Exhortation
God expects our worship of Him to come from honest lips. We know that we are not capable of this on our own steam, but we should also know—just as certainly—that God’s grace makes honesty possible for sinners in this world. With it having been made possible, by His grace alone, it is therefore obligatory for us to receive this grace. This being the case, we have no way to justify any continuing dishonesty in His presence.
For most of us, the temptation comes, not in the form of flagrant lies, but rather in the area of self-serving “trimming.” We tell ourselves the story, and that is what happened, for the most part, but a few salient facts are left out. And somehow, whether conscious or not, the facts that are left out always seem to favor the account that leaves us looking better than we actually were.
But we are told in Scripture that God hears the prayers that do not proceed from feigned lips. We worship Jesus Christ, who is the embodiment of incarnate Truth. Part of our task in coming here to worship God week after week is to learn how to be done with all trimming, balancing, explaining, contexualizing, blame-shifting, dissimulation, misdirection, and more.
Part of our regular prayer of confession needs to include the deep desire for God to clean all the lies off of us, and then to get inside, and root out the lies that have taken up a squatter’s residence in our souls. Our confession should ask the Spirit to come in and evict them all.