Day 320: The Truth (2464-2474)

• It’s Day 320!!

• ARTICLE 8: THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT

• LIVING IN THE TRUTH

• TO BEAR WITNESS TO THE TRUTH

• We begin by talking about the truth

• What is the truth?

• How are we called to live?

• We are called to live in the truth and bear witness to the truth

• The supreme witness that we are giving to the truth of the Faith is MARTYRDOM

• Martyrs bear witness to the love of God regardless where it leads

• What does Jesus say in Acts Ch 1? 

• “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and then you will be my witnesses.”

• The Greek word for witness is the word MARTYR

• Let’s pray!!

Prayer by Fr. Mike: “Father in Heaven, we give you praise and glory and thank you. We thank you for revealing the truth to us. Thank you for helping us to live in the truth, and please continue to help us. Give us your grace so that we can live in the truth, and we can bear witness to the truth by what we say and by what we do. Lord God, help us. Help us to never bear false witness. Help us to not lie or to live by lies. Help us to walk in your grace and to walk in your truth and to always walk in your love. That is what we ask, Lord. Truth, grace, and love. Help us to walk in these, to live in these, and to bear witness to these as we bear witness to you. We make this prayer in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen”

• So there we have it!!

• Paragraph 2464 says, “The eighth commandment forbids misrepresenting the truth in our relations with others. This moral prescription flows from the vocation of the holy people to bear witness to their God who is truth and wills the truth. Offenses against the truth express by word or deed a refusal to commit oneself to moral uprightness: they are fundamental infidelities to God and, in this sense, they undermine the foundations of the covenant.”

• If someone saw my life and thought it to be true and it isn’t true, that means I am violating the Eighth Commandment

• God is the source of all truth

• God is the truth

• What did Jesus say?

• “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

• Paragraph 2466 says, “In Jesus Christ, the whole of God’s truth has been made manifest. ‘Full of grace and truth,’ he came as the ‘light of the world,’ he is the Truth. ‘Whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness.’ The disciple of Jesus continues in his word so as to know ‘the truth [that] will make you free’ and that sanctifies. To follow Jesus is to live in ‘the Spirit of truth,’ whom the Father sends in his name and who leads ‘into all the truth.’ To his disciples, Jesus teaches the unconditional love of truth: ‘Let what you say be simply ‘Yes or No.’”

• Paragraph 2467 says, “Man tends by nature toward the truth. He is obliged to honor and bear witness to it: ‘It is in accordance with their dignity that all men, because they are persons…are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth.’”

• The only thing that gets us off the pursuit of the truth or living the truth is our weakness

• We have an intellect

• This means we want to understand things

• We want our thoughts to correspond with the truth

• What is your intellect made for?

• The truth

• Every human being, by their very nature, is oriented toward the truth

• It is only in our weakness that we choose something other than the truth

• It could be the weakness of our intellect where we do not know that something is true

• It could be the weakness of our passions where we are drawn to something that we know is not true

• It could be our weakness of will where we choose something that we know is not true or we know is not good for us because it is easier

• Because we are drawn to the truth by our very nature, we are obliged to honor and bear witness to it

• So what is truth?

• Truth is simply “what is”

• A statement is either true or false to the degree that it conforms to what is

• Truth is reality

• YOUR truth and MY truth is subjective

• Yes there is such a thing as subjective truth

• I like tea is a true statement for me

• You may not like tea so that is not true for you

• Subjective statements are about the subject of the sentence

• Ultimately though, subjective truth cannot contradict objective truth

• Truth cannot contradict truth

• We tend towards wanting to understand what is

• When we come to know the truth, we are morally bound to adhere to the truth once we come to know it

• We are morally bound to direct our whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth

• Once we come to realize that Jesus is who He says He is, then we are bound to adhere to that truth and to direct our lives in accordance with the demands of truth

• This is a challenge

• To know it but not act on it would be a violation of the Eighth Commandment

• Paragraph 2469 says, “‘Men could not live with one another if there were not mutual confidence that they were being truthful to one another.’ The virtue of truth gives another his just due. Truthfulness keeps to the just mean between what ought to be expressed and what ought to be kept secret: it entails honesty and discretion. In justice, ‘as a matter of honor, one man owes it to another to manifest the truth.’”

• There is a middle ground between what ought to be kept secret and what ought to be expressed

• We are not obliged to say what is true at all times

• Paragraph 2670 says, “The disciple of Christ consents to ‘live in the truth,’ that is, in the simplicity of a life in conformity with the Lord’s example, abiding in his truth. ‘If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth.’”

• Paragraph 2472 says, “...All Christians by the example of their lives and the witness of their word, wherever they live, have an obligation to manifest the new man which they have put on in Baptism and to reveal the power of the Holy Spirit by whom they were strengthened at Confirmation.”

• Remember when we talked about the sin of scandal?

• Scandal is bearing witness to something that is not true

• One example is cohabitation before marriage

• Some may think it should not matter to other people what we do

• Every one of us is called to bear witness to the truth

• When we don’t, we have to repent of that

• If Christianity became illegal, and they brought you into court, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

• Do you live any differently?

• Does your life bear witness to Christ?

• Does your life bear witness to Christianity?

• Does your life simply bear witness to you and what you want?

• Does your life look just like everyone else’s life?

• Back in the day, you could say that living like your neighbors is a good thing because they’re Christian

• We are not in that place anymore

• If we are actually going to bear witness to the truth of Jesus, then our lives cannot look like our neighbors in some respects

• Our lives have to look different in some respects

• We can let the Holy Spirit convict us

• Would there be enough evidence to convict us?

• What are we bearing witness to?

• Paragraph 2473 says, “Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith: it means bearing witness even unto death. The martyr bears witness to Christ who died and rose, to whom he is united by charity. He bears witness to the truth of the faith and of Christian doctrine. He endures death through an act of fortitude. ‘Let me become the food of the beasts, through whom it will be given me to reach God.’”

• We pray for the grace to be able to be martyrs

• Not just to be RED MARTYRS where we shed our blood for Jesus

• But to also be WHITE MARTYRS

• We must spend our lives for Jesus and bearing witness to Jesus

• White martyrs shed their blood for Jesus drop by drop by bearing witness to Him

• That is God’s destiny for you

• We need God’s grace to do this

• We don’t live like martyrs and we know that we are called to

• Fr. Mike is praying FOR YOU!!

• Please pray for Fr. Mike and for each other!!

• I cannot WAIT…