The Pointlessness of Lying

I saw an image on Facebook a while back, and made a note to myself to blog about it later. Later is now.

The only things that bother me about this message are the obviously missing Y, O, and G, and the lack of punctuation after "seen" and "anyway." It should say this:

If you have to sneak to do it, lie to cover it up, or delete it to avoid it being seen, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it anyway.

Sneaking is difficult, and lying is even harder. With some practice, people can get good at it, even make it effortless, but as a general rule, sneaking and lying and keeping secrets are pretty stressful, and most people's lives don't need any more stress. And there's another problem: There are (at least) two people that you can't effectively lie to - God and yourself.

God is omniscient - He knows EVERYTHING. He knows what you did last Summer. He knows what I had for lunch yesterday. He knows about everything that anyone has ever done. Want to cover your tracks and pretend it never happened? Sure, you can do that. It might even work, too... until you die. Once we're standing at the bar of God (if we even have the courage to stand there), all fibs and truth-stretching will be completely out of the question, or at least absolutely pointless.

The other person you can't really lie to is yourself. Sure, you can lie to yourself. You can tell yourself whatever you want to tell yourself, but you're not really fooling anyone. You know what the truth is. You know that you're lying to yourself. You can see right through it. So there's really no point in lying to yourself any more than there's any point in lying to God. You and God both know the truth about anything you might want to lie about, and at Judgement Day, that's all that's going to matter.

Thankfully, we don't have to rely on lying to sneak our way into heaven. We can rely on repentance, which ironically requires honest and open confession. Though, there's danger to that, too. If we willingly continue in sin, relying on God's mercy to wipe it away at the last second, you may find that He isn't quite so merciful to those who treat His commandments so trivially. Of course, repentance is always available for those who are trying to keep the commandments, but first we need to actually try.

There's no real way to "get away" with anything. All our actions and inactions will be brought into account when our time comes, unless we've sincerely repented of them by then. Thus, the best way to avoid the consequences of sin is to avoid the sin itself. If you have to sneak to do it, lie to cover it up, and delete it to avoid it being seen, then you probably shouldn't be doing it.

So, save yourself a headache. Give yourself one less thing you need to lie and worry about. Reduce the burden of sin that you put on your back. Cut down on the things you do that you're ashamed of. Give yourself one less thing to feel guilty about at Final Judgement. I'm sure you'll thank yourself later.