The one thing that all three of the candidates now running for president agree upon is this: that each of their opponents should tell the truth to the American people.

In a court of law every witness is required to place his left hand on a Bible, raise his right hand above his head and say: “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” Then he sits in the witness chair and before judge and jury gives his testimony.

How important is truth-telling in national politics — in deciding cases in our courts of law? To ask a more pertinent, personal question: how important is it for each one of us to tell God the truth in all our religious exercises? Well, to tell God the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is not only the first step in our private prayer, and in our worship together in the sanctuary, but it is also the first step in our stewardship: to acknowledge that God is the giver and provider of all that we have, and therefore, we intend to pledge a tithe, one tenth, of all the income God provides to the support of His kingdom on earth.

Sometimes we hear people moan and wail over their problem of unanswered prayer. They complain that their oft-repeated petitions have received no noticeable answer. However, more basic than the problem of unanswered prayer is the problem of unprevailing power. How, not only to get a response to one’s requests, but also to experience always an awareness of God’s presence, the abiding assurance of His love, and an uninterrupted flow of inner spiritual resources to fill our emptiness — these are the fruits of prevailing prayer and of honest worship which we crave, and these we cannot experience as realities in our lives unless we fulfill the first law of the spiritual life: “Tell God the truth.”

But can it be that men and women will lie to God? Is this not introducing a foolish and impossible suggestion that religious people, church members, who come to worship on a Sunday, would lie to God?

Since the beginning, men and women have lied to God. Adam began it in paradise. Annas and Caiaphas lied about the Lord of Glory in the Sanhedrin, the religious court of the Jews, and again before Pilate in the Roman court of law. Ananias and Sapphira lied to God in the early Christian church. And men and women in the church and out of it have, in Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, been “joining the Ananias club” ever since, lying to God; or, to put it in more current phraseology, “packing their communication with God with dis-information.”

How does one go about lying to God? Ananias and Sapphira, according to the Book of Acts, lied to God by falsifying the facts about a gift they were making to the church. They lied about a real estate deal and indulged in double-entry bookkeeping. They tried to get the prestige of generosity without paying the price.

Sometimes people lie to God by professing to be or to believe what is far from their hearts. These are those Jesus was talking about when He said: “They call me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say.” The hypocrites, the play actors, who for a pretense make a show of being pious and devout but whose hearts are filled with lusts, greed, hate. They may take prominent places in the church, they may even give ostentatiously to charity, yet their closest business associates, their competitors, their own family know all this Christianity with them is a show and a false front. Their profession is without sincerity. They lie to God about their real affections, interests, and intentions.

Jesus warned His disciples against using “vain repetitions such as the heathen do” in their prayers to God. He told the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican which draws the contrast between a man who told God the truth about himself as a sinner, and that poor pretender who paraded his virtues in the false notion that he was really praying.

Jerry Taylor gives as the chief in his list of prayer fundamentals: “Do not lie to God.” And Arthur John Gossip advised: “Do not burn false fire upon God’s altar; do not pose and pretend, either to God or yourself, in your religious exercises.” (In the Secret Place of the Most High — A. J. Gossip, p. 26-27, Charles Scribners Sons, N.Y. 1947)

God wants the truth from us. He must have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or we cannot really pray, worship, or serve Him.

And what happens when men and women lie to God? One thing, for sure, doesn’t happen: we don’t fool God. We don’t take in the Almighty One who searches the heart of every person and knows all our secret thoughts. And we don’t fool others, either, for long. They see that we are all bluster and blow — no real joyous service, no genuine love and sympathy in us, no faithful stewardship of our resources. The world outside knows too. They call us hypocrites and lose confidence in the church and in God Himself because we have turned religion into a pretense.

But most disastrous for us, not telling God the truth blasts our spiritual life. When Ananias and Sapphira lied to God in the early Christian community and Peter confronted them with their duplicity, they fell down dead. The same thing spiritually has happened to thousands of other church members across the centuries. They lie to God and accordingly they are reduced to walking corpses in the body of Christ. They cut themselves off from Him who is ultimate truth.

But what does telling God the truth accomplish? Most important for us all is this: it opens the floodgates of divine mercy and grace in response to our acknowledged needs. Our transformation from gloom to glory comes only by God’s grace, by the touch of His loving hand on the festering sore of our condition, and that hand must wait the frank statement of our needy, desperate situation.

Scotland Yard captures most of its criminal suspects by remembering this fact: they are creatures of habit. The London police files show that one convict has operated under 440 aliases — that many lies about who he is — but always he commits the same crime in the same way and invariably gets caught. We are all, every one of us, creatures of evil habit. No matter how many false faces we put on, or phony names we assume in God’s presence, our sins invariably repeat themselves and we are caught up with. Our only hope is to tell God the truth about ourselves — plead for His mercy — and discover His amazing grace breaking the chain of evil habit and setting us free.

“The beginning of wisdom,” said St. Augustine, “is to know thyself a sinner.” And continuing intelligence is never to forget our sinful nature, however long we may have been in God’s service, however strong and effective His grace has made us become. Let us remember it is His grace and not our goodness.

But telling God the truth also accomplishes this — it transforms mere men and women into saints, apostles and holy martyrs. Donald MacLeod points out that: “one of the biggest differences between the early Christians and us is that modern pagans do not see in us what the Roman pagans saw in them. Those early Christians took their stand — and their obvious integrity shook the world. Why? Because they meant what they said and were ready and willing to back it up with all they had and were — even with their very blood. Theirs was a mission into danger.”

Down in Port Gibson, Mississippi, there is a Presbyterian church building that has become distinctive across the nation because of the large hand with the index finger pointing heavenward mounted on top of the church steeple. For miles before your drive into the town you can see on the skyline that awesome hand uplifted. It is a memorial to one of the church’s pastors, Zebulon Butler, whose outstanding mannerism was the uplifted hand with the index finger pointing upward.

Invariably, that’s what comes of a man’s or woman’s making it the practice of life to tell God the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and act on that. Such a life, thus open to the Almighty, becomes so sensitized to Eternal Truth that, like the sensitized needle of the mariner’s compass, in any storm or gloom, that life points to the fixed pole of Everlasting Reality. This is the outstanding mannerism of that person’s thought, speech, and action.

The same thing happens to a congregation — a company of believing, caring people who tell God the truth about themselves, about their community, and then back it up with their gifts and deeds: they become so open to the floodtide of God’s saving grace that the world around them sees a church with a mighty hand pointing upward to God.