“For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile” (1 Thessalonians 2:3).
TEXT — 1 Thessalonians 2:1-6
Message
America’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, Saul Bellow said of Truth: ‘’A man may say, ‘From now on, I’m going to speak the truth’. But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he’s ever done speaking.’’ Bellow was not conversant with the conquering Spirit Jesus Christ gives those He makes new creatures when they are born again. They live above board; they domesticate the truth, as the Lord Who saved them is Truth personified. They and the truth never part.
Apostle Paul had this relationship with the truth. Writing to the brethren at Thessalonica, he says he and his fellow evangelists who brought the gospel of Christ to them had long abandoned the ways of “deceit…uncleanness… (and) guile.” Paul says that after encountering Christ, he and Silvanus and Timotheus uncompromisingly embraced the truth that prevented them from speaking lies and ‘’flattering words’’ to please men. Thus empowered, truth could not flee from them. It would abide with them.
Since, as the Lord declared, truth possesses a liberating and an overwhelming force, we must trace the prostrate spiritual state of the whole of humanity to their rejection of the truth of the Gospel of the Son of God. They are predisposed to deceit and the lies of the devil, the father of all falsehood and his agents. The truth would always flee from them, seeing they hate this virtue.
Believers in Jesus (The Way, The Truth, and The Life) must never fail to reveal themselves as the servants of the truth wherever they are. They must replay the conduct of the early disciples at Antioch, where the power of the truth they lived out promptly identified them with Christ. We must be believed; our body language must reflect what we preach. There should not be any disconnect between us and our message of salvation.
Listed among “500 most powerful people on the planet” by the Foreign Policy magazine in 2013, Pastor (Dr.) William F. Kumuyi is the founder and General Superintendent of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry (DCLM) headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. DCLM started in 1973 as a 15-member Bible study group right in Kumuyi’s apartment at University of Lagos where he was a lecturer. His revolutionary Bible teaching on personal holiness and commitment to evangelism soon gained so much traction and resulted in a widespread revival.
