Honesty in Print and Speech

Over the years, I have heard some discussion about Pastors who make themselves the hero of all of their illustrations and who put themselves in stories that were not really about themselves.

I came across the same thing today while reading a book entitled, Life Lessons from Soccer, I came across two well-known stories that have made the rounds via email and jokes for a number of years. The one dealt with the substituting "tents" for "tense" and the other dealt with someone betting on event on TV that they had already seen and then after they won the bet, revealing that they had already seen it only to have the other person say, "I saw it too, but I did not think that he could do it again."

Now, the fact that the jokes/stories are corny are bad enough, but that is not my concern at this time. What bugged me as I read these stories, however, was that in both cases, the author made it appear as though these things were directly related to him. In the one case, it involved his kids' soccer team. In the other case, it involved his two sons.

Now, I would guess that it is possible, however remote that both of these popular things also happened to him, but it seems kind of fishy to me.

When faced in a secular book about soccer, maybe it does not make much difference (I mean, after all, who besides Ben Wright and Bob Bixby actually cares about soccer :)?), however, when coming from a Pastor or one who handles the Word of God, this is a griveous sin. Not only is lying a sin, it is also affects the credibility of the other things that we say.

Hopefully, no one reading this actually has a problem in this area, but after reading these two examples within the space of ten or so pages and feeling like I was wasting my time reading this book, I thought back to comments I have heard in the past about Pastors who do the same thing and thought I would encourage us to be careful in this area.

Just my thoughts,

Frank