“In your eyes, I am complete”
“She saved my soul from the devil”
“I could not ask for more”
“Forever and ever, never will part”
For music fans, all of the above quotations can be rightly attributed to a song that includes it. The songs range from Pop to Country to Oldies and they all share one common denominator…they all contain lies.
Now, most people will sing along to these songs without any strike of conscience. And maybe that’s normal. But for thinking people, especially thinking Christians, we have to consider the impact of the words and the thoughts that we allow to infiltrate the way we perceive the world. After all, as Scripture says “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34). If this is true, then even the words we say carelessly, maybe especially so, gives us revelations about our heart. And if we unthinkingly repeat untruths just because they are set to a catchy tune, what does that say about us?
Because you see, the challenge with these little lies is that most of the time we don’t recognize them as such. We think that someone else really can complete us, or that they can save our soul, give us all that we’ve ever wanted, or will be with us for always. However the only being that all of these can really be attributed to is God. When we place someone else in God’s place, we are exchanging Him for something less than Him. In other words, we are creating and serving an idol – a caricature of what God offers that can only be expected to disappoint.
The logic may seem extreme, which is maybe the point. We don’t recognize the seriousness of “little lies” and that is why they can often have the greatest damage.