The Insufficiency of Swearing | Matthew 5:33-37 | Pastor Neil McClendon

Do you find yourself constantly using over-the-top reassurances or loopholes just to make people believe you? Discover why reclaiming true verbal integrity and simple speech is essential to a mature Christian walk.

In this sermon on Matthew 5:33–37, Lead Pastor Neil McClendon unpacks Jesus’s teaching on oaths and honesty. Uncover how the religious leaders of the day twisted the law to create loopholes for lying, and explore why going outside of yourself to establish your integrity reveals a deeper spiritual loss of self. Learn the signs of losing your sense of self, examine how God’s own nature sets the standard for unshakeable truth, and discover the liberating power of letting your "yes be yes" and your "no be no."

In this episode, we cover:

• Reclaiming a Sense of Self: Why relying on external oaths indicates a breakdown in personal integrity.
• The Progression of Losing Yourself: How disillusionment and distrust lead to self-destructive choices.
• Recognizing the Warning Signs: Identifying external validation, emotional fog, negative self-talk, and rising anxiety.
• Reclaiming Simple Speech: Moving away from manipulative "word salads" to clear, believable, and direct language.
• God’s Nature as the Standard: How God's inability to lie provides the ultimate foundation for our trust and character.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

God looked around and said, There's nothing greater than me to swear by. I swear by myself. And look at me. And in Matthew 5, what Jesus is saying is you should live so integrated, you do the same thing. But you don't say, I swear by myself. You just say, look at me, crazy simple statement, yes and no. Period. Because anything more than that is from the devil. I used to say to my daughters, and they were like, I promise, Dad, I promise. I'd say, stop talking like the devil. What did you say? I said, when you go on with all these over-the-top reassurances, you're teaching me not to trust you. Just let your I'll go King James on you. Let your yay be yay and your nay be nay. And when I really wanted to get my kids frustrated, I would go, nay, nay, little pony. Say that to your teenager today.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

This podcast is brought to you by Grand Parkway Baptist Church, helping people to know, enjoy, and glorify God. For more information about Grand Parkway, visit our website at grandparkway.org. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Amen. Amen and amen. Let's pray, church. Lord, uh, we just understand that in our Father's house, there's a place for us. We're not going to sneak up on you. We're not going to surprise you. So nothing about us today surprises you because we're not going to surprise you then. Because you said, if I go, I go to prepare a place for you so that where I am, and I'll come again to receive you unto myself, so that where I am, you may be also. And so, Lord, you're a straight shooter and a square dealer. You don't serve up some corporate word salad to get out of the responsibility of being God. And we don't want to serve up some corporate word salad to get out of the responsibility of being your people. And so, Holy Spirit, speak to us today. Down to the simple thing about how we talk. We got too much disconnected speech going on. Too many people speak fluent helium. And not, and their words just float up in the air. No one believes them. They're like clowns with a title. We don't want to be those people. So, Holy Spirit, uh, connect us to what Jesus is saying today so that it comes out of us tomorrow. This is our prayer we pray in Jesus' name, and everyone said, Amen. Amen. You can have a seat. If you've got a Bible, I invite you to take it and open up to uh Matthew chapter 5. And if you're our guest, let me say, uh, welcome again. Thanks for giving us your morning. We're teaching through the book of Matthew. Uh, Matthew is one of the four gospels of the New Testament. The Gospels, uh the first four books of the New Testament, written by eyewitness accounts. People hung out with Jesus, four guys, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Uh Matthew, each one of them wrote with a different emphasis. Matthew was writing to Jewish people to say, hey, you guys got a bunch of rules and you love religion and you love the rules, uh, but you're kind of missing it on this whole Jesus thing. And that's kind of the perspective that he takes, all right? And uh, we're in the the part of Matthew is called the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest ethical teaching in the history of humanity. It's three chapters, Matthew 5, 6, and 7. And why it's three chapters? We're just breaking it up into little bite-sized pieces. Uh, and we're in the part where it's called the the antithetical statements of the Sermon on the Mount. Well, it's a big word. What it means is this Jesus is talking to these people, and and they were, by the way, they're experts on the truth, the Pharisees, uh, the religious uh leaders of the day, they're called the Pharisees, they're experts on the truth and they're dropouts on the way. Okay? What they would do, uh, and hopefully you've already begun to see this, uh, they struggle with God's word. And so they're always looking to find a loophole. It's like you tell your kids no, and they go, well, no, but but what about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? If I did this. And so they're always to find out trying to find a way around God's yes or around God's no. For example, when the Bible says, love your neighbor as you love yourself, they come back with, well, who actually is my neighbor? When you say neighbor, can you define neighbor? Because here's the thing. If I can just shrink it down to neighbor is the person on my right, my left, and across the street, then I gotta love three people. I got that. I'm good, okay? Uh and so they shrink the definition so they can shrink their responsibility. We talked the last couple of weeks because you see that they struggled with adultery. Uh, they didn't want to be guilty of adultery, so they made it easier to divorce their wives. And so now, this morning, we're gonna read four verses, and you'll see they gotten so used to lying, okay, that they learned to use oaths or swearing to make themselves more believable. And what they ended up with was a system that'd swear by anything. Uh, and then I remember my first experience was someone swearing on something, okay? I was in the third grade, we were playing football at recess, and we had decided, okay, from the monkey bars down to that post down there, this is the out of bounds line. And I mean, 20 minutes later, Thomas Matoulis runs like clearly over the boundary line, and he goes down, scores a touchdown, and we're like, no, you were out of bounds, you were out of bounds. And he turned around and said to us, I swear on my mother's eyes I wasn't out of bounds. And I remember thinking, what are you in the mob or something, bro? Who swears on their mother's eyes? But then after that, it became people would swear on their mother's heart. And I'm like, no one's why does nobody swear on their dad? Because women are much more consistent than men, that's why, but I digress. But I remember just thinking, what in the world? Now in the Bible, they would swear by Jerusalem. Like it will, you'll see, they would swear by the gold of the temple, the sacrifice on the altar, they swear by heaven, they swear by the earth, they would swear by their own head. And Jesus comes along and he's like, because here's the thing Jesus, they'd found the loopholes around all the laws, and Jesus says, You guys are getting it all wrong because you're misinterpreting what the Bible says. And if you don't understand what the Bible says, then you don't understand who you can be. And Jesus is really saying to these people, you can be such different, such better people. This is what it sounded like in Matthew chapter 5, verse 33. He says, 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 the footstool of his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. Do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply yes or no. Anything more than this comes from evil. Ah, now there's there's two points I want to make in the text today. The first one is simply this we must reclaim a sense of ourself. We must reclaim a sense of ourself. Now, let me just caution you, this is not a self-help pep talk, as much as a simple fact that we have to go outside ourselves to establish our integrity, and that is not a good thing. This is why people made oaths to begin with, because they realized in and of themselves that they were lying. And so it would say, Oh, I swear by heaven or I swear by the temple. Like you could swear on Jerusalem and it didn't count, but if you swore towards Jerusalem, then that was legal and binding. All this religious legal minutiae, and here's the bottom line where they failed to see what Jesus is saying here is you guys have lost the fact that you got to reclaim a sense of yourself. You don't even believe yourself, and so you go outside of yourself to establish your integrity, okay? And this is where O's came in. They had so distance themselves from themselves that their thinking immediately takes them away from themselves to something else to establish their integrity. In the text today, it's heaven, it's earth, it's Jerusalem, it's your head. He said you can't make one hair white or black, and some of you ladies are like, you've not met my hairdresser. She can come up a lot of colors. Uh here's what Jesus is saying. He's saying, Why do you swear by things over which you have no control? Why not focus on the one thing you have control over, your verbal integrity, and the words that you use to represent the life that you actually live. Now that's the key point. Actually live. The loss of self is the first indication that you're living in violation of God's word in some area of your life. And there's a progression to this loss of self, okay? It's what I it's a three-step process, and I describe like this. Number one, we become disillusioned with ourselves. We become disillusioned with ourselves. It's I can't stop this and I can't start this. I can't stop this bad habit, and I can't seem to start enough good habits to make me not want to do the bad habits. So we become disillusioned with ourselves. Secondly, we become distrusting of ourselves. We become distrusting of ourselves. You're like, what do you mean, distrusting? It's gonna happen here in a couple of months. A lot of people in December are gonna uh are gonna join, are gonna buy a gym membership. And about January 15th, they will have got exhausted. Now they won't just get a gym membership. They'll get workout clothes, they'll get workout shoes, they'll get some hokas or on or whatever they're selling this week at Dick's Sporting Goods. They'll be all fitted from head to toe. They'll go three times and they'll just become disillusioned with themselves, and they'll be like, Who am I kidding, man? Come on, all right? And here's the third step: we become destructive towards ourselves. We become destructive towards ourselves, and we just tell ourselves, uh, who am I kidding? And here's what we say now, it doesn't really matter. Some of you before you go to bed tonight will make a destructive choice because you've come to this place, you've convinced yourself that it doesn't matter. You will eat something you shouldn't eat, you will drink something you shouldn't drink, or you'll drink too much of something uh that that you drink, or you'll watch something you shouldn't watch. It's a destructive choice because you've lost this sense of self. You no longer know when you're violating yourself and what you believe, okay? And so before you get into this process, there's some signs that ought to be like a wake-up call to you to look and listen along the way. And so here's some signs that you are losing your sense of self. Now, again, this is not, if you're visiting our church, we're not about self-help or pop psychology at all. We're about the Bible. But a lot of people go, well, Jesus said oaths and blah, blah, blah. And and and by the way, this is not, some people take it to a really legalistic place and say, well, you shouldn't take oaths. And so I can't swear an oath at work, like if I'm in the military, if I'm in politics, or I can't testify in a court of law, I can't get married. I've heard people say before, who live together, oh, we just live together because I don't believe in taking oaths, Pastor. Getting married is taking an oath. And I'm like, that's such a terrible interpretation of what the Bible actually says. What Jesus is saying is, he's really asking a simple question. Why do you have to go outside of yourself to establish your own integrity? Why do you have to say, Well, I swear to God, or I swear in my mother's eyes, or I swear in my mother's heart, or I swear by heaven, or I swear by the earth, or I swear by my own head, and God's like, you can't control any of that. Why don't you just focus on something you can control? Here's some signs that you're losing your sense of self. Number one, you're seeking, you're always seeking external validation. You're always seeking external validation, either verbally or non-verbally. You're always kind of like, hey, uh, because I'm kind of at a deficient, uh, a deficiency, I'm at a deficit. Can somebody else fill me up? You're the cup half empty in every room. Secondly, you have difficulty with decisions. You have difficulty making, I don't mean like, should we sell the house and move to Africa and be missionaries? I mean chicken or beef for dinner. It's like, ah, because you don't trust yourself. Uh thirdly, you have this sense of just feeling lost. I'm just kind of drifting here. I don't do it. Do I have any purpose? What's going on here? Uh, fourthly, you experience what I call an emotional fog. You're never quite sure what you feel. You'd be surprised how many people I ask when they come for counseling. I'm like, just tell me how in your own words, how does your life feel? I don't know. I was hoping you could tell me. I can't. I can't. I'm too busy feeling my own life. But this emotional fog, it's like an emotional fog, you're never here's how this is the pendulum of human emotions. It's supposed to swing real wide. Great joy, deep sadness, and everything in between. When you're in emotional fog, it's kind of like right here. It's just like eating oatmeal every day. It's like, nah, it's not bad. I mean, I'm not gonna die, but uh, it's not a nice seared steak and a baked potato. It's just like, yeah, how was work? It was good, yeah, yeah, yeah. Men, your wife's biggest concern is that you're gonna get stuck in an emotional fog because you give the same answer to every question. Good? Fine? Okay, and she's like, Oh my god, I'm gonna get this for the next 30 years. Yes, yes. There's an excellent loss of identity. A loss of identity. This happens a lot when men retire because we get a lot of our identity from the work that we do. And so when we retire and we can't do that, what we've always done for the past 30 years, then the question swells up: who am I now that I'm not doing this? This is where a lot of men start to struggle with substance abuse because it's kind of like, uh, by the way, substances suppress things. Substances suppress things. If you don't know how to feel your emotions, you you you can't unconsciously rely on substances to suppress so you don't have to feel your emotions. Loss of identity. Here's the next one: negative self-talk. Negative self-talk. I asked a lady not long ago. I said, Hey, what do you say to yourself to motivate yourself? And she goes, You don't want to hear. I said, Is it negative or positive? Oh, I give myself a good thrashing. And I said, Is there any of it you can say? She goes, most of us like are. Uh but I said, You got any PG 13? And she said, Yeah, here's one name I called myself. And you call yourself names? She goes, Oh yeah. Oh yeah. To whip myself into frenzy and get myself going. I'm putting on my makeup and looking at myself in the mirror and telling myself, and I said, untruths? And she said, You don't know they're not true. And I said, I okay, give me an example. Just give me a PG 13. And she said it, and I went, that's probably R. And then she said, Okay, so what are the rest of them that I think will, you know, I said, NC17? And she said, I didn't know what that is. I said, it's worse than R. She goes, we'll go with that. Yeah. Negative self-talk. Uh listen, a positive, you rarely will you get a positive outcome out of negative self-talk. That's all I'll say. Uh, here's the next one. You're always changing to fit in. You're always changing to fit in. You don't know who to be. If you're a student, you walk in the cafeteria with your tray and you're just kind of like, hey, uh, do I sit with the jocks or the freaks or the pot smokers? Or who do I sit with? Uh uh. Instead of walking in and kind of going, who could use some good news today? Who doesn't, who lives under the illusion and the negative self-talk that they don't believe that they're popular and that they're accepted? I want to sit next to that person and just remind them that they really are. But that that doesn't happen because most people are just always their chameleon, they're always changing to fit in. And here's the last one, and it's the culmination of all these. There's an increased anxiety and insecurity. Increased anxiety and insecurity. This is why we have the mental health crisis we have in our world today. It's because people have lost a sense of who they are. They have no idea who they are, and they're hoping they go out into the world, every social encounter, because look at me, your kids were raised on this because they didn't need you as much, so you got them on when they were eight. And they just yeah, and this is nothing but a platform of comparison that tells them, hey, this part of you is too big, this part of you is too small, and blah blah. I remember years ago, I'm I'm not they they even make this kind of car anymore. But this may or may not surprise you. I'm not on any social media. I I'm not against it, I think it has some good purposes. I just never find it interesting. And people are always like, dude, it's like 2025. And I'm like, I have a calendar right here on my phone. What are you saying that for? I mean, who's not on socials? And I was like, oh, socials, okay. And they said, so you've never, I said, I just I said I will get on social media today. I tell you, I'll get on social media as soon as I meet somebody in person who is as interesting as they appear to be on social media. So far, I'm not on social media. I'll let you do the math. But I'm talking to a kid, and he slows out he's got one leg hanging over the arm of my chair, and I'm like, you got about two more minutes to get that leg off the arm of my chair before I slap the taste out of your crooked mouth. And he's talking to me and he's calling me bro. Okay, now he's 15. His parents caught him doing something he shouldn't do. He had to come see this pastor that does counseling, and he's like, yo, bro, and he's got some, the Mr. T starter set, a few gold chains, and he's he's like bro, and yo, and he's a white kid, and he's trying to be all ghetto. And I'm just like, it's I can feel it rising in me. And then he said, bro, I'm gonna roll in a Bugatti one day. And I just because I'm not, I'm out of the loop. I said, What's the Bugatti? He goes, and he took his leg down, he goes, You don't, bro, you're not down with a Bugatti? And he pulled up his phone and showed me all these rappers, and I said, Hey, let me just break this to you. You're not a rapper, you're not gonna be a rapper. You're a 15-year-old rich white kid with braces. You got $5,000 worth of hardware in your mouth, okay? You're not gonna be a rapper. Shut it. And he's like, I ain't down with that, bro. Now, you know what some of y'all are thinking right now? Was that my kid? No, he doesn't go to church here. He hates, he got sent to see me because he got in trouble. And he said, Man, why are you hating? I said, I'm not hating, I'm just loving you enough to hold up a mirror and flag back to you. You're not gonna drive a Bugatti, okay? And you're gonna be okay. And he said, If I gave you a Bugatti, what would you do with it? I how much are they cost? And he told me, I was like, I would sell it and buy 10 vehicles for people that needed them. This crushed him, okay. This was a while back, and I said, And I'd buy my wife a new minivan. And he's like, Oh, he stood up, he's like, Oh my gosh. Oh, and I said, Listen, I feel rich. My wife walks out, hits that key flop, boom, boom, and those doors open up, and our two girls climb into their chairs, and my wife hits a button, boom, closes those doors. And I said, You're not there yet because you're only responsible to yourself. That's why you're not interesting. You're selfish, you're not interesting. He's like, You shouldn't say that to me. I said, Why? I uh you're like this because no one said it to you. He goes, How'd you get this way? I said, I read the Bible one time where Jesus said, Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything beyond that is from the evil one. Oh, come on, bro. See, I I'm saying this cards on the table. We have in off-the-scale anxiety and depression and insecurity because we've lost a sense of ourself, because we walk into every social media platform and every social encounter asking people, you tell me who I am. I don't seem to remember. And so the immediate pendular thought is okay, okay, so how do I reclaim my sense of self? It's very simple. You begin living in such a way that causes you to like you. You're not in a relationship, ladies or girls, with a guy who's kind of like, well, if you love me, you wouldn't know. No, no, it's not about me loving you. I'm not here to demonstrate that I love you. I'm here to demonstrate that I like me. Because if I don't like me, I can't be loving you. And I keep pounding this in counseling, in relational counseling with people that are dating, people that are living together, people that are married. And I say, listen, if you don't like you, you can't love him. And girl, like, wait, what do you mean? I just love him. No, you don't. You can't hate you and love him. No, I'm just gonna disagree with you. I don't mean, I don't mean to disagree with you. It stops saying I don't mean to disagree with you and then disagree with me. You're house divided against yourself, you can't stand. And I said, Can I tell you where I get that? Oh, yeah, yeah. Jesus said, Well, they said, What's the greatest commandment? He said, Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you don't love yourself, you can't love your neighbor. You are being violated in this relationship, not because he, you, you, you don't love him enough, you don't like yourself, much less love yourself. Well, and then he speaks up, like, hey, hey, bro, be careful. You're about to find out I'm not Joel Osteen. And he said, What? I said, You just said to me, be careful. If you step to this smoke, it wouldn't go well. I promise you. I'd be on you like a duck on a June bug before Wade Bird just get a hair and pull me off. But I'm not threatening you with physical violence as much as I would enjoy that. What I'm saying is, you got a good thing going, and this woman is beat down and you're built up, and I ain't okay with that. He's like, oh, uh, uh. Ask yourself this question. I ask her, I said, hey, what would change if you treated yourself like someone you love? And I mean, like that, she said, I wouldn't be with him. You live so integrated that you do not have to go outside of yourselves to establish your integrity. This is a very Christ-like experience, by the way. Let me say that again. You and I are called what Jesus is saying in Matthew 5 is hey, don't take oath, don't swear a military oath, or no, no, no. What he's saying is, you live so integrated that you don't have to go outside of yourself. I swear to God, I'm telling the truth. I mean, people tell me one time, much less twice, I don't believe you. I swear, I swear, Pastor, I'm telling the truth. Why you gotta swear? Some kid came up to me in the lobby, and I go, and he's like, I told him he asked me something, I and I told him, yeah. And he said, You pinky swear? And I said, I don't have to. And some adults ain't over there, oh Pastor, you know, all kids pinky swear. I'm not SpongeBob, I ain't pinky swearing. Well, you asked me a question, I said I would. Stop asking me, okay? Over, I'll be there. Yeah, you pinky swear. No, I don't pinky swear. Who taught your kids not to believe adults? You did. When you say, hey, I'll be home at six, dad'll be home at six. If you're not home at six, you should be on the phone. If you know you're not gonna be home at six, you should be on the phone at 5 45, give it an updated time. I got so many kids that are like, I'll say something, they go, You promise? I'm like, oh my gosh. What? You promise? You promise? You see, again, what Jesus is saying, and what I'm trying to beat the drum today to say, you are called to live so integrated that you do not have to go outside of yourself to establish your integrity. And this is a very Christ-like experience. What do you mean? Hebrews chapter 6, verse 13 says this for when God, listen to how narcissistic this sounds. For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater to swear by whom to swear, he swore by himself. Get a load of this God. It's kind of like, oh, I swear on my mother's eye, I don't have a mother. Um, I swear on my mother's eye. No. Wait a minute. God said, God looked around and said, There's nothing greater than me to swear by. I swear by myself. And look at me. And in Matthew 5, what Jesus is saying is, you should live so integrated, you do the same thing. But you don't say, I swear by myself. You just say, look at me, crazy simple statement, yes and no. Period. Because anything more than that is from the devil. I used to say to my daughters, and they were like, I promise, Dad, I promise. I'd say, Stop talking like the devil. What did you say? I said, when you go on with all these over-the-top reassurances, you're teaching me not to trust you. Just let your, I'll go King James on you. Let your yay be yay and your nay be nay. And when I really wanted to get my kids frustrated, I would go, nay, nay, little pony. Say that to your teenager today. Yes, yes. He says, he said, hey, for when God made a promise to Abraham, since he he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, saying, Surely I will bless you and multiply you. Unless Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise. For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all the disputes, an oath is final for confirmation. Okay? Abraham obtained the promise not because he waited, but because he was waiting on a God who could not lie. It's not, oh, having waited patiently. No, no, no, no. It's surely I will. The promise is as certain as the character of the person making the promise. And to reclaim a sense of ourselves is to move towards being a people of character who we trust ourselves and other people trust us. Now, if you're a thinking person and you are, you may be thinking, okay, why does God tell us not to swear when the Bible you just read to us, he swears by himself. Why does he do that? Because God is accommodating to us. He knows that we expect lies from everyone, so he swears not to make himself more believable, but to assure us, hey, your faith is in the right place. You are believing in a God who is, the Bible says, and God is not a man that he would lie. Think just for a second, don't dwell on it, you'll get depressed. Think for a second of all the people who have lied to you, who've said one thing and done another. And if you've experienced a lot of lying and people who have no integrity, you should really, really, really explore Christianity because it is rooted in and based on a God who cannot and does not lie. God is not a man that he would lie. Since He so He could find no one greater to swear by, he swore by Himself. Here's the second thing the text tells us today. We've got to reclaim simple speech. Simple speech is the habit of integrated people because they understand that to go beyond yes and no is to talk like the devil who's the father of lies. Christians need to regain God's view of the sanctity and the sufficiency of words. Let me say that again. We need to regain God's view of the sanctity and sufficiency of words because this is what Jesus is getting at here. And he's saying, Hey, I want you to stop using your words to lie and deceive and manipulate people with our fingers-crossed promises that allow us to only be accountable to ourselves and never to anybody or anything else. And men, it's got to start with us. You've got to stop being the shuck and job player who's like, How many women can I have on the line at the same time? No. No. I'll give you a more accessible example. Uh, you get an email five weeks in advance, and it's your turn to volunteer in the nursery. And five Sundays, you're up, and you're gonna do what other parents have done to provide your kid a great experience. And the Friday before that Sunday, you're supposed to volunteer. Five weeks later, you get a call from your buddies. Hey man, so-and-so's got his own Lockin V, this exclusive golf course. We need a fourth. You want to come play? And be like, that's an ethical dilemma. No, it's not. Not if your yes is yes or your no is no. You're like, hey guys, I'd love to play Lockin Bar. You get a caddy, it's pretty swanky. I played there before. But you know what? No, no, no. I it's my Sunday to volunteer at my church, and so it's a no from me. It's not, oh yeah, and you text Krista. By the way, when you text or email and you don't call, we know you're lying. Because look at me, here's what human nature does you will type a lie quicker than you'll say a lie. Because you can't even believe yourself. You know you're lying. You're like, I can't even hear myself lie again, but I can watch myself type a lie. We've had a family emergency, and I can't volunteer this Sunday. I trust that you can find someone to take my place. You trust. You're lying, talking about trust. Shut up, man. Come on. You think we're that stupid? Because I ask them, did they text you or call you? Oh, they gotta text. I bet you did. Oh, Pastor, don't assume the word. I don't assume the words, I just know people. Uh or ladies, let me get in your business real quick. It means you get invited to something with your friends, and you simply say, uh, all we're gonna get together, we're gonna go have dinner, blah, blah, blah, and you just say, uh, uh, thank you, but that's a no for me. Period. Nothing beyond that. You don't go on to say, well, you know, I would if I could. I mean, you believe me, right, right, right. Because remember that time we went to the Madelines and we had brunch and I paid, and you had a dessert and a mimosa, that thing was eight dollars, girl. I think it demonstrates my commitment to the relationship, okay? Uh I mean, you you know I'd be there if I could. No. And then the day of event, you send a text, you know what, I hate that I'm missing the night. And then that night at 11:30, your husband's passed out mouth breathing. You're on social media to see if they posted pictures. And then the next day you call. Hey, I hate to miss that. It looks like it was a lot of fun. You can't just say no and shut up. No, thank you for thinking of me. No. Now, this is a news flash, okay? Some people in this church get ready to be offended. Some people in this church think I'm rude. And here's why. They invite me to stuff, and I say very politely, thank you for thinking of me, no. And my wife just kind of cringes on the inside. I'm like, I ain't talking from the devil. And they look at me like, what do you mean, no? No, I can't make it, but thank you for thinking of me. Well, why can't you make it? That's none of your business. And sometimes I say, That's not something I care to do, but thank you for thinking of me. What do you mean? See, some of you got FOMO so bad, and you talk to your kids about, oh, those people are your friends, they wouldn't talk that way, and your daughter rolls around like, Mother, please. Yeah. You say, Well, what do you mean? You gotta escape the gravitational pull of fear that says if you miss this, people are gonna forget about you. So, no, no, what you don't want to miss is that you're you don't want to miss becoming a person who simply says yes and no. Uh uh we're so used to managing people's impression of us with our yes that we can hardly give a no. You say, What do you mean? When's the last time you went to something simply because you couldn't say no? I don't want to do this. Like I got an email from a lady in our church, great lady, works in a great organization called Starve Hope. We're gonna start partnering with them in mission support and work with the homeless here in Houston. And she said, I'd love it's a church partner event. Can you come? And he said, business attire. And I called the most over-dressing person I know, Wade Burgess, and I said, What exactly is business attire? And he said, A suit, and I said, You can go. And then someone came to me and said, Why aren't you going? Because I don't like to dress up. I'm a grown man. I ain't gonna go to things I don't want to go to. No. And that was it. And then someone came to me and said, Do you really not like to dress up? I said, if you want to see me put on a suit, you better be getting married or you better die. To go walk around, eat finger sandwiches, and drink punch, I'd rather be beaten with a pipe. Now, at this point, my wife is like, You've given us enough. Stop talking. There's more explanation where that came from. Here's what I want to say, we'll be done. All right, listen to me. You need to realize that the Pharisees failed, what the Pharisees failed to realize is this. They didn't need more external regulations, they needed integration that led to demonstration in how they speak. Their speech needed to become more simple and direct and believable. It's not a matter of external intensity as much as internal intimacy. Translation, you shouldn't have to go outside of yourselves to establish your integrity. I'll close with this illustration. True story. I'm watching CBS uh news one night. There's flipping channels, and they go, Steve Hardy, some guy goes around doing these stories all over the country. And it was a story about a little league, kid playing little league, uh, and he was a second baseman, uh, and and the pitcher winds up and pit, the kid on first, uh, ghost is still second, he runs over like a good second baseman, straddles the bag, the catcher throws the ball right there, the kid slides in. The umpire was a lady, she said, I had a bad angle. I got trapped behind the kid, and I was moving around, but he slid in this big old dust cloud, and she goes, honestly, I didn't see. I didn't see if he tagged him or not. And the second baseman looked up at me and said, I missed him, he's safe. And the umpire went, safe. People went crazy. Come on, blue. And she was kind of like, Thank you, son, and just kind of walked back and got her position behind second base the next weekend. Same kid, except he's on first base. He's the kid stealing second base. He slides in, same big cloud of dust. She's like, Oh my gosh. She said, I was thinking to myself, I didn't see this play either. What is my deal? I need to quit and go work at Bucky's. What's going on? And she said, the kid that slid in from the week before looked up and said, He missed me. I was safe. And she went, Safe. And she goes, Do you believe him? And that umpire with tears in her eyes said, Absolutely. Because he told the truth when it cost him, he told the truth when it cost somebody else. This is what being integrated looks like and sounds like. Let's pray together. If you're a guest, just relax. We'd like to teach the Bible, and then we give you some space to think about it. Some questions come on the screen. You ain't gotta write them down. You can pull your phone out and take a picture. But for right now, just be still and ask the Lord, what had my name on it? What's the one thing, God, that you are saying to me today? Lord, we don't come together today to wallow in self-pity and self-hatred. Instead, we come together to marinate in the truth, to become saltier people, not harsh, just salty, just people that bring out the God flavors in every conversation we're in. Because we're integrated. And integration is essential to the first step in demonstration. And we demonstrate who we are by just we're yes and no people. Not going on to manage people's impression of us. They can, they're free to think whatever they want. Because what matters supremely to us is what you think. And so, Lord, we recapture the simple simplicity of honest speech, of integrated speech, and we do it in Jesus' name. And all God's people said, Amen. Amen.

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