So he told a little bit of a lie. Now it wasn't a complete lie. He just said oh, she's my sister, and actually there was a relational connection, so he didn't quite lie completely. He just misrepresented, so the king thought, oh this one's up for grabs, and took Sarah into his home and so what happened was, he got struck down with a plague, he and everyone in the home. God showed him, you're a dead man. You've got someone else's wife. He said I didn't know, no one told me and he went back and said to Abraham, what's this thing you've done? You lied to me. And he said this; he said I was afraid, so fear causes people to lie. That's one reason that people lie, is because they're afraid. Another reason they lie, is because of hate. The Bible says, that the person who lies, hates the one and they afflict with the lie, so true love, we don't lie to people. We tell them the truth. We're talking, we're open, we're honest - so the key heart issue here when people lie, one is fear, fear of being truthful, fear of the consequences. One heart motivation for lying, misrepresenting the truth, holding back the truth, is just plain fear, I'm looking out for myself.
See the second one is hate, where actually we lack love for people, and we've got no hesitation to just tell them a lie. Another one is a hidden agenda, where we have a hidden agenda, we have something we're trying to accomplish, and if we told them the truth they'd never buy in, so we tell them a part truth, so we'll get them to respond, and we get what we want from them. We're getting close now aren't we? There's an awful lot of that goes on isn't there? So there's a Holy Ghost, a spirit of truth. So the first place for Him to talk the truth, is to us. The Holy Ghost wants to tell us, so what you do, if you would ask the Lord to just begin to speak to you every time you misrepresent the truth, or tell something that's actually creating some kind of illusion or misrepresentation - just begin to ask the Holy Ghost to do it. Believe me, the words will barely have got out of your mouth, and He will tell you. That wasn't true. That's what He'll say - that wasn't true, or He'll say more bluntly, you lied. I tell you, it's quite a shock to get a slap on the face by the Holy Ghost, when you've asked Him to help you deal with words, and you didn't quite lie, just sort of well, you know, told most of the truth. [Laughs] Yeah, most of the truth is still a lie, because it doesn't actually paint the full picture.
So we see that those are things of the heart, so therefore if I want to deal with that, I've got to ask the Lord to help me get over the issue of fear, begin to really have a heart that loves and embraces the truth, embraces the truth in my own life, and then embraces the truth in speaking the truth to others. Of course, some people aren't ready to hear the truth. You know, there was a Jack Nicholson movie and they were talking, they were saying, I want the truth, I want the truth. He said, you can't handle the truth! Of course some people in relationship aren't able to handle truth. They go bananas when you tell them the truth, and they just react, and get angry and upset. You still have to tell them at some point, but there is a timing in things, so just because we've talked about being truthful, doesn't mean you have to go now and blab. You've got to speak the truth in love, so in our relationships, our relationships are cultivated by speaking the truth.
Think about this. If you lie to your spouse, or lie to your parents, or give things which are misrepresenting the truth, your relationship is going into darkness. You've left a whole area now, where demons can come in to isolate you and afflict you. The Bible tells us in Isaiah 28, it says that we've come into a covenant with death and hell agreement. Now in other words, we've come into a binding agreement with demons. How? Because we made lies our refuge. We hid under lies and deceit. You'll find whenever people speak a lie or misrepresent something, immediately demons are empowered by their agreement with the devil, who's a liar. The Bible says, John 8:44, the devil's a liar. The lies come from him, so when we lie, when we deliberately misrepresent something, deliberately tell a lie, we immediately come into agreement with a demon, and now he's empowered to further increase the web.