Johnny Sanders (00:00)
Truth is incredibly important. It's important for us to understand what is true, what is real, and what is false, what is not real. Unfortunately, our culture has really mixed these two things, or even worse, at times we can make up our “own” truth. I can say I have “my” truth and you have “your” truth. And that's just a lot of nonsense. We need to have the truth, the truth, objective
Biblical truth. On Monday's episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Dawn Irons and we talked about her new book, IndoctriNation, that really gets into leftism that has hijacked the counseling profession and how there's just not a lot of truth that's going on there. So we discussed a lot of different themes within her book, but I wanted to take today's Faithful Friday discussion into a specific passage of scripture. This is actually just one verse today that we will unpack right now. So this verse is Ephesians 4:25. I'll go ahead and read it. “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one another.” Now, it's important to keep in mind here this verse is one tiny verse within a whole book, within a whole book of the Bible, the whole story of the Bible. I mentioned on a previous Faithful Friday that we want to be very careful when we're just looking at one verse and trying to tie it into everything. But I wanted to use this verse because of what it talks about with falsehood. “Therefore, having put away falsehood.”

So what is falsehood? What is false? In order for us to know what something is, whether something is false or not, we need to know what truth is. I always come back to this illustration and I'm going to butcher the details because I don't know all the details on it, but it's a good example of people who are looking at counterfeit bills, particularly within the FBI or some type of agency like

Johnny Sanders (02:33)
Somebody who's looking at counterfeit bills, there are a million different types of counterfeits out there from really just terrible looking fakes that basically any untrained eye can see that yeah, that's not really a dollar bill to very elaborate ones that to an untrained eye look exactly the same as a real dollar bill. But somebody who's really trained in finding those counterfeit bills,
cannot learn by trying to figure out every single trick out there because there are so many and there are always new tricks, people are sinful and try to steal try to get around true justice all the time. So there's always going to be people who are trying to steal in creative ways, so the person who's trying to find the counterfeit, what they're really really good at is knowing the truth.
They know what a dollar bill looks like. Even more so, they know what dollar bills from different eras look like. If you, and I'm here on this example about to give, don't carry cash as much anymore. I think a good chunk of, particularly millennials and younger, are much more in a cashless society. But even still, for the sake of this argument, I'm sure some of you anyways have carried around dollar bills, $5 bills, $20 bills, whatever, some type of cash.

And if you've seen them throughout the years, if you get like a really old wrinkly dollar bill that's been around since the seventies or something, it looks a little bit different than one that's just fresh off the press. There's different like seals and things like that. Some of those shiny little things on there to catch fraud. So the seventies-looking dollar bill is going to be different than the 2024-looking one. So they're going to know the differences between that over the years and they know those things inside and out. They're going to be able to really inspect and know what the truth looks like. That's how you point out falsehood. So in this verse, therefore having to put away

Johnny Sanders (04:49)
We don't figure out falsehood by only pointing out that that's bad, that's bad, that's bad, that's bad, that's bad. We talk about this often on the podcast with different guests that I interview, that pointing out stuff that is wrong is good. We need to be able to identify what is false, but we do that by knowing what is true. I go back to this point all the time on Faithful Fridays. You cannot know truth if you're not living in the truth, if you're not reading scripture, if you're not going to church and worshiping Christ together as a local body of believers, if you're not being called out for your sin, repenting of your every sin, you're not gonna know what truth is. And if you're not gonna know what truth is, you're gonna be susceptible to falsehood. So we want to be very, very careful that we're not only pointing out what is wrong but instead, we are pointing out what is right, we know what is right, so we're able to point out what is wrong. That order really matters. You can't point out falsehood first and then get to the truth. Truth starts first. You have to get there first. Moving on into this verse, “Let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor for we are members of one another”. So again, we're going to be able to put away that falsehood by knowing the truth, but we need to speak the truth.

This is something that I was going to say I think we all struggle with, but I'll speak for myself. I know I struggle with this at times- that I may know what the truth is, but I might be hesitant to speak up. Maybe there's a literal neighbor, a next-door neighbor that I don't reach out to and say hey to them or introduce myself. I know I'm guilty of that often. Even more so, maybe a family member, maybe a church member that is my brother, is my sister, that I'm not speaking truth to. I may not be speaking falsehood. Maybe I'm not lying. Maybe I'm not actively trying to do wrong in their life. And while that's nice, that's not necessarily what we're always called to do. We're called to speak the truth. And sometimes that truth is hard. Sometimes that truth is, haven't seen you at church in a while.

Johnny Sanders (07:14)
Are you doing okay? Sometimes it may be calling it out. Hey, I heard the way that you were talking. I don't think that was very God-honoring. I don't think you should do that. Sometimes it is that way, but it's speaking that truth. We talked about it on the show before, we’ve got to speak the truth in love. It's not about me being the victor here, me being the one that's got it all figured out, but we need to speak the truth to our neighbors. We can get a little bit deep in here again, the scriptures writing about specific things in these passages. But we know that at times our “neighbor” can be more broadened than just my next-door neighbor. These are the people that we're doing life with, that we have an impact with. We need to be able to speak truth to them. So again, maybe that's your next-door neighbor. Maybe that's your son, your daughter; family member, a friend, or your spouse, we need to be speaking truth actively, speaking truth in their lives. To go back to the discussion with Dr. Dawn Irons, what has happened in the counseling field is there's been a lot of falsehood that has come in, whether it's trans ideology or trying to really shun anybody with conservative beliefs from the field. That's falsehood.

how that falsehood really spreads is not just simply by speaking the bad stuff, spreading the bad stuff. Yeah, that's a piece of that, of course. But it also spreads by there not being people speaking up against it, by speaking truth to lies, being bold, being bold and courageous. It's a theme we see in the Book of Joshua often. We need to be strong, be bold, be courageous, and speak truth.

even if that means that we get bad looks, even if that means that people get mad at us, even if that means that we have people who are really judging us. So keep that in mind that we're not just called to be liked all the time. We're called to speak the truth to our neighbor, even if there's some cost associated with that. It ends here for we are members of one another. This has different

Johnny Sanders (09:37)
connotations here of- if you are members of a church, if you're members of the Church of Galatia, like Paul is writing to here, that is a very different connotation than a neighbor of your next door neighbor or somebody that just lives in the same town as you do. So it's important to keep that side of things in mind that when you are in a church body, you really have a lot of responsibility because we are members of one another. We are in covenant with one another. When I sin, it doesn't just affect me, it affects the whole church body there. So it's important to keep that context in mind. However, we can broaden this out a little bit that we need to realize that our actions, our lives, they don't just impact ourselves. And we can take that outside of church. If I am being unfaithful to my spouse. If I am cheating my business out of money, stealing money from my business. If I am looking at pornography or just not achieving things in my life, it's not just about me. This is how we get into the lies of the culture all the time. What I do with my time and my business, it doesn't affect you. Just get out of my business, let me do my thing. Nobody else is going to be impacted. It's just not true. What we do is connected to other people. God made us as social beings, as relational beings. This is why we hear talks of loving your neighbors so often. If we weren't social beings, then it wouldn't matter what we do with our neighbors. It only matters what we do with ourselves or with our family. It's not true. What we do affects other people around us. We live in such an individualistic society, that sometimes we lose sight of that. We lose sight of the impact that our individual actions have on other people. So yes, we need to keep this within the church context of realizing that when we're covenanting together as a church body, we are responsible for not just our own actions, but it affects our whole church family. But we need to look at that within our society as well. How we act with our kids.

Johnny Sanders (12:04)
how we train and raise up our kids, that doesn't just impact us, that impacts society. How good of a job we do at work, the way that we talk at work, that doesn't just impact us, it impacts our coworkers, it impacts the customers that buy the products or consume the services that we bring to the table. Keep all of this stuff in mind that it's not just about you. So let's take this whole verse as a whole.

and look into how one, we need to know what truth is. If we're gonna put away falsehood, we gotta know the difference between truth and falsehood. We're gonna know that by scripture, by living, breathing God's word, being under a biblical church leadership at a local body of believers that you're regularly worshiping with. You gotta have that if we're gonna know what falsehood is. We can't just point out all the bad stuff the culture is doing. Yeah, there's plenty of it. Don't get me wrong. But we have to have a basis. We are to be based in something. And that needs to be in biblical truth. Two, we need to speak that truth. We need to speak that truth with our neighbors, speak that truth with our coworkers, with our family members. We cannot just sit idly by and watch the world burn around us. We’ve got to speak up, speak the truth. And three, we’ve got to realize that our actions do not just affect us.

They affect everybody else around us. They impact our communities. They impact our kids. They impact our churches. It's not just about you. It's not just me, myself, and Jesus. That is not Christianity. We've got to keep that in mind. If you're sitting there, you're struggling. You're saying, you know what? I am just complaining all the time. I believe in Christ. Maybe I have a more conservative worldview. I don't like what's going on. But I'm not doing anything. I'm

sitting around, kind of complaining. Maybe I'm a keyboard warrior and talk about things online, but I'm not really setting the legacy. I'm not really doing anything with my life. Maybe I'm not even going to church right now and I don't know what my career life is looking like. I'm just kind of there. I'm offering consultation services for people like you. My goal here is to not say that I have every answer for you, but I know through things that God has gifted me with to be able to help listen well

Johnny Sanders (14:30)
point people in the right direction, try to get you plugged in in a biblical-minded, truthful-minded church, maybe help give you some direction in a career or dating device, or things of that nature, to get your life rolling. I want you guys to be active. I want you guys speaking the truth, not just talking about how bad things are. So if that relates to you, feel free to give me a shout-out at faithfullyengaged.com. We can get that ball rolling there. Otherwise, hope you have a wonderful weekend, and I will catch you on the next episode on Monday.