Dropping the Ball

How dependable are your words? Broken commitments and lack of follow-through can quietly erode trust in our marriage and family, but integrity is built when we consistently do what we say, even when it’s inconvenient. When our “yes” means yes and our “no” means no, we protect our relationships from the damage and disappointment of unmet expectations.

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Guys, welcome. My name is Ryan. I'm one of the pastors here at Impact. And uh we're in the middle of a series that uh is is great timing. It's a marriage and family series, uh, but we've been looking specifically at the great Sermon on the Mount that Jesus preached in Matthew chapters five through seven. Uh, and we were examining it in light of our marriage and family relationships. And so it's really opening a lot of things up. It has definitely been challenging. We have talked about anger and bitterness and the need for forgiveness. We talked about lust and and and infidelity and the need for faithfulness in the marriage covenant. Uh last week we talked about divorce, and so today we're talking about lying and unmet expectations, and I don't know why, but I'm just relieved. Because it seems like, man, you know what? This isn't quite as intense. But then as I studied and prepped for today, I realized actually there's some challenge the Lord has for us today, too, without question. We're gonna be in Matthew chapter 5, starting in verse 33, and let's let's re-examine the teachings of Jesus that as we obey those teachings, he said, it's like building our home, building our house on the solid ground, the rock, the stable rock and foundation of a healthy family. Matthew five, let's read verse 33. Jesus says this again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn. But I say to you, do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. And I would add, or remain. Let what you say be simply yes or no, anything more than this comes from evil. So Jesus continues this whole uh similar pattern that we've been studying the past few weeks, where it's this juxtaposition of the old covenant, and then as he illuminates and explains the fulfillment he brings to it in the new. Right? The old covenant, the old testament law that God gave to his people, they had misunderstood. They knew his law, they committed it to memory, but as years went on, they got further and further from his heart. And so Jesus comes back to say, listen, you've heard it said this, but I say to you, and what he's doing is helping us understand the heart of God behind the law and the word of God. Because we need to know that heart to live it out, in particular in our marriage and family relationships. He says, You've heard that it was said to those of old. Now, Jesus is likely going to give us here a combo summary of really two Old Testament commands, and we see it referenced in the first part of his statement and the second. So there's no one specific command in the Old Testament law that you're pulling from, but two really that come together, he's bringing together. The first we see with his statement, you shall not swear falsely, right? So you've heard it said, don't swear falsely. This is pulled from all kinds of places in scripture, but specifically Leviticus 19, 12. Let's read that together. We read this you shall not swear by my name falsely. This is God speaking to his people. You shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord. So very clear cut. And guys, this should not be rocket science or revelatory for any one of us in here. Lying and deception harms healthy relationships. Nobody needs to write that down, do we? This is self-evident. The foundation of healthy relationships, the lifeblood of healthy family relationships is trust. And so when I lie, when I deceive, it erodes that trust. It destroys that healthy foundation and makes everything unstable, oftentimes resulting in utter and complete collapse. And we know this, lying, bad. We've learned it from the time we were little kids. And yet, so many of us lying and deception is still a regular part of our life and our relationships. We lie about all kinds of different things. Yeah, I shared this before, but but I still am so grateful for my dad when I was a kid because early on in my childhood, my dad was just like every other dad at that time, where we would have one house phone, right? It was the landline, and it was uh it would ring, and so I would jump up and run to answer it. Because that was back when I was still excited to get a phone call. And I'd answer the phone, and before I'd get to it, though, my dad would always yell out and he'd say, Tell him I'm not home. That's why I get on the phone, hello? Oh no, he's not home. Okay, I take a message and I'd hang up. And it was probably when I was like 10 or 11 years old. I remember my dad pulling my sister and me into the living room, and he sat us down, and we thought we were in trouble, but he was in trouble. And he says, Hey, I want you guys to know that the Lord's really convicted me of something. And you know how I always tell you, tell him I'm not home? You guys know that's a lie. And it's never okay to lie and deceive like that. God's convicted my heart, and so I want you guys to forgive me. He took full ownership of that, and we're just like, okay, we didn't know what was going on. But he said, from now on, if if if the phone's ringing and and and I don't want to talk with somebody, I want you to say, I'm not available. He goes, because that's an honest statement. It's true. And I remember that to this day, the weight and magnitude of my dad taking ownership for deception and saying, we want to be a family that walks in truth. But lying is such a part of our family dynamics, oftentimes we don't even think about us doing it anymore. We lie about why we're late to get where we're going. We lie about what we're doing, we lie about who we were doing it with. We lie because we're trying to avoid consequences. We don't want to get in trouble. We lie because we're trying to avoid conflict, we just don't feel like getting into it right now. We lie for personal gain and benefit to get something for ourselves. Oftentimes we're all always very altruistic, and we lie because we're wanting to spare someone else's feelings. But lying is lying, deception is deception, and it destroys that trust that's essential to healthy relationships. But you know, here Jesus seems to be dealing with a specific kind of deception. And you see it in the second part of this statement where he writes, You've heard it said, right? You shall not swear falsely, he says, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn. Now, this is a specific kind of deception Jesus is referring to here. And we see this in Numbers chapter 30, verse 2. If a man vows a vow to the Lord or swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge, he shall not break his what? His word. He shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth. Right? So Jesus is getting very specific with the kind of deception he's dealing with here in the Sermon on the Mount. It's not necessarily a reference to the ninth commandment, which is you shall not bear false witness. Right? That means you should speak truth. Don't say anything you know is not true. But he's specifically dealing with a violation of the third commandment. The third commandment is you shall not take the Lord's name in vain. Now, today we've kind of taken that commandment and gone, oh yeah, don't use the name of Jesus or God in a curse word way. But that's not what it's in reference to. Taking the name of the Lord used to be something they would do to make an oath or a pledge or a vow. And they would swear by the name of the Lord to make it binding, to lend weight to it, where it was assuring that person, I will follow through in my word. So taking God's name in vain meant attaching the name of the Lord to an oath or a vow and not following through on it, not doing what you said you're gonna do. So here Jesus is not speaking specifically to a lack of honesty, he's addressing a lack of integrity, a lack of follow-through that can be so destructive to relationships. So many of our families are suffering because those within our family can't count on us. They can't depend on us. We are unreliable, we're flaky. I love that phrase. You ever thought about that imagery? Oh, they're a flake. What do we mean by that? What is a flake? A flake is just something that just floats around, no weight, no substance to it whatsoever. Wherever the wind is blowing, that's where it goes. It's not anchored, it's not tethered in truth. How many of us would be described as flaky individuals? A flaky husband, a flaky wife, a flaky parent? We have broken promises and commitments that are so destructive to healthy family relationships. Our family needs to be able to count on us. Do you ever consider that when your kids want to play and we're tired, but we tell them, hey, not now, but when I get home from work. You guys ever done this before? I think back to those days when my son was little and that's all he wanted to do. He wanted to play with dad. And I wish I could have done that all the time, but I had a job. And I was pouring out a lot all day long. And so there'd be in the morning, I'm tired, I'm getting ready to go to work. And he'd come up to me and be like, Dad, can we play catch? I'd be like, Oh, buddy, I'd love to, but I daddy's got to go to work. And he'd get kind of sad. So to make him feel better, and I wanted to do this, I'd be like, hey, buddy, when I get home from work today, we can go play catch. And he got all excited and he was just ready to go. Well, I'd go to work, and it'd be a rough day, man. A lot of meetings, a lot of dealing with stuff, a lot of issues, and I just felt drained. And I'd come home and I'd walk to the door, and all I wanted to do was just crash on the couch and not move the rest of the night. I felt like I had nothing left. But my little three, four-year-old son, he didn't really give a rip about the day I had. He comes running up to me, and what's the first question he asks? Dad, can we go play catch? He's got his glove ready, he's ready to go. And in that moment, too often, to my great dismay and regret, I would just say, buddy, Daddy's so tired. I had such a long day at work. We'll play tomorrow. And you just watch him go, okay, and walk around his little soul spirit crushed. What am I doing? I'm not letting my yes be yes. I am making a vow, I'm making a commitment, and I'm not following through. And it damages my relationship with my son. Guys, if you ever see your young children after you say, hey, we're gonna do this, or hey, we're gonna do that, if they followed up with really, do you promise? Know that they need a vow attached to your word because too often you haven't kept it. They need that promise as an assurance. And this is what Jesus is speaking to here. I want to acknowledge that broken promises, they're often the result of good intentions, aren't they? We mean it in the moment, we intend to do it in the moment, and we certainly don't want to disappoint our family, we don't want to disappoint people, and so we say yes in an effort not to disappoint them, but then we end up being too tired, too stressed out, too stretched thin to follow through, and then we end up hurting them and disappointing them even more. If we do feel overcommitted, if we do feel too stressed out, stretched thin, guys, there's a good chance you are saying yes when you should be saying no. That your no should be no, and instead your yes is becoming a no. And that discourages those in your family, those that are close to you. We overcommit and we over overcommit ourselves and our schedule where we want to do something, but we just feel like we don't have the resource personally to do it or follow through. Jesus says, do not take an oath at all. Right? So I say to you, don't take an oath at all. Now, understand this. This is not speaking some legalistic thing of Jesus where Jesus said not to take an oath. So if I'm uh testifying in court and they ask me to take an oath that I'm gonna tell the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth, nope, not gonna do it. Jesus here is not saying that oaths are bad. What he's emphasizing to us as his people is that oaths shouldn't be necessary. Right? The word for oath here in the Greek, it refers specifically to an enclosure, a fence that restrains someone. So the imagery is I am going to bind myself by this enclosure of an oath or a vow, this fenced-in oath, so that I can't get out of it. I can't escape my word. There's no gate to this oath that I can come in and out of. The idea here is that we're bound. But guys, our word as followers of Jesus, as men and women of integrity, whose yes is yes and our no is no, our word shouldn't require offense, should it? It shouldn't require something that binds us. It should be sufficient in what we say. If we need to attach an oath to what we say to our family, as what does that say about who our family perceives us to be? What kind of character and integrity or lack of it we may have? An oath only becomes necessary when our word doesn't mean anything anymore. Right? Our character is what should validate our words. Who we are should guarantee what we say, shouldn't it? Jesus says, Let what you say be simply yes or no. That is all that's needed. I'm reminded of James chapter 5, verse 12, where James writes to the church, he says, But above all, my brothers, do not swear either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation. Right? James here unpacks more and reiterates the words and teachings of Jesus. Guys, integrity is doing what you say you're going to do, even when I would say, especially when it's not easy to follow through. It's doing it even when it's hard to do. That's how trust in family relationships is built. When you say yes and to live out that yes isn't easy, to let your yes be yes, when it's not an easy thing and your family knows that, but they see you do whatever is necessary to follow through and be true to your word, that's what builds trust. That's what builds integrity is when the yes is hard and it's done anyway. I love Matt up here with his red beard. Because he committed to those kids at VBS, hey guys, here's what's gonna happen. The color of the winning team, I'm gonna dye my beard that color for you guys on Sunday. And the kids are like, Woo, going crazy. And then we told him we have elder and deacon appointment up here. And he looked at us like, Are you kidding me right now? What am I supposed to do? This isn't coming out. And he just showed up and was like, ta-da! He let his yes be yes, even for your kids. Our yes creates an expectation. This is what we need to understand. And the importance of expectations cannot be understated in marriage and family relationships. As we all bring expectations into family relationships, and these expectations are shaped by any number of different things. They come from our own personalities, our own personal preferences, but mostly expectations develop and are shaped by our past or our previous experiences, right? Things that we go through or things we're familiar with kind of dictate or determine what we expect things to be in the future moving forward. I think back to my eighth grade year, I was at home and I had a buddy call, it was the landline, so I ran to it. My dad's like, I'm not available, but I picked up. And he invited me, he said, Hey, what are you doing tomorrow? I'm like, dude, I'm 13, I'm not doing anything. What are you talking about? I had no life at that point. He said, Do you want to go to a Lakers game? Well, I'd never been to a basketball game. I'm like, seriously? He said, Yeah. So we had a mutual friend, and her dad uh was was uh owned a large commercial insurance company, and he was a huge Lakers fan. So we had season tickets. This is back when they were playing at the forum right out in LA area, and uh he would he would win the auction every year to play like a one-on-one game with Magic Johnson. I mean, this guy loved the Lakers. So uh my friend told me that that the guy's wife and other daughter, they got sick, they weren't able to go. So their pain, our gain, he said to his daughter, hey, invite invite your friends. So she knew how much we liked the Lakers. So I was thrilled. I my parents said, Yeah, go ahead and go. I said, okay, that's great. So I hang up, and all of a sudden, as I'm walking back in the living room, it dawns on me. The Lakers are currently playing in the NBA finals. This is 1991, against Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls during his first championship campaign. And it was game three at the forum that they just invited me to. Wow, that's amazing. So they told me to pack a little overnight bag because they had a house in that area. We're gonna stay the night there after the game, then come home the next morning. So the next day they come to pick me up, and I go out there with my little grocery bag of clothes. And as I'm walking out, there's a limousine waiting for me. And the chauffeur opens the door and we get in, and there's my friend Cora and my other friend Kelly, and and uh and he's there, she's there, her dad is there, and he's just enjoying all of this and have all kinds of snacks and stuff that we can eat as much as we want on the way there. Well, we pull up to the forum and we didn't walk in to the general entrance with all the rest of the peasants. We're in a limo. So we get pulled up right to the VIP forum club entrance. And there is a red carpet roped off, armed security, only letting people with their forum club passes through. There's paparazzi everywhere, they're taking photos of us, and I'm like, this is awesome. And we go into the forum club right through. That's all we need, no line, anything. Celebrities everywhere, athletes everywhere, and we're just looking around going, oh my goodness, this is incredible. An usher escorts us to our seats, walks us across the baseline, the floor of the court, and we walk to our seats six rows behind the Laker bench toward mid-court. Yeah. We had our own personal server who would come up and ask us if we wanted more food every 15 to 20 minutes. The guy we were with, the dad's like, get whatever you want, eat as much as you want. It's on me. We watched this incredible game in the thick of the action. It was so incredible. Lakers lost, but it was still a great game. And then afterwards, the dad's like, hey, buy some souvenirs. You want some t-shirts? You want some of these things? And just bought us a bunch of stuff we take with us. Walk back up through the Forum Club again, right to our limo waiting for us, and the limousine takes us to their house, which happened to be a large beach house on the cliffs of Laguna Nigel. And we stayed in a casita, me and my buddy, all night until the next morning when the limo took us home. So imagine the next time somebody said, Hey, you want to go to a basketball game? Imagine my expectations in that moment. Ryan, you want to go see a basketball game? Sure. What time's a limo picking me up? What is our personal server's name going to be? And how close are we gonna be to the court? Are we gonna be five or four rows closer? Where are we staying afterwards? Whose beach house? Are we gonna stay in the main house or will we have our own casita and private beach? Right? Our past experience shapes, determines future expectations. Guys, hear this, please. The primary source of conflict in marriage and family in relationships is unmet expectations. When we bring expectations into our marriage, into our family relationships, and they're not met. Oftentimes these expectations they come from our family of origin. Right? Our family growing up contributes a great deal to expectation formation for better and for worse. We can have positive experiences, positive memories that are very nostalgic for us. We see this a lot during the holidays. And so we have expectations about how things should go, what things should look like, how we're supposed to interact with one another. We also have negative, negatively formed expectations. There are certain things maybe you saw about your parents' family relationship. Maybe your parents split up, they're not together anymore. And so you look at that and go, no, I want a marriage that's gonna last. I don't want to fight and argue like I saw them doing when I was a kid growing up. I don't want to be treated this way that I saw this parent treat that parent. And so we form what we refer to as inner vows, saying, I will never let this happen. And we have an expectation of how things are going to be, how they're not going to be. And when those expectations aren't met, the result is hurt, frustration. Frustration, disappointment, and conflict. One question we consistently need to ask, and this is just a little side note here, when we're feeling like our spouse even is maybe not living up to our expectations, that their yes is not being yes. Guys, are you upset because your spouse isn't keeping his or her yes? Or are you upset because they aren't keeping the yes you said for them? Right? Because we bring in expectations that oftentimes we don't even know we have. And so we have said a yes for our spouse that they never said. And when that yes is not yes, it's not carried out or lived out, we get angry because they didn't live up to an expectation they didn't even know we had. We don't even necessarily know that we have these expectations. Now here's the good news knowing this gives us a different way to understand conflict. Right? Because if unmet expectations result in conflict, then conflict can reveal these unknown or unacknowledged expectations. So when we're in the middle of an argument, if we can have the wherewithal by the grace of God to stop and stop duking it out and play in that tug-of-war of who's right, who's wrong, and all the anger that comes with that. If we have the wherewithal to just stop and presence of mind, say, Lord, I'm really upset right now, and even talk to the spouse, to say, I'm really upset right now. Clearly, that there's an expectation that I have that wasn't met. And let me just process through this and let's talk through this to identify the expectation so we can talk about that together. Where it changes the whole dynamic where it's no longer conflict, it's constructive conversation to say, let's talk about the expectation. Because hear this: just because you expect it doesn't mean it should be met. You and I, over the course of time, because of past experiences and hurts and woundings, we can embrace expectations that aren't healthy, they're not legitimate, they're not reasonable. We shouldn't be expecting someone to fulfill this. Yet we have it because of past hurt and exposure and experience. And so it reshapes this conversation to take the expectations we have, identify them, and then evaluate them together as a team to say, let's talk about these. Oftentimes, what we expect needs to be corrected. Because so many of our expectations, they're self-serving. The only one who really benefits from these expectations is me. I think of early on in Tracy and my marriage, we we would get in arguments whenever it was time to do a project around the house. I'm not talking about the normal day-to-day chores. I mean, something broke, something needs to be improved. We're doing a project, right? Backyard inside something. I always wanted to do it together because I'm at work all day, she's doing things. I just wanted to be together, you know, that relational kind of, we're all in this together, kind of a thing. Right. But my wife's approach was very much like divide and conquer. So she just wanted, hey, you work on that. I'm gonna go work on these things because we can maximize our time and get more done. It's way more effective that way. So she was divide and conquer, I'm we're all in this together. She was like, soon say is the art of war. I'm high school musical. And we're trying to bring these expectations into our marriage relationship. And the result was often conflict until we were able to stop and identify what those expectations were, give voice to them, and talk about them together. You know what we resolved? Hers wasn't wrong, mine wasn't wrong. There was value to each of them. We needed to do our best to alternate. We needed to do our best to say, hey, this is just a time where I'm missing you, and I know you want me to get this project done, but I feel like I just want time with you. Can you join me and do this together? And other times where we've had time together and something needs to get done, Ryan, suck it up, buttercup. Just go do what you need to do. And we're gonna divide and conquer. Jesus' conclusion on this is anything more than letting your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything more than this comes from evil. You guys notice here, he doesn't say anything more than this is evil. He says it comes from evil. He's exposing the true motivation oftentimes behind swearing oaths. It's trying to give weight to what we actually know are empty words. Right? This is what the Pharisees and religious leaders would do consistently, guys. They would they would swear an oath, and they were careful to not break the law of God. They didn't want to take the name of the Lord in vain. So they would find the legal loophole, they would find the technicality, and they'd say, Well, we're not swearing by the Lord. We're gonna swear an oath by heaven. We're gonna swear an oath by earth. We will swear an oath by Jerusalem or even by the hairs of my head. And this is what Jesus is talking about, saying, Don't you understand? Heaven is the throne of God, earth is his footstool, Jerusalem is the city of the great king. And you have no control over what color the hairs of your head even are. In other words, every oath you are taking, when you're trying to get out of having to keep it, it still circles back to the one that we're making the oath before and by. We are still swearing that oath before the Lord and taking his name in vain because it's all his. Guys, a challenge for us today that I want to leave us with. Does this describe us? Are we consistently looking for the technicalities or the loopholes not to be people of integrity, not to have to actually keep our word, to let our yes be yes and our no be no? That we're looking for that way out to say, well, technically I said, Well, I know I didn't say everything, but I technically didn't lie, I just didn't tell you everything. Are we looking for ways to twist truth or are we building trust within our marriage and family relationships? Where our wife, our husband, our children, our parents, our siblings, they know if something leaves our mouth, it's true. And it's going to be done. Guys, if you're here today and you're maybe on the flip side of this, the shoes on the other foot, you've been wounded, you've been hurt and betrayed by a lack of honesty and a lack of integrity with someone in your family. And maybe you're here going, How do I move forward from this? How do I ever trust them again? And your response is trying to set up as many fences for them as you can, making them swear those oaths and doing everything to safeguard and protect. And you're going crazy because you're trying to do everything possible to make sure that they don't do what they did again. That they don't say and lie and deceive like they did. And you're wondering, how can I ever move forward? How can I trust them again? Guys, here's my encouragement to you. Chances are right now you can't. You can't trust them that there is someone you can trust even right now on your heart. The one who is faithful always. The one who is yes is always yes and amen. The one who fulfills every single promise he has ever made to us as his people, even at the cost of his own life. That you may not be able to trust your spouse right now, but the only way to let that trust be rebuilt and to give them grace to let it be restored is by putting your trust in Jesus. And knowing no matter what may happen down the road, he has you and he's gonna carry you through. And so you can give that to him and entrust your spouse, your family member to him so that you have peace knowing it's between them and Jesus. Can we stand together? I'm really being intentional today because we told you we're gonna end at 10. I want our yes to be yes. Our ten to be ten. Guys, let's pray together. Lord Jesus. Thank you for fulfilling every promise. Thank you that when you say something, not only can we trust it, we can build our lives on it. And Lord, this is the kind of people we want to be. Lord, those moments where we see or find or you make us aware that something leaves our mouth that is not true. Where we're saying a yes that we kind of know is not gonna be an actual yes. Lord, I pray in those moments that we will have the grace and the courage to just stop, to humble ourselves, to repent and take ownership and say, what I just said wasn't true. Will you forgive me for saying that? I don't know why. I just said it for this reason, but that's not the truth. This is the truth. Understanding that for not only will that most likely not cause people to doubt us more, they're gonna trust us more than ever before. Because they're gonna see us prioritize and value truth that is vital to relationship. May we be men and women of integrity, Jesus. Show us the weight of this, show us the importance of it. And Lord, for those who have been hurt and betrayed, I pray that you will bring freedom to them today. Help us leave this place, walking in your truth. Lord, bless every dad here. Encourage their hearts today. May we love on them and show them how much we love and appreciate them. We commit this day to you in Jesus' name. Amen.