 'here I am, why have you called me?' Then Eli understood that Jehovah was calling the young man. And Eli said to Samuel, "Go and lie down, for if I call you, you will say, 'The Lord speaks, for your servant hears.' So Samuel left. He lay down in his place and Jehovah came and stood up and called like the other times. ‘Samuel, Samuel,’ then Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant hears’....”
You see that you don't have to be old to hear the word in the voice of God. One can be young, we have seen right now an example of how there are young people who capture God's message and who know how to transmit it. It is not necessary to have a gray beard or gray hair to hear our Lord Jesus Christ and God. Because Samuel is a teenager, he is young. He is still not used to hearing and capturing the voice of God, to such an extent that he thought it was Eli calling him, and he got up 3 times to talk to him and says 'here I am, here I am'.
And Eli was the first to understand why adults, the oldest, have to teach the youth how to capture the voice of God, because God speaks to the young as well. Samuel was in the temple, and God spoke to him in the temple.
And here we are in the temple and here too God speaks to us, both to the young and to the old. God speaks to us and we must know how to listen, we must understand when it is the voice of God and say, 'here I am, Lord, I hear your word, I am willing to do whatever you want'.
But many people do not know how to discern the voice and many times it can be because of pride. Pride is an impediment to our grasping the word of God. Remember the story of the tower of Babel, men wanted to build a great city and a tower to reach the sky. They thought they could scale heaven and force God to come to them by their efforts and not by God's grace.
And what was the punishment that God gave? You remember that God came and confused the languages, he divided the languages in such a way that among them, men no longer understood each other. They did not understand each other because they had not understood the will of God that we always be in humility.
It is humility that will give us the possibility of hearing God and the possibility of speaking worthily to God. And it doesn't matter if we know what things we should say or not say, because we have received the promise that the Holy Spirit himself will come to pray from among us with groans knowing what we need.
We have to entrust ourselves to God. And if we don't know the words to say, the Holy Spirit will say them. Because we can be in direct communion with God. But as I say, there is confusion and there is also a lot of confusion because there is a lot of lies. There is a lot of lying, we can easily lie to ourselves and to others. And the modern world today is an ocean of lies. Lies on television, lies in schools, lies many times even in families, lies in certain churches, lies among politicians. We swim in an ocean of lies.
But who is the father of lies. We know, I don't want to pronounce his name, so he has no glory or that. But there is a father of lies, our Lord Jesus Christ, what has he said about himself, 'I am the way, the truth...'
It is the truth. Christ is the truth and every time that we speak the truth, that we tell the truth, we are speaking in the spirit of Christ that through our tongue, that God, to put it that way, is incarnated through our tongue. While when we tell a lie, who is speaking through our mouth? Not the one who should have power over us.
And we are easily fooled. I remember once a family called me, they said, well, the doctor that our grandfather is not going to last the week, that he is going to die, but we don't dare tell him, the doctor didn't say it either, but we are a little restless for his eternity because he does not understand well the things of God, if you can come and talk with him to prepare him to present himself to God.
So, I came and I talked to him, and I told him, 'Don Tomás, I have to tell you something that is not easy but that is necessary, that no one dares to tell him, is that during the This week he is going to present himself before God, it is the moment when he still has a conscience, he still has the possibility of thinking about everything he has done wrong in his life to ask God for forgiveness. You have to ask for forgiveness for not leaving this world without God's forgiveness. You have to ask for forgiveness for your sins. Nobody wants to talk about sin today.
And he told me, 'but I've never sinned.....' 90-odd years.... 'I've never told a lie.' I said, 'and the lie, have you never told a lie?' 'No, I have never told a lie... Me, a lie.' I tell him, 'well, at least you can ask Christ for forgiveness for the lie you just told.'
He says, 'what lie?' He still understood, that is, that you have never sinned, ... it is known from the Gospel that the just, not the sinner, the just sin 7 times a day, and you have never in your life of ninety-something years or so never sinned... Blessed are you. But think about it, think about it,
Because what happens? If we are not souls of prayer, however intelligent we may be, our mentality darkens, our intelligence darkens. That is why we can see brilliant people in the economy, in politics, in universities, very gifted people intellectually and they talk nonsense. They do not understand the truth, because God has taken away their light, because they do not have the humility to get on their knees and ask for God's light. They think that all their intelligence comes from themselves. But it is God who gives the talents, it is God who gives the possibility of speaking, it is God who gives the word of wisdom, it is the Holy Spirit who enters within us so that we can speak as if it were Christ himself speaking, because we are extensions , if one may say, to complete the work of salvation that Christ has begun on this earth. We are instruments and we must act as instruments.
So when we really started to speak the truth. Do you remember what happened with Solomon? Solomon had asked for wisdom. God told him what do you want, what gift am I going to give you? And he said, 'wisdom', he asked for a very important gift. Then God gave him wisdom and he did not keep it for himself, he began to speak wisely, to judge wisely, to reign wisely. And it is said that people came from all nations to hear him speak, they came from everywhere. So, if we are truly men and women of God, if we really have this spirit of God with a word of truth, a word of wisdom, people will listen.
There are people who will listen because there is much thirst and hunger today because there are so few who are teaching the truth that when sincere souls hear it, they are happy, they are satisfied, they feel very happy. You must always guard your tongue, because we, as I say, easily lie to ourselves. We say that, well, a little lie, a white lie, which is not serious, right? It's not important. Me to defend my reputation, as it remains the reputation is sacred. In justice I have a right to my reputation, so if I am going to say a word that is not totally in accordance with the truth, it doesn't matter, at least I retain my reputation. Reputation of what? Of liar.
Once there was a lady, not only ladies who behave like this, men too, but there was a lady who really liked to talk about her neighbor. You know, my neighbor did this, and my neighbor did the other and at 11 at night I saw a man who is not her husband enter her house and ta, ta, ta, ta, talking. But at a certain point they realized that she really shouldn't talk like that, so she went to see a man who had just the light of the Holy Spirit and she says, 'what should I do that maybe, maybe, I shouldn't do that? So the man said, 'okay, go get a pillow, come with me to the crossroads and open the pillow and throw all the feathers to the four winds.'
So, she says, 'so what about that? After a week go back to collect the feathers. She says, 'but that's impossible, how am I going to pick up the feathers that have been blown away by the wind a week later?' And he said, 'so the words that you have said against your neighbor have blown away, where... .. God knows where they got to. Those feathers have multiplied, those words are walking everywhere.
And only at this moment did he understand the seriousness of speaking badly, he understood the seriousness of speaking badly. And sometimes it can become very, very serious. You remember the story of Ananias and Sapphira, right? That they had sold their properties, they had the money and they wanted to put everything in common, they said, and they came to the Apostles to deposit the price of their gain, of their sale. And Peter, by the light of the Holy Spirit, understood that they had not brought everything. They were not obliged, it was not an obligation to bring all the money from the sale and give it to the Apostles, this is still much more than the tithe. We can't complain about tithing when the early Christians gave everything, not just 10%. The tithe is little.
So, they said, well, here's all the money from the sale. And Peter said, 'it is not to men that you have told a lie but to God himself', And Ananias fell silent and died suddenly. You see that I lie to God....
There are many people who, when the time comes to confess their sins, say, oh, Lord, I have not done anything wrong against my neighbor. I have not stolen anything, and they list their virtues and their qualities. But not the list of their sins, they are confessing to God, trying to convince God, oh, I am very patient with my children, and I am very tolerant of my wife's vagabondage and this and that.... Lie. They are telling lies to God.
And they think that God, I don't know, is kind of stupid.... that God doesn't know... So, brothers and sisters, we have to develop a cult of truth, be very, very people , very true. This comes to us for the love of Christ, for the love of the Holy Spirit, it comes to us... God gives us that reverence.
I remember a man who was somewhat lacking in judgment. He made mistakes of all kinds: he lost money, accidents, many things, but frankly, frankly, true. I believe that in his life he has never told a lie, so whatever he told us, we had the confidence that he was telling the truth.
If we can give this impression to others, it is always telling the truth, when we speak about the things of God, they will listen to us, in the sweet name of our Lord Jesus Christ, love and thank you.
Glory to the Lord. Simple, but profound and biblical and it is a call, brothers, to all of us. I am going to ask the musicians to come in, please, there is no need to add more to this. It is a call for everyone, starting with me to be careful how we use our mouth, to be honest with God first or perhaps with ourselves first. Because before being honest with God we have to know what we are going to confess to God and what we are going to share with God; and to marry the truth, to make a pact with the truth.
The truth, within ourselves, the truth when speaking to others, the truth also in how we treat others, may there always be truth in our relationships, and if we don't have an uplifting word to say let's not say it. If we are in an environment where they are talking about a person we know, let's not be a part of it. And let's be careful not to say things that destroy the reputation of others as well.
As Christians, I believe that we should distinguish ourselves by that integrity that we must always have with God and with our brothers. That people say, there is a man, there is a woman that I can put my reputation in his hands, I can put my life in his hands, I can make a mistake and put that mistake in his hands too and he will handle it correctly. May God make this church always a church where the truth in all its manifestations, all its expressions prevails, even from this pulpit always also, brothers.
This will keep us healthy and will not allow the enemy a chance to accuse us and do damage to our lives.
Let's stand up. We are going to make a pact with the truth this morning. Amen. If you have spoken ill of someone, if you have damaged someone's reputation. Sometimes with a slight comment, a word, a look, a gesture, a quick comment with someone passing by and that word did not have the seasoning of Christ, it would not have come from the mouth of Christ, we are going to repent of that at this moment , amen.
If our habits of speaking to our children, to our spouse, in moments of socializing at work do not reflect the healing that befits a child of God, they do not reflect love, mercy, grace , looking first at ourselves and knowing that if it were not for God's mercy we would not be able to be in his presence. If our words do not reflect affirming others, lifting up the fallen with a word of encouragement, comforting someone who is in need and in trouble, let us repent in the name of Jesus.
If we speak more than necessary many times, there are more words of criticism than of affirmation that sometimes come out of our mouths, let us ask the Lord to heal our attitude, and make a commitment to be harmless people . Harmless means incapable of doing harm.
Now, if you have to speak the truth, you speak the truth, but you always speak the truth with mercy and love. A small insulation is placed on the sword so that it does not hit, does not kill, does not cut, but if it hits, it hits in a way that strengthens and edifies and does not leave the person falling and lying on the ground.
So let's receive this call from the Lord. Father, we repent of idle words, we repent of cruel words, we repent of words lacking in mercy, we repent of words that hurt the image of people who are not present to defend themselves or present their case, we repent at times that we have not said good things when we could have said them, Father. We regret sometimes not affirming others, our children, our spouses and we ask that you help us to be more generous and more merciful and more fearful before you and before our brothers.
Thank you for this sweet reminder, Lord, that you have given us this morning. Thank you for everything that has been done today, for the presentation of the young people, for the praise, Lord, that has flowed among us, for the prayers that have been made, for the intercession that we know has come before your throne and for the privilege of being in your house, Lord, today, in this Christmas season and remembering our Lord Jesus Christ who always spoke the truth and who always embodied the truth.
Take us out of here now with your blessing, Father, with your very strong presence within us because we ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen. I bless you in the name of Jesus.
