The interesting thing is, once you start down the road of lying, you've got to keep going there, and it gets more and more - you can't even remember what you said and what you didn't say. Then finally it all collapses, and you get caught out, and it's a disaster. You're humiliated, because you never just embraced the way which is right. God hates lying. He loves the truth. He's a God of the truth. Why don't we just in our heart just say Lord, help me now to just guard my lips, that I actually speak and represent the truth, and that every time I misrepresent it, you'll convict me, show me, so I can get out and walk in the light very, very quickly. Oh, he'll go quietly. See, the truth sets you free. Truth sets you free. I can give you one more, because I think it's gotten - I'll give time, four minutes to do one more. This one's a good one too, and it's an infectious disease. It's a deadly disease, actually really breaks up families and churches and businesses and all kinds of things.
Let me just give you one more, come on, here it is, this one here. It's gossip and slander. Gossip - you knew that one was coming. Juicy gossip, it's the words of a tale bearer, like dainty morsels, they go down, but they wound you on the inside. They have an effect, so tale bearing, gossip. There's a bit of a difference between gossip and slander, I'm going to define that for you. The first one, gossip; gossip's when you talk about someone. You talk about them, and you share their person affairs, but here's the thing about it. It's always flavoured by your interpretation of it, and when you tell someone they don't just pick up the facts, they pick up your interpretation of the facts. So when we start to uncover what's happening in other people's lives and share it, what we do is we begin to create a defilement. We begin to defile the relationship, and then the person's name and reputation are run down. That's a horrendous thing. Magazines make millions on gossip, juicy gossip, all the women's magazines. Now if you're going to fast off negativity, fast off every magazine that's loaded with gossip. Just start with gossip. Start with gossip and end with that. Put and end to it.
Get on the phone - did you hear about so-and-so? Oh [natter natter] Well if it wasn't edifying, why did you tell them that? Why did you go and share that thing? Why did you share what was private, see? Here's the thing is, when someone shares with you something about someone else, you don't hear all the story. You hear what's in their spirit, you feel it, and you're left with an impression, and your facts aren't quite right, because anyone knows if I start a story off over here and we spread it round, by the time it gets up here it's a totally different story. So what happened? See people repeated what they thought they heard, and sometimes they hear out of their own heart, so if someone's got a snitch with Bill, and I share them something about Bill, they don't hear what I said. It just reinforces what they already felt in their heart towards him. You understand? So gossip's horrendous.
Now slander's something different again. Slander goes a bit further. Slander deliberately misrepresents a person, so the things that are spoken deliberately create a wrong impression about them, so undermining their character and reputation, their good name. Slander is a horrendous thing, because when you slander someone, you are destroying their good name and reputation. You're actually taking something - if you took $100 from them you can pay it back, but if you slander someone, you can't pay it back. You can't even fix it. It's a horrendous thing to slander someone, to speak and misrepresent them deliberately. That's what a slander is, and so in Psalm 15, Verse 1 and 3, it tells us if you want to abide the presence of the Lord, don't get into back-biting or gossiping, and don't take up a reproach, or start to agree with people about someone else's faults. Everyone has got faults.