Explore the generations of lies that have become a defining characteristic of our times with Ronald L. Dart. Drawing from the wisdom of Proverbs, Dart discusses how truth impacts our personal and political lives. He challenges listeners to embrace honesty, not only for personal integrity but as a vital step towards a healthier society.
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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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It seems that every age and every generation has its defining characteristic. A lot of you out there listening to me now are baby boomers, and probably some of you are what they like to call Generation X. It seems to me, though, that we are living in the generation of the lie. If you want to see what I mean, just tune in on Sunday morning to television and watch the Sunday morning news shows that interview government figures. I always try to watch them because you get a good idea of what’s going on in the world, and you also get a good idea of what the government has decided to lie about this week. I usually groan when I see these things because if they have an administration official coming on, somebody out of the White House, a member of the Cabinet, It’s almost pointless to watch because you’re not going to get anything but the straight party line. And when they can throw, you can throw any kind of question. You can throw the hardest possible questions at these people. And they twist and they turn and they spin them and they give you a canned answer which may or may not have anything to do with the question that they were just asked. I don’t know how the word spin entered our political vocabulary, but in truth, it’s a euphemism for the word lie. They just get on there and tell us what they – I guess they tell us what they think we want to hear or what will keep us quiet for the moment that will keep us from forming a revolution and throwing them out of office. Now, there are a few people that I like to see come on these programs because they give straight answers. Senator Moynihan is one of those who sometimes when they’ll ask him a question, he’ll just come back and say, yes. Or no. And it’s always fun to watch because it leaves the interviewer flat-footed. He is accustomed to throwing out a question and then being able to sit back and have a sip of coffee while the person in front of him waffles for three or four minutes. Not Moynihan. You ask him a question, you get an answer. You may not like the answer, but at least you know what Moynihan believes and what his policies are, what he wants to do. You know, I often think… that in a nation of liars, the man who tells the truth is the only man anybody trusts. You might not like his policies. You may not like his ideology. You may not even like him. But at least you know him, and you know what he stands for. You know what he believes, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what he’s going to do next. I’ve watched a lot of this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I think you’re better off to vote for a man who will tell you the truth even when you don’t like what he tells you. You can debate his policies and issues with him because you know what they are. But an awful lot of people will vote for the liar who tells you his policies are one thing when in truth they are something else entirely. Why do we do this? I don’t know. I guess we just have a high quotient of gullibility, and we want to hear this so much that if we can find a man who will tell us what we want to hear, we’ll vote for him. But this program is not really about politics. It’s about making your life work. And in Proverbs 12 and verse 19, we come around to a question of truth and lies, which transcends politics and gets all the way down to what makes your life work and what keeps your life from working. In verse 19, Solomon says this, The lip of truth shall be established forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment. Deceit is in the heart of them that imagine evil, but to the counselors of peace there is joy. You know, one of the most fundamental elements of character is honesty. So many of the things that we do wrong all trace back to that. They trace back to deceit. If a man will cheat on his wife, he’ll cheat on you. If a man will steal from someone else, he’ll steal from you. And he’ll lie to you about what he’s done. Honesty may cost you in the short run. It sure might. But in the long run, it’s the only way. A politician who tells the truth may lose an election. But who wants to lead people who don’t value the truth anyway? If I can’t tell you the truth and say, I’ll lead you this way, this is the way I’ll run the country, well, why should I even want to be in charge? If you’ll vote for a guy who’ll just tell you what you want to hear. One of the things that’s killing us in this country is that we no longer value truth and honesty. We surely must prefer the liars in office because they are the people we keep voting for. Well, just tune in Sunday morning and see how much straight talk you can get. Continuing in Proverbs in verse 21, There shall no evil happen to the just, but the wicked shall be filled with mischief. Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but they that deal truly are His delight. And you know, I think if you think about this for just a moment, you will realize that you feel about the same way the Lord feels. You don’t like people to lie to you. You want people to tell you the truth. There’s a problem, though. If you really want people to tell you the truth, you’ve got to learn to respond to the truth in a positive way. If you keep beating up on people who tell you the truth, you keep voting against the politicians that tell you the truth, you’re going to be led by a pack of liars. If you expect your life to work, start out by telling the truth to yourself and then tell the truth to others. You don’t have to be mean-spirited about it. You don’t have to beat up on people when you tell them the truth. You can be kind and tell the truth. But won’t the truth hurt? Well, sure it will. But people will start to value the fact that you care enough about them to tell them the truth. It isn’t kind to lie to people, is it? Really? Because only when you tell them the truth, only when they’re dealing with honesty and truth, can people make wise decisions about their life. Well, um, If telling the truth is going to hurt, is it okay maybe if I just don’t say anything? Yes, it’s okay as long as your silence does not lead people to a wrong conclusion. If your silence is taken as agreement when you really disagree, then when you say nothing, you lie. I don’t know what it is that makes us think we can engage in wholesale lying and deception and maintain a sane society. When no one knows where the truth is. When no one knows what’s right or what’s wrong. When no one knows that this is correct or it’s a lie or it’s accurate or it’s inaccurate. When we have to read between the lines. When we have to depend on journalists to tell us what the real truth is. When all the journalists are in bed with the politicians. You’ve got a sick society. And we’re all going to wander around in the dark and bump into things. It’s happened before. Oh, yes, a long time ago, Isaiah the prophet addressed a people just like us. So much, in fact, like us that it might as well be us. It’s the 59th chapter of Isaiah and verse 1. Behold, the prophet says, the Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save. You’re not so far away God can’t reach you. And his ear isn’t heavy that he can’t hear you. He’s not wearing a hearing aid. He’s turned it down. Your iniquities have separated between you and your God. And your sins have hid his face from you to where God will not hear you. You can get to the place where God won’t listen to you anymore. And why should he? When you’re not telling the truth to your fellow man, and you’re not telling the truth to yourself, when there is no truth in the inward man, when we make lying a habit and a way of life, we lose track of reality, and we end up lying to God. And when you’re to that point, why in the world should God listen to you? In verse 3 of Isaiah 59, he says, “…your hands are defiled with blood.” Your fingers are defiled with iniquity. Your lips have spoken lies. Your tongue has muttered perverseness. Nobody calls for justice. No one pleads for truth. They trust in vanity. They speak lies. They conceive mischief. They bring forth iniquity or lawlessness. That’s not a pretty picture, is it? The problem is it’s a pretty clear picture of what our society is like. But you see, no one really wants justice. No one’s really willing to challenge a politician on the question of truth. We don’t want the truth. If we wanted the truth, we would vote for the truth. And since we want lies, well, we vote for lies. Their feet run to evil. They make haste to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity and wasting and destruction are in their paths. The way of peace they don’t know. There is no judgment in their goings. They have made crooked paths. Whoever goes therein shall not know peace. And how, pray tell, can you have any judgment in your goings when you don’t have the facts to make your judgment on? when you’re making your judgment on errors and inaccuracies and spun tales that people draw out to make you believe something that isn’t true. Then the prophet shifts his focus and begins to speak for the people in verse 9. Therefore, is judgment far from us? Neither does justice overtake us. We wait for light, but behold, obscurity. We tune in to the television set and we sit down there and we watch these commentaries and these news programs hoping for light. And what do we get? We get spinmeisters who get on there and keep things obscure, throw dust in the air so we won’t see through and really understand what is going on. We look for brightness. But we walk in the dark. We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes. We stumble at noonday as in the night. We are in desolate places as dead men. Why? Because we don’t know what’s true anymore. And frankly, sometimes we don’t want to know. When you walk in the way of lying, you never know where you are. Verse 11, we roar all like bears and mourn like doves. We look for judgment, but there isn’t any. We look for salvation, but it’s way off. Our transgressions are multiplied before you. Our sins testify against us. Our transgressions are with us. As for our iniquities, we know them. Because in transgressing and lying against the Lord and departing from God and speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve conceived them and we’ve uttered them from the heart, which means that we have so twisted and perverted our own hearts that we don’t know what’s true anymore. We have convinced ourselves that a lie is the truth. So from the heart, we utter words of falsehood. I think this may be the most distressing truth of all. And the result is confusion and a kind of subtle insanity. Verse 14, judgment is turned away back. Justice stands a long way off for truth is fallen in the street and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth fails and he that departs from evil makes himself a prey. And the Lord saw this and it displeased him that there was no judgment. Yeah, I would think it would. The sad thing about this is that statement, that the man who departs from evil turns himself into a prey, that his people prey on him. He’s a victim. He’s beaten up on. No one wants to hear what this man has got to say. Give us liars. Give us people who will spin the tale the way we want to hear it. Tell us what we want to hear, and we’ll vote for you. And let our kids and our grandkids pay the bill. So God looked on all this, and he saw that there was nobody who was willing to stand up for what was right. And he wondered that there was no intercessor. So he had to do it himself. His arm brought salvation to him, and his righteousness sustained him. For he put on righteousness like a breastplate and a helmet of salvation upon his head. He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing and was clad with zeal like a cloak. According to their deeds, accordingly he will repay. Fury to his adversaries, recompense to his enemies. To the islands he will pay recompense. So, they will fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him, and the Redeemer shall come to Zion, to them that turn from transgression in Jacob. This is a reference to the coming of the Messiah, who will redeem those who are ready to repent and turn their lives around and to walk in the way of truth. Liars are losers. It’s the winners who walk in the way of truth. I’ll be back in just a moment.
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Join us online at borntowin.net. That’s borntowin.net. Read essays by Ronald Dart. Listen to Born to Win radio programs every day, past weekend Bible studies, plus recent sermons, as well as sermons from the CEM Vault. Drop us an email and visit our online store for CDs, DVDs, literature, and books. That’s borntowin.net.
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We’re talking about making your life work. And believe it or not, one of the things that makes your life work is work. It’s really sad that so many people wake up to realize this far too late in life. It’s a powerful thread all through the book of Proverbs. Chapter 12, verse 11, for example, says, “…he that tills his land shall be satisfied with bread.” But he that follows worthless pursuits is void of understanding. There are two messages in this. One of them is that all the worthless pursuits that we pursue in the world aren’t going to take us anywhere. They may divert us. They may be fun for the moment. They may relax us for a moment. But you can’t make a way of life out of them, and you can’t eat them, and you can’t put them on the table. They don’t feed your children. The other message is just get started. There are so many jobs and so many tasks that we undertake in life that just look overwhelming when you look at the end of it from the beginning. Like raising crops, for example. You start off early in the year, and you have to start very early indeed. But the first thing you have to do is get the ground ready. And the message is, he that tills his land. Now, tilling is not the whole thing. But what tilling is, it’s the start. Get the ground broken, folks. That’s what you have to do. Take a look at whatever task it is that’s out there ahead of you, the big and daunting and the hard task, and just start somewhere. I remember once climbing a mountain in England, Mount Snowdon. A bunch of students and I went out there. We were going to climb the hard way up from the base, although there was no real hard way up Mount Snowdon, but there is an easy way. We decided to go up the more difficult way. And as we made our way up the line, one friend of mine had brought along his boy, who was rather young to be making that climb. But I remember the kid kept wanting to stop. He said, that’s far enough, Dad. Let’s go back. And his dad said, well, I’ll tell you what. You see that boulder up there? The kid said, yeah. He said, let’s go up to that one, and we’ll see if you still want to go back. And so he got him up to the next boulder. And then he said, well, see that one over there? Let’s go on up to that one. And finally, they got so close to the top, the kid wouldn’t go back without making it all the way. And the kid that I thought was a little young to make that whole 5,000-foot climb made it all the way to the top. He made it all the way to the top because his dad was with him. His dad kept encouraging him. His dad didn’t try to take him to the top in one swoop. He took him up there one rock at a time. And there’s a real lesson in that. Two lessons. One, go up the mountain with your kids. And second, take them up it in steps. And remember, there is absolutely no way to get to the end of this job without taking the first step. A little later in Proverbs 12 and verse 24, the hand of the diligent shall bear rule, but the slothful shall be under tribute. Yeah, that’s right. There are two categories of people in this world, those who rule and those who are ruled. Now, just sit down for a moment and ask yourself, which one of these would you rather be? The ruler or the peon? The one who’s poor? The one who gets the crumbs off the table? Or you want to be the one who calls the shots? Okay. It tells us that these two categories of people are the diligent and the slothful. And it’s your choice. You can pay attention to details. You can be diligent in your job. You can work hard. And you can be in charge. Or you can be a lazy lout and be a peon. The sooner your kids learn this, the better off they’re going to be. Passing down a couple of chapters to Proverbs 14 and verse 4 is an interesting little proverb to memorize and never forget. It says this, Where no oxen are, the crib is clean, but much increase is by the strength of the ox. This is rather, the Bible, you know, is a very down-to-earth book, and this is a very down-to-earth concept. You know why the crib isn’t clean when you’ve got an ox in there, don’t you? Well, he eats and eliminates in the same place. And so you wind up with a lot of dung all over the floor. And because of that, the ox isn’t going to clean it up. You’re going to have to get in there and muck it out every once in a while. Well, that’s awfully messy, I think. I don’t think I want to have an ox because I don’t care to have to muck out those stables every once in a while. Well, he goes on to tell you, well, okay, but much increase is by the strength of the ox. What’s the lesson? To get real work done, you have to put up with some messy circumstances. An ox is going to make a mess in the barn, and you’re going to have to clean it up. And when you walk along behind him in the row, you’re not looking at the ox from his best viewpoint. But that doesn’t mean you don’t want one. An animal or an our-day attractor can multiply your labor many times over. You know, one of the principles of winners is they find ways of multiplying their output, even if it requires more work. to multiply their output, sometimes by the work of others, sometimes by the work of animals, sometimes by the work of machines, even if it means I’ve got to repair the machine and clean the machine and oil the machine and fuel the machine. There’s a lot of increase from the help of that machine. Proverbs 14 and verse 23, “…in all labor there is profit.” But the talk of the lips tends only to poverty. Now, to be sure, some kinds of work are more productive than others, but work is always more productive than talk. If you can get this idea into your child’s mind, you’ll have given him one more piece of the best employment insurance that there is. One of my favorite Proverbs is chapter 15, verse 19. The way of the slothful man is a hedge of thorns, but the way of the righteous is made plain. Now, what in the world does that mean? It’s such a simple statement. Well, I’ll tell you what it means to me and why it’s so important. When I finish a job in my garage in my workshop, I have a real bad habit. I’m absent-minded, and I tend to lay down my tool right where I’m working and go on doing something else. The problem is that when I need that tool again tomorrow or next week or a month from now, I don’t remember where I laid it down. So I end up looking all over the garage for it, which is a lot of wasted time. The diligent man puts his tools away when he is finished with them. His way is easy. It’s plain. He knows when he needs a tool. He knows right where it is. He goes, gets it, and gets on with the job. The slothful man, well, he’s got to look all over the place for it. A slothful man does not take care of his tools. A dull axe or a dull chainsaw make a lot more work. But it’s always the lazy man who doesn’t sharpen his tools. And take a look at your storage room. If you have to move a dozen things to find what you want, well, you may have found yourself in this proverb, the way of a slothful man is like trying to get through a hedge of thorns. Think about that, and I’ll be back after these words.
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For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled, Making Life Work, number 22. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44. And tell us the call letters of this radio station. When I lived in England, I taught at college over there.
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And the college had beautiful grounds and gardens around it. And I was always fascinated by the work the gardeners did in the winter. It was gray and miserable and cold outside. And yet they were out there, grubbing away in the grounds, working in the gardens, preparing the gardens. I had always thought of gardening as an activity for sunny weather. But that gives away the fact that I’m not a gardener, doesn’t it? You gardeners all know that if you wait for that, you’ll always be too late. Well, that brings us to Proverbs 20, verse 4. The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold. Therefore, he shall beg and harvest and won’t have anything. Why? Because he didn’t, A, start his job, B, start his job early enough, and also because he had to be comfortable to work. This is another one of those lessons that your children have got to learn. You don’t always have to be comfortable, but you always have got to get the job done on time. And when it’s cold, well, that’s when certain jobs have got to be done. And if you expect them to get out there and do it, you’ve got to go out there with them. Proverbs 17 and verse 16. Well, and when I was in England, I also got a good view of this. It says this, Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, seeing he has no heart to it? Well, here I was. It was a winter morning. It was still dark outside at 8 o’clock because of the way they were setting up daylight saving time in England. And I come into class, and I get to class all together, and I open up the discussion on today’s reading assignment. And with a dozen students sitting out here in my class, I found that not one of those students had prepared for the class. And so I just flipped over to Proverbs 17, verse 16, and I read this to them. Why in the world are you fools paying tuition to take this class, seeing you have no heart to it? You know, I thought about this, and I thought about my own case, and I realized that if I had gone to college straight out of high school, it would have been a complete waste of time and money because I didn’t have the heart to it. I had no idea what I wanted. I had no idea of why I even wanted to go on to school. So in a way, it was just as well for me that I didn’t have any money, and my parents couldn’t afford to send me to college. I joined the Navy. After four years in the Navy, I was ready. I understood where knowledge could take me. I understood the objectives of learning. So I went to college. I was an A student. But I learned there is no point in coughing up money for tuition for a kid who is not ready to work. Finally, take a look around you and listen to this proverb. I went by the field of the slothful and by the vineyard of the man who was void of understanding. And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Losers let things go to wreck and ruin. Winners build them up. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart, and you were born to win.
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The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at…
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1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE44 to sign up or visit us at borntowin.net
