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‘Let your communication be Yea, yea.’
Mat_5:37
I. The tribunal of conscience.—The great and chief happiness of life is to give Conscience her full and absolute sway. The most powerful proof to us of the facts of our holy religion, of God and the soul, and the future life of rewards and punishments, is the undying tribunal of Conscience in our hearts. But to be careless about the strictest conception and expression of truth is a daily violation of this heavenly witness within us. First, let us train ourselves by God’s grace to see things as they really are, without exaggeration, diminution, colour, or prejudice, and then let us equally ask His gracious help to say them as they really happened, as we from the very ground of our hearts believe them to be, without fear or flinching.
II. The habits of the world.—This is by no means so easy a task as at first sight it seems. The habits of the world are quite the other way; and many of the children of God are so much influenced by the habits of the world that they become, to their shame, very largely indifferent to this virtue of Candour, Truthfulness, and Accuracy, and thus lose much of the blessing of God and the benignant presence of the Holy Spirit. How seldom it is that worldly people give you the whole reasons for their conduct! How terribly careless people are about repeating scandal and gossip! What a tremendous responsibility lies on that vast body of educated men who make their living by journalism, and who daily purvey to thousands and millions whom they have never seen, the views they are to hold, the things they are to accept as true!
III. Want of candour in party conflict.—And then, again, what a temptation to this unchristian want of candour is there in the excitement of political and ecclesiastical parties! How greatly those who are engaged in such struggles need to pray that they may not take up with any other code of morals but the laws of Christ; that they may not have heated, prejudiced, partial views of the questions that are brought forward, or shape their line of action out of deference to some great name, but may try to look at everything in the light of justice and of truth! How instinctively we turn with honour and gratitude to those who always speak out their mind fearlessly, whether we agree with them or not! How inestimably precious and how rare, but how powerful for good, is a statesman or an ecclesiastic who is absolutely honest, truthful, candid, and unprejudiced, to whatever party he may belong!
IV. White lies.—Living thus in the midst of exaggeration and unreality, many of us do not see things in their true proportions and colours. We think that there are white lies as well as black lies, and that most lies are white. We fancy that we may tell the white lies, because they do not cause much harm and because they are allowed by the world in general. And we forget that we are not lying with men but unto God, of whose nature truth is an essential element.
—
Archdeacon Sinclair.
Illustration‘Our Lord’s special object here is to insist on His people practising the habit of absolute truthfulness. which will not need any oath to confirm it, and which is apt to be greatly weakened by the use of such language. The needless taking of oaths tends to lessen a man’s sense of truth, and enfeeble his regard for it. Men who swear much by heaven or by earth do not regard such oaths as very binding; and once they have accustomed themselves to untruth in this way, bigger and rounder adjurations will be needed, and will be found equally useless, until the whole soul becomes corrupted with that worst of all rottenness—an utterly lying spirit.’