I hate being lied to.

Don’t lie to me; I am mature enough to handle someone giving me proper correction. When I was leading singing, one of the regular attendees of our Sunday night service was a 70 year old who was a friend of mine. One night he asked me what songs we were doing, I was going down the list and named one and he said “oh no your not.” It seems that I failed to remember that song had just been done recently. So I took the correction and changed the song. Now there are a few important reasons this worked.

1) He built up credibility with me. Ken (the man’s name) was a friend of mine, I respected his opinion. He was always complimentary of me, he built up a reputation of trust with me so that I knew when he told me something, it was out of Christian love.
2) I was willing to listen. I was not so wrapped up in my own way of doing things that I was unwilling to listen to someone telling me something that differed with my own ideas.
3) He was honest, and said it to my face. He did not complain behind my back about how I was doing things. Instead he brought directly to my attention anything he thought I was doing wrong, and to the best of my knowledge he didn’t talk to other people about those things.

Because of that, I could respectfully listen to him. There are other reasons I will be willing to listen to correction, like: You approach me with a tone of friendly correction not harsh criticism, You are placed in a position of authority over me, You prove to me a level of skill or competence in a specific area that earns my respect.

If you present yourself reasonably to me, I’ll listen to anything you have to say and treat what you say, and you with proper respect. If I find out you lied to me, you will lose my respect, and probably not get it back.

If you say you want to meet me at the dunkin doughnuts at 7:30, and I’m still waiting at 8:00 because you didn’t prioritize your time right, you lied to me. If you just got caught in bad traffic, I understand and won’t hold it against you, but if you knew you weren’t coming (at least on time) in the first place, then you lied to me.

If you say you’ll be ready to go in 5 minutes, and you know full well it will take 15, you are just saying 5 because it sounds better or because you think it’s “about” 5 minutes, you have lied to me.

I don’t want to be lied to. More importantly, God doesn’t want you to lie. If you feel the need to lie to me, maybe you should really consider the reason why, it is possible the reason is not as good as you think. Maybe, just maybe, you are off about the entire issue if you must lie about it to me.