Can Christians Swear or Take Oaths - Zack Johnson - Followers of the Way

And so basically the world substitute to truthfulness, it's broken as well. And so now you get this even a conundrum that people are saying, "You lied under oath," like "You lied under this transcendent entity," and it just hasn't worked. And Zeus's solution is much more simple. He's saying, "You don't, we don't get to lie ever."

Grace and peace to all of you. It's great to be here. I feel like it's been many years in in the making for me to get out here. And David, as I was preparing for this message, Daniel left it open, and I was going to read through your book, "Plain Speaking," and just do all the things you say not to do in the sermon and just see if you could use it as a teaching moment for, "Don't do these things." But I decided not to, but I was tempted.

Many of you have heard my testimony, bits and pieces of it, but I grew up in a missionary community in Quito, Ecuador, and I attended a boarding school for most of my life. So that I went there from age five to eighteen. So many of the missionaries in Latin America, they would send their children to board, or they went to a dorm at my school. And that really informed my understanding of what Christianity was when I was young. And Christianity became a list of don'ts. A lot of missionary kids in boarding school, they have a similar understanding where they handed you the handbook to attend our school and they said, "This is what it takes to be here."

And that's just what it became. And it was sort of a list of prohibitions. And I think there's a big danger when we study Zeus's teachings to make them these lists of prohibitions. And Christianity did, it wasn't real to me, it wasn't real to a lot of people. And so before my journey of walking alongside started, I really pushed my lines with some of these prohibitions in terms of like the substance world and the sexual world. There's all these teachings that Jesus teaches us to stay away from. And I was talking to my friend trying to get a sense of remembering what it was like to go against some of these teachings. And there was this feeling of waking up the next morning and looking at yourself in the mirror and just being utterly disgusted with yourself once you did something you knew you weren't supposed to.

And it was almost like you wanted to scratch your skin off or something like that. It's hard to really understand the feeling of disgust that is counterintuitive with Christ. And it took me a little bit of growing up to figure this out, that there are these moments of crushing guilt in our lives that Christ is trying to keep us from. And if we frame Christ as a teacher who's not only telling us, not only giving us a list of don'ts, he's really giving us the path to life. It changes the way we interact with some of the things that we read in the New Testament and the way that we teach them to others and talk about them.

So I wanted to frame that before we got into our teaching today. We're going to be talking about Jesus's prohibition on oaths. So a lot of you might be rolling your eyes at another prohibition to go through. But if you frame it in terms of Jesus was trying to keep us from these moments that are going to cause pain, he's going to try to keep us on the path to life. It changes the lens that we read it in. In John 10:10, Jesus says, "The thief does not come except to steal and to kill and to destroy. And I have come that they may have life and that they may have it more abundantly." And I just want us to frame our thinking about what Jesus is saying here.

In Secrets of the Kingdom Life, I'll throw another shout out to Brother David. He uses this analogy that Jesus's teachings are kind of like, it's kind of like a teacher who gives us all the answers to a final exam that we're going to be studying for. And it's no surprise when we come up that we should know all the answers to what the teacher gave us. And I'm going to try to shift that analogy and one-up you here because I can. I work at college and too many students. I have to say, it's okay if you fail the final, I promise. You'll make it another day. When I was in the Air Force, one of the most memorable experiences for me was going through the Air Force Academy's jump program.

So the Air Force Academy has this program where they train a lot of people to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, makes little sense to a lot of people. And it's the only program in the world where your first jump, you're completely alone. You don't have an instructor with you. And so you do all your training right on the ground. And part of this training involves hanging in a harness and the people who are telling you how to jump out of an airplane, they're throwing water on you, they're trying to rip your clothes, they're messing up your hair, they're sticking their fingers in your mouth, and they're asking you questions about what you're going to do when you jump out of that door and you're flying at the ground.

And if you don't remember the things that you're training for, the ground is coming. And if you don't remember, you're going to die. And I want us to sort of frame Christ's teachings in this kind of a moment that are we hanging to his words so closely as if the ground is approaching us and if we let them slip, that there are grave consequences for us and for the people around us too. Right before we went into the program, there was an ROTC cadet who forgot one of the things in training on the landing and he ran into a power line and cut his leg off because he forgot how to steer the parachute coming in.

And a lot of times I feel like we get too comfortable with Jesus's teachings and we don't have this picture in the back of our minds that he's warning us about what's coming. And it's not, and I like the analogy of the final exam, but sometimes I think that a final exam, you know, it matters a lot to me, but some people will be like, "Oh, it's okay if I fail. I'll get another chance." We don't get another chance here. And so let's open our Bibles up to Matthew chapter five with me. We're just going to read two short passages and we're going to work our way through Jesus's teaching on oaths. And I hope at the end of today that you won't just view this as a prohibition, but you'll be open to the liberation that also comes with this passage.

So Matthew chapter five, verses 33 to 37. "Again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform your oaths to the Lord.' But I say to you, do not swear at all, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by the earth, for it is his footstool, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. Nor shall you swear by your head, because you cannot make one hair white or black. But let your yes be yes and your no no, for whatever is more than these is from the evil one." And then we're just going to read one more passage that echoes this teaching in James.

James chapter five, verse 12. James chapter five, verse 12. "But above all, my brethren, do not swear either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no no, lest you fall into judgment." I'm going to say a prayer before we try to talk about this. Father, I thank you for your teachings. I thank you for sending your Son to show us the way to life, Lord. And I pray as a people group that we would cling to his words as if our life depended on it. And when we see others in the world walking outside the way that it would break us and that we would do everything we can to bring them into these teachings that are not only a list of what we should not do, but that we understand that behind these teachings are the path to life.

In your Son's name, I pray. Amen.

There's a clear pattern in these two passages. There's a do not, so do not swear and take oaths. And then there's a do, let your yes be yes and your no no. And then there's a or else. And the or else comes out clearly in James, lest you fall into judgment. It's more black and white than I think most of Jesus's teachings. There's not a whole lot of room for interpretation if you ask me. But what's shocking to me is that this teaching on oaths has been let go in most Christian circles that I grew up in. So I'm going to go back to my story and how I've interacted with oaths. So I've managed to take three significant oaths in my life in a mixture of individual and corporate styles.

And zero times did anybody bring up a discussion about Zeus's teaching. So the first was in an Ecuadorian school, the same school I went to. In order to graduate from high school, all of the students have to take something called an oath to the flag or any Spanish speakers, juramento a la bandera. And it's an interesting moment where they take the top student academically in the class. And I don't think there's a flag up here, but they take the Ecuadorian flag and they parade the whole class in, they plant the flag. And one by one, each person who graduates takes an oath of loyalty, respect, and defense to Ecuadorian patriotism. And that's what you have to do to graduate from high school.

So my senior year, I happened to be an Ecuadorian citizen and I was the one who was holding the Ecuadorian flag as each of my classmates walked down, took a knee and said, "I swear to protect this flag." You would take it and you would kiss it and you would throw it and then you'd walk on. And if you weren't an Ecuadorian citizen, you'd put a little rose and a little jar right next to it. So this was happening perpetually in my community where the oath, it was never a question of Jesus's teaching can actually mean when he says, "Don't take an oath, take an oath." So that was my senior year. Six months later, I had joined the United States Air Force and I took an oath of allegiance as a cadet at the Air Force Academy.

So I had just pledged my life in an oath to the Ecuadorian government. Six months later, I had renounced my Ecuadorian citizenship and I'm taking the next oath to the United States. In this oath, they march a thousand cadets onto a field and they have everybody raise their right hand and take an oath of allegiance, very similar to the commissioning oath. And not a single time does anybody question whether or not this is in contrast to Jesus's teachings. It's ironic too because we took the oath belief below the chapel. So we have God's chapel right above us as we are taking that oath. And then finally, I took another oath called the oath of office after completing the academy.

And that's another individual oath where you basically swear to protect the Constitution of the United States. That was in front of my parents individually. So three different times I've taken these oaths and zero of those times did anybody sort of tap me on the shoulder and say, "Hey, have you ever thought about what Christ said here?" And it's really interesting because in my interaction with kingdom circles, I sort of bumped into the Followers of the Way in Boston in 2016. I hear a lot of conversations about non-resistance. And my life has changed because of that. But I rarely hear a lot of people talking about oaths and it's the precursor to non-resistance. And I think this is good.

And there's a phrase that I think this is not good that we sort of have a clarity around non-resistance, but we really don't have a clarity around oath taking. We haven't really refined our thinking on it. And I hope for the next couple of the theme of my year is trying to understand why oaths are important. And I think they deserve more intention than we give them. A great question that Brother Finney posed to me in my walk out of the kingdom, or out of the Air Force, not the kingdom, into the kingdom. And he said, "Zach, next time we meet, I want you to make a list and I want you to make a list of what you believe that the world doesn't.

Make a list of the things that you believe that the world doesn't." And so I try to take on that homework assignment. It's a really, really good assignment to do if you're interacting with somebody considering the kingdom, just plainly, what do you believe that the world doesn't? And you tend to write some things along the lines of, you know, I believe in integrity, truthfulness, sexual purity, marriage, loving your neighbor, the golden rule. But what's shocking is that when you go through these lists, oaths, Jesus's teaching on oath taking is probably, in my mind, one of the most unique differentiators among Christianity and other world systems.

You'll find a lot of people teach on non-violence these days, but none of those people are combining the teachings of non-violence and oath taking. So I think it's really important for us to pay attention to here. And the burden I have for us today is that we develop a deep conviction that our words have as much significance as our actions. And I hope we can develop an equal sensitivity to deceit as we do for violence. I think we talk a lot about violence, but we don't nearly talk about deceit enough. So, and if you ever see anybody as a Christian about to go take an oath, I hope that it sends quivers down your body and that you would be reminded of what Jesus teaches here and you do everything you can to stop them from making that teaching.

So before I start and getting into it, just my one point or thesis for this passage is that Jesus rejects the default of untruthfulness and gives us the freedom to choose our commitments. So Jesus rejects the default of untruthfulness and gives us the freedom to choose our commitments. And then I'll just try to make four points and we'll walk right through them. So the first point I'll make is swearing and oath taking are different than vows, promises, contracts, and covenants. Swearing and oath taking are different than vows, promises, contracts, and covenants. The second point I'll make are oaths are the world's substitute for consistent truthfulness. Third point, we get to choose our commitments every day.

And my fourth point, oaths are a gateway to judgment. Oaths are a gateway to judgment. So let's start off with this first point and we'll sort of work our way through Matthew here, particularly. And hopefully this will, you can follow along as I go. So swearing and oath taking are different than vows, covenants, contracts, and promises.

When we read through the first line, Jesus says, "You have heard this said to those of old, you shall not swear falsely, but shall perform your oath to the Lord." So a great place to start is just by trying to nail down a definition of what is an oath, what separates an oath from other things. And an oath, I'll pitch the thesis, an oath has three basic parts that make it an oath. The first part is affirming the truthfulness of a statement. The second part is invoking a transcendent entity.

And then the third part is an invitation to punishment. So those, if you look at most of the oaths that people have laid out, there's those three components that you should look for and pay attention to. Affirming the truthfulness of a statement, invoking a transcendent entity, and the invitation of punishment. So there's a definition. I got those three. I think my favorite definition comes from a man named Daniel Lowery. He's just talking in a lexicon. He says, "Swearing an oath affirms the veracity of one's statement by invoking a transcendent entity. Usually in our day and age, it's before God or somebody else.

Frequently implied with an invitation of punishment if one is found untruthful." And to just illustrate to you, I'm going to read through two oaths that should be familiar to you and sort of the world that we work in. The first is I'm just going to read the blanket oath that any person in the U.S. military takes before they step into office. So this is it. I, and then state your full name, having been appointed a rank in the United States military or army or Air Force, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of deviation, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I'm about to enter.

So help me God. All right. So if you look through that oath right there, and I'm going to read the presidential oath as well because I think it's worth looking at, you're affirming something you're saying. So I will do this. And it's the whole oath. And where is the transcendent entity in the oath of allegiance? Did anyone catch it? Where is the transcendent entity clause?

Very end. So help me God. So we see the transcendent entity clause. And then that clause actually doubles as the invitation for punishment if you don't uphold your oath. So we get these three components. We're saying, "I'm going to do this before God." And here, you're basically saying, "If I don't accomplish, I'm accepting whatever punishment God gives down to me." It's actually a lot, I never thought about how drastic of a statement you're saying to invite God to punish you if you fail to uphold these words before you. It's actually, I think it's much scarier than a lot of people frame it as. And then I just watched this. You can go watch President Biden take his oath here.

So I'll just read what he said. I, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Wait, let me frame this first. If anybody hasn't watched this, there is a lot of controversy over Biden taking a family Bible. So what he does is he chooses a Bible. And before the United States, they place the Bible. And he puts his left hand on the Bible, raises his right hand, and then he says the following words. I, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States. Will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. And then this one, it was framed as a question.

The man who was saying the word said, "So help you God." And then President Biden said, "So help me God." So help you God. So help me God. So the last statement was just as a question. And there's two. So the president's saying that he's going to do this. And then the transcendent entity, did anyone catch in the additional element that's being thrown into the oath? It's the Bible. So now, in some oath taking settings, you're actually taking the Bible as your transcendent entity before God. You're saying, "All right, I'm going to do this." Basically, this Bible is giving more veracity to my statement. And then the invitation to punishment is again, inviting God to punish you if you don't want to fulfill everything you said in that oath.

So I won't go into all the nuances between the difference between an oath and a vow and a promise and a covenant and a contract. But it's worth just knowing as a group of people that oaths are different than these other forms of promises that we participate in. And if we don't acknowledge that, we put Jesus kind of in a position where he's teaching, he's making these statements, but they don't mean anything. So some of my friends in my life, they've basically said, "Hey Zach, I heard that you won't take the oath, but you just said your marriage vows. You're such a hypocrite." They view oaths and the marriage vow as equal and the same.

And let's just take a tiny bit of time to unpack that myth. It's not true. An oath is very different than a vow. So a vow is basically a solemn promise to do something. And Jesus prohibited oath taking, but he did not prohibit us being able to take a vow. And we actually have a couple of examples of vows in the New Testament in Acts. So we'll just look at two of them here. So in Acts 18:18, Paul, I'll just read Acts 18:18. So Paul still remained for a good while. Then he took leave of the brethren and sailed for Syria, and Priscilla and Aquila were with him. He had his hair cut off. At Cencria, for he had taken a vow.

So we see Paul taking a vow after his allegiance to Christ. Then fast forwarding here, we actually have another example of Christians taking vows. And then the next one is in Acts 21. Therefore, do what we tell you, for we have four men who have taken a vow. So twice in Acts, we get instances of men taking this vow. And they're basically saying, "I will do these things." And we're allowed to make commitments to people. We're just not allowed to invoke this transcendent entity above us and try to invite that punishment into our lives. So when we apply this in our lives and we're thinking about how to walk other people through it, I want everybody to not be able to put in this hole that Jesus was an inconsistent teacher and that we can actually take what he taught and distill some of the nuances.

So another example gets thrown out is, okay, you can enter into an oath, but can you still sign a contract? And when you look at any contract that any of us sign, it doesn't have any of those three elements of an affirmation of truthfulness. It does have that, an affirmation of truthfulness, but it misses this transcendent entity. So those three things are the three things that differentiate an oath from a vow. And I hope you can remember them. Does everyone remember? The first one was what?

Affirmation of truthfulness. The second one was what?

Yeah, applying to a transcendent entity. And the third aspect of an oath was an invitation of punishment. So those are the three components that sort of Jesus is warning us against. So let's just take a second to lead into my next point here, that oaths are the world's substitute for consistent truthfulness. And let's just read through the next passage, the next set of verses in Matthew here, verses 35. I'll read it also. But I say to you, do not swear at all, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by the earth, for it is his footstool, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king, nor shall you swear by your head, because you cannot make one hair white or black.

So what's going on here is that Jesus is rejecting these levels of truthfulness that have become the baseline for where the world is operating. Many of us now, when we interact with the different people and the levels of truthfulness, there's almost an expectation that you have your level of truthfulness when you're on the street and in your everyday life. You have a level of truthfulness maybe to your family that's a little bit more elevated. But then, oh, if you're under oath, you're at the pinnacle of truthfulness. You're not allowed to say a lie if you're under oath. And Jesus is rejecting this whole notion that there are ever any differentiations of truthfulness that we can come to.

And what's happening here is Jesus is teaching against this elevation of truthfulness that had crept into society. So when you look at his passages, let's look at the things he said. So don't swear at all, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne. So heaven is this, if you swear by heaven, then you're operating at this level of truthfulness. Nor by the earth. So wait, if you're trying to be a little less truthful in heaven, let's operate down here. Let's swear by the earth. And then Jesus says, not by the earth, for it is his footstool. Nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. So we go heaven, the earth, Jerusalem.

So Jesus is saying there's no levels of truthfulness that we operate in. And then finally he says, don't even swear by yourself. You can't swear by yourself, by this low level. And he's trying to say that our default position as Christians is always truthfulness, always consistency, and that we are never operating in different circumstances where we're allowed to fudge the line. And then it's also really, really salient to go through some of the examples of oath taking in the New Testament and in the Old Testament to frame our thinking along the lines of, has it ever helped anyone across the course of history to take an oath? Maybe all of you can spend just maybe a few seconds thinking of an example.

And if you have one, then I'm wrong. I haven't been able to come up with one. Is there a moment in history where an oath brought about this immense good to the world? We're taking an oath, really saved the day, and it brought about a good solution. Any examples that come to anybody's mind?

Or even in the Bible, an example of an oath that produced good?

All right, silence is good for me because I have to try to work against it you if you come up with something. All right, let's just take some time to go over four oaths in the New Testament and the Old Testament, and let's see how they turned out. So the first oath that I want to look at is, and we'll just go really fast, is later on in Matthew, in Matthew 14, verses 6 and 7, it's a famous oath. So Herod, he's at a banquet, and his wife's daughter comes in. I'll just read it right here. But when Herod's birthday was celebrated, the daughter of Herodias danced before them and pleased Herod. Therefore, he promised with an oath to give her whatever she might ask.

All right, so here's the first example of an oath after we actually receive Jesus's teaching, and what's the repercussions of that oath? So the story is familiar with us. The daughter asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and Herod said, he said, "Oh, I wish you wouldn't have said that." And his oath leads him to the death of John the Baptist. So first oath. Second oath that we get in the New Testament comes in Matthew 26, and this is with Peter. So where Peter swears that he doesn't know the man before him, Matthew 26:72-74. But again, he denied with an oath, "I do not know the man." And a little later, those who stood by him and came up and said to Peter, "Surely you are one of them, for your speech betrays you."

Then he began to curse and to swear, saying, "I do not know the man." And I think there's more to this story. And this has actually carried its way forward into English, where when we heard the word swear, most of us think, what I usually think of is just saying four-letter words, like, "Don't swear, don't say those four-letter words when you get angry." But this is the second oath in the New Testament. So Peter swears that he doesn't know Christ before the people accusing him. All right, let's go into the Old Testament to a couple of oaths that get taken. So one comes from Judges 11. Many of us know the story of Jephthah, who—and I'll just read the verse right here.

And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord and said, "If you will indeed deliver the people of Ammon into my hands, then it will be that whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the people of Ammon shall surely be the Lord's, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering." So this one's a little more nuanced because it uses the vow language, and we're going to get into this in a little bit. But Jephthah basically promises something that he has no control over in the future. So this vow before the Lord causes Jephthah what? Does anyone know the consequence? The life of his own daughter.

All right, another crazy oath that we see no good coming out of this. And then further on in Acts, this is one of my favorite oaths because I kind of laugh at it. So right as the Jews were having some problems with Paul, in Acts 23, verses 12 and 14, it says, "And when it was day, some of the Jews banded together and bound themselves under an oath, saying that they would neither eat nor drink until they had killed Paul." Now there was more than 42 who had formed this conspiracy. They came to the chief priests and elders and said, "We have bound ourselves under a great oath that we'll eat nothing until we have killed Paul."

How did that go for them?

They failed. And it doesn't say what ends up with these men's life, but I'm assuming that they didn't fulfill that oath unless they starved themselves to death and didn't drink until Paul was dead. So four just examples in the New Testament of this weird concept where people are, because they're not in control of things, they're tempted to go into this oath-taking mode where they promise to this higher entity that they're going to do something, and they're never able to do it. When we look at what oaths really are in the Old Testament and the New Testament, it's really good to just acknowledge that in the Old Testament, the Lord made God made concessions to his people because of how weak they were.

A quote by the man named John Stott, and he says, "If divorce is due to human hard-heartedness, swearing is due to human untruthfulness." So if divorce is due to human hard-heartedness, swearing is due to human untruthfulness. So swearing in the Old Testament is like a concession to God's people, that God's allowing us to swear by his name. But in the New Testament, Christ comes and he takes away his concession. And now moving forward, the application that we have as Christians is actually really hard. We have to elevate ourselves to the point of truthfulness in all things that we do, and we have to reject what the world has accepted as the correct level of truthfulness.

It's kind of scary because we don't get wiggle room for when we get to fib and when we get to tell the truth. There's no black, there's no gray in our truthfulness. So Jesus is coming and is rejecting what the world has accepted here. So point three is just that we get to choose our commitments every day. We get to choose our commitments every day. And the verse I just want to look at is, "Let your yes be yes and your no no." So over the course of time, Christians have gotten a little bit smart. They've said, "All right, so Jesus teaches that we can't take oaths, and so here's what we're going to do."

I'm going to go back up to that presidential oath, the oath of office, and here's what people have worked their way around. They said, "I'll just do the presidential oath." Instead of saying, "Solemnly swear," what has become an optional clause in the presidential oath? Anybody know?

Affirm. All right. So basically, people have said, "I state your full name having been done this, solemnly swear," and now in parentheses before the oath, after the oath, there's a parentheses that says, "Or affirm." All right. And then at the very end of the oath, the second optional part has become, "So help me God." So over the course of time, Christians, particularly Quakers, they've gone in and they've said, "All right, we can't take oaths, but what if we just change the word swear to affirm, and then what if we remove this so help me God part at the end?" Does that make this an oath? Does that change Jesus's teaching here? So I just wanted to say some things to prevent any misunderstandings, particularly on the question of, can Christians affirm things?

I think I came off really strongly and said Christians shouldn't switch the words swear for affirm. We can say, "I affirm to tell the truth," and that's not an oath. And getting back to the three components, that's sort of what I'm getting at. But I just wanted to sort of clarify and make sure it didn't come off strongly that I'm saying we can't affirm anything. That's not what I was trying to say. Hopefully, that just undoes any misinterpretations of what I was trying to say.

What I want to question you as an audience is that Jesus's teaching on oaths isn't a matter of playing word games. His teaching on oaths isn't a matter of saying, "Don't say the word swear versus affirm." This isn't what Jesus is teaching here. Where he comes in here with what your less be yes and your no no, what he's basically saying is, "You have to examine all the commitments you make on a consistent basis against what I've taught you." And so when we go back up to this presidential oath, and I'll read it with the affirm and without the so help me God. Actually, I'll do the military oath just so all of you can get a little bit of acknowledgment that I'm on the right track.

So let's say we take out the swear and we take out the so help me God. And I'll use my name because I've taken this. I, Zachary Johnson, having been appointed a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force, do affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter. All right, does it work?

Am I allowed to say those words now?

What do you guys think? So the obvious answer here is no. When we look at what particularly the Quakers have influenced this, and they said, "All right, let's just change this one word," and then this becomes not an oath anymore because we've said they affirm. All right, I'll even give that to them. If you take out the oath and you change it to a sermon and you take out the so solemnly swear, let's just say it's no longer an oath that you're promising to adhere to a certain set of obligations. When we go through it, you have to weigh those words against the other things that Christ taught, and you have to consistently be able to say yes or no to the things which you commit to.

And this game of just saying, "Oh, I'll say a swear, I'll say affirm instead of swear," it doesn't liberate us from the things that Jesus is warning against. During my trial as a conscientious objector, I don't know if any of you have ever been on the stand before in front of a court. I had 14 witnesses. I saw somebody back here. Hopefully for good. No, I'm kidding. So I had 14 witnesses come up, and does anybody know the oath that people get put on when they're on the stand? So when people get brought up to the stand, you put your right hand on the Bible or your left hand on the Bible, raise your right hand, and you say, "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God."

People are familiar with that, and you're like, "What? Why is this going on? What is going on here?" And so in order for me to go through the trial, I had assembled this package that I couldn't take oaths. So before, I watched 12 people take oath of allegiances, including my family. And then when it came to Brother Finney and me and myself, we had worked out a deal where he looked at us and he said, "Will you tell the truth?" And I said, "Yes."

And looked at Brother Finney, "Will you tell the truth?" "Yes." And so we're allowed, in my perspective here, to make promises to people about telling the truth in a way that isn't an oath, but we still have to step away from this whole oath-telling system. I tell people that before the trial, I sat down with a lawyer and I rejected the whole premise about taking the oath in the first place. And we had to work out a deal where he would accept the veracity of our statements. But getting out of oaths is not as simple as just switching a simple word from "I swear" to "I affirm." So many of us, I've shared this a couple of times, many of us have come into some form of legal document, maybe I'm alone here, where it says, "I swear that these things that I said are true."

What are you guys going to do if you come into a legal document where it says that? Any answers? I've started, even though it takes me an extra two weeks, I'll cross out the swear and I'll say, "I can't take oaths and I don't swear," and I'll send it back. And I said, "I'll always tell the truth." But a lot of people just, they glance over that and they said, "Oh, it really costs me too much to not swear in this document or before this court." And they sort of skip over the implications of Jesus's teaching here. So I hope that all of you are training yourselves for you to know what to say yes to and what to say no to.

And in the realm of discipleship, I actually think that Jesus's teaching here has immense implications for us. So when you look at what Jesus says, "Let your yes be yes and your no no," when we look at the Christian walk and Jesus's call to follow him, Jesus appoints when he looks out at all of his disciples, he says, "Follow me." We now have this kind of a duty as disciples to let people know what they are committing to so they can either make a decision on yes or no.

And a lot of people these days, we talk about the broad evangelical world, there's sort of these altered calls at the end, and many of us are familiar where people commit their lives to Christ without even understanding what the yes they're saying yes to or the no to be able to say, "If Jesus teaches on these things, I want to be able to say no." So when we're discipling people, the goal, we always talk about this, we want to get people to the point where if Jesus told you to cut your left pinky off, would you do it? And a lot of people, that's an extreme. Jesus doesn't call us to cut our left pinkies off.

But the goal is to get people to a place where they'll say yes. If the New Testament says this to me, that's the mark of where we want to be as followers of Christ. And I'm going to even stretch this even further that every word that we let out of our mouths is almost a commitment in itself. A lot of times, people have gotten into this habit of treating our words as lesser than our actions. So a lot of times, people will say, well, they'll say certain things, and then later on, they'll try to backtrack and dig themselves out of holes and say, "I didn't mean it that way. I didn't mean what I said."

But when we look at Christ's teachings, we should be really, really, really scared and not scared, but precise about the words that we use and the words that we commit to before people. And then let's just move on lastly into this last point. So oaths are a gateway to judgment. Oaths are a gateway to judgment. I'll be the first person to say that I don't necessarily understand everything that's going on behind the scenes here with what Jesus is warning about when he teaches his people. When he teaches in Matthew, he says, "Anything beyond these is from the evil one."

But like Abraham in the Old Testament, sometimes we can't just trust our logic with the decisions that we make. So God came and he told Abraham, "I'm going to make you the father of many nations." And then later on, he says, what does he ask Abraham to do? He asks Abraham, "Now, give me your firstborn son." So sometimes the obedience to God's words, we can't trust our immediate logic just to say, "Ah, God, it doesn't make sense in the system. Why would you not have me take an oath? It doesn't play well with the systems. I don't understand why, so I'm not going to do it." And that can't be our reaction to the things that we don't understand.

I just want us to take just a couple of minutes to notice the placement of Jesus's oaths in the Matthew 5 and in James. So in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus's teachings on oaths, does anyone know what comes before it and what comes after it?

So right before it, we have Jesus's teachings on divorce and remarriage, and then we have Jesus's teaching on oath-taking, and then following this, we have Jesus's teaching on to love your enemies. And I was watching a video of just a World War II soldier, and he's recounting the story of standing before a French soldier in World War II, and they both have bayonets, and there's this pause of a moment where they didn't want to kill each other, and they looked at each other's eyes, and as they're looking there, the German soldier said, "And then I hesitated to kill him, and then I remembered all the training, and I plunged my bayonet into his heart, and he died before me."

So I think about these stories of how oaths become like a gateway sin into a world of other sins where we actually, as humans, we can point to our violence as to an oath that we took. A lot of people talk about some of these in the world of substances. They call them these gateway drugs. Has anyone ever heard of gateway drugs? Where you start with something small and something that seems insignificant to you, and over the course of time, it can elevate to repercussions that we could have never imagined. And this is where I think that Jesus's teaching on oaths is genius because he foresaw what taking an oath would open the door to.

So you get a bunch of people taking oaths to the government, and then fast forward however many sets of years, and you see them confronting these heinous moments where they have to take a lot of life, but then they fast forward. If you rewind, you come back to this moment where they took an oath to defend the Constitution, and it's like, "Oh, I took this oath, so whatever I do here is covered under that oath." And then in James, when you look at James, it's amazing.

In James 5:12, this verse comes at the conclusion of James' ethical teachings. So I'd encourage you, if you haven't, to go read through that chapter. And there are things like taking care of the poor, like taking care of the orphans and widows, all sorts of ethical teachings in James. And then what does he say about oaths? James says, "Above all, my brethren, do not swear." So I don't understand how James was prioritizing this, but he does come out and say, "Above all these things I've told you, this is the one that I want you to pay attention to." It's almost like his last reminder to his audience. Above all, do not take oaths.