Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching then you are really my disciples and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free". If truth is what makes us free it only stands to reason that lies must be what hold us captive. The fact is, all our anxiety and every twinge of guilt and fear and every neurosis and psychosis we experience is the direct result of a lie or lies we have received in to our minds and accepted as truth.
All our guilt and fear is based purely on our perceptions of what is good and what is evil. Our perceptions are the product of what we believe and what we believe is fashioned from birth by every small sliver of information we have received into our minds and determined to be truth or lie. This compilation of layer upon layer of assumed truths and assumed untruths is the fabric of our belief system.
Every one has a very personalized belief system even if we are not aware of just how it developed and that belief system determines the choices we make every day. Unfortunately, as a result of the lies a person has accepted as truths and the truths they have rejected as lies their belief system can be riddled with holes leaving them to make life's critical decisions based on totally bogus conclusions.
According to the Bible, that is exactly what happened to Adam and Eve. Eve believed the lies of the serpent and they both made bad decisions based on bogus conclusions. The immediate results was guilt, "they were ashamed", and fear, "we were afraid". Their guilt made them hide from each other, "they covered their nakedness with fig leaves", and their fear made them hide from God, "they hid from the presence of the Lord". Since that day all mankind has been struggling to escape the captivity of guilt, fear and alienation and find a their way back to a place of truth, peace and freedom.
The problem is, truth often seems so subjective because we have all been lied to in various ways from the time we were able to understand our first words and we have been lied to by nearly everyone we know at one time or another including peddlers, politicians, preachers, pop-psychologists, the press and even our own parents. Many misguided parents see a lie as a useful tool to manipulate their children and teach by example the art of the lie. Even good parents often pass lies on to their children never considering that what they believe to be true is, in fact, untrue.
Many children grow up in a household where most of what they hear is the varied but always cruel lies of dysfunction. Verbal abuse is nothing more than strategically deployed lies designed for the single purpose of crippling loved ones/victims with the guilt of past failures and the fear of future anguish until they submit to being controlled. Those brained washed with such dysfunction often suffer for a lifetime and frequently inflict their own children with the same lies and torment.
The most destructive lies of all are those believed by the victims of sexual abuse. Since the abuser is usually a friend or relative who claims to be acting out of love but uses guilt and fear to control and silence, the victim is not only subjected to the vicious lies of their abuser but they are also likely to embrace lies of their own creation as a means of coping with what they perceive as a truth too horrible to face. This also is a lie. A stable life, family and home is nearly impossible to build as long as such destructive lies are part of a person's belief system.
Even people raised in a loving, nurturing home can allow guilt and fear to poison their minds with lies such as, "I'm ugly. I'm stupid. I'm a failure. I'm worthless. I'm so horrible God could never love and forgive me". Lies of this nature can stick with people for years and prevent them form leading happy and productive lives and can even facilitate all kinds of dysfunction and self-defeating behavior in their own children and even their grandchildren.
If you are in bondage to guilt and fear in the form of anxiety, depression, obsession, compulsion, sexual obsession, addiction, anger, hostility, violence, suicidal thoughts or other dysfunction you can be sure that something you believe about God, others or yourself is not the truth and only a big, healthy dose of the truth can make you free.
Go to Part 2 of 4 - Absolute Untruth