By Marcella, The Philippines

I am a watering team leader in the church. Because newcomers join the church every day, the supervisor asked us to report how the newcomers were gathering in a timely manner. One day, while writing the report, I found that a few of the newcomers hadn’t had any gatherings arranged for them. I was shocked and thought, “How could I have missed this?” I couldn’t believe I’d made such a basic mistake. I did my duties so carefully every day, so how could such an issue have arisen? In the past, the supervisor evaluated that I was responsible, that I had a sense of burden in my duties, and that I did my work with an eye for detail. Yet on this occasion, I’d made such a basic mistake. I wondered, “If I write about this truthfully, will the supervisor think less of me? What’s more, I’m the team leader, and I remind my brothers and sisters to be careful in their duties every day, but today, I’m the one who’s been careless. Will they think I just shout slogans and parrot words and doctrines?” I was like a cat on a hot tin roof, and thoughts about what I should do kept running through my head. After thinking for a while, I decided I absolutely couldn’t let them know about this. So, in my report to the supervisor, I said that I had notified these newcomers, but they had said their network connection was bad and couldn’t attend the gathering that day. After writing this, I thought to myself, “I’ve gotten past the supervisor, but what if the sister who is watering these newcomers asks the newcomers the real reason they didn’t attend the gathering, and then she reports the truth to the supervisor? Wouldn’t that expose my lie? If the supervisor finds out that I lied and tried to deceive him, then what would he think of me? What would my brothers and sisters think of me? Would they think I’m utterly deceitful for doing such a despicable and shameful thing? If that happened my reputation would be in tatters. How can I handle this matter without leaving any loose ends? As long as the sister watering these newcomers doesn’t talk to the supervisor, this issue won’t be exposed.” So I hurried to find the sister and explained the situation truthfully, and she said it was fine to make arrangements the next day. Hearing this, I finally let out a sigh of relief after a busy night of work. But later, I felt really uneasy, thinking, “I clearly didn’t make the arrangements and instead said the newcomers didn’t attend the gathering. Was I not clearly trying to deceive others by doing this? But if I admit my mistake to the supervisor, I’ll lose the good impression he has of me.” For a moment, I found myself in a whirl of emotions and didn’t know what to do. I quickly prayed to God, “God, I feel so bad right now. I know that what I’ve done was an effort to deceive You and the supervisor, but I really don’t have the courage to admit my mistake to the supervisor, as I’m afraid that if I do, it’ll damage the good image they have of me. God, please guide me, so that I can learn a lesson from this and practice the truth.”

After praying, I looked up relevant passages of God’s words according to my state. I read God’s words: “In their everyday lives, people often talk nonsense, tell lies, and say things that are ignorant, foolish, and defensive. Most of these things are said for the sake of vanity and pride, to satisfy their own egos. Speaking such falsehoods reveals their corrupt dispositions. If you were to resolve these corrupt elements, your heart would be purified, and you would gradually become purer and more honest. In reality, people all know why they lie. For the sake of personal gain and pride, or for vanity and status, they try to compete with others and pass themselves off as something that they’re not. However, their lies are eventually revealed and exposed by others, and they end up losing face, as well as their dignity and character. This is all caused by an excessive amount of lies. Your lies have become too numerous. Every word you say is adulterated and insincere, and not a single one can be considered true or honest. Even though you don’t feel that you’ve lost face when you tell lies, deep down, you feel disgraced. Your conscience blames you, and you hold a low opinion of yourself, thinking, ‘Why am I living such a pitiful life? Is it so difficult to speak the truth? Must I resort to lies for the sake of my pride? Why is my life so exhausting?’ You don’t have to live an exhausting life. If you can practice being an honest person, you will be able to live a relaxed, free, and liberated life. However, you have chosen to uphold your pride and vanity by telling lies. Consequently, you live a tiresome and miserable existence, which is self-inflicted. One may gain a sense of pride by telling lies, but what is that sense of pride? It is just an empty thing, and it is completely worthless. Telling lies means selling out one’s character and dignity. It strips away one’s dignity and one’s character; it displeases God, and He detests it. Is this worthwhile? It is not. Is this the correct path? No, it is not. People who frequently lie live according to their satanic dispositions; they live under Satan’s power. They do not live in the light, nor do they live in the presence of God. You constantly think about how to lie and then after you lie, you have to think about how to cover up that lie. And when you do not cover up the lie well enough and it is exposed, you have to rack your brain to try and straighten out the contradictions and make it plausible. Is it not tiring to live in this way? Exhausting. Is it worth it? No, it is not worth it. Racking one’s brain to tell lies and then to cover them up, all for the sake of pride, vanity, and status, what meaning is there in that? Finally, you reflect and think to yourself, ‘What’s the point? It’s too exhausting to tell lies and to have to cover them up. Conducting myself in this manner won’t work; it’d be easier if I just became an honest person.’ You desire to become an honest person, but you cannot let go of your pride, vanity, and personal interests. Therefore, you can only resort to telling lies to uphold these things. If you are someone who loves the truth, you will endure various hardships in order to practice the truth. Even if it means sacrificing your reputation, status, and enduring ridicule and humiliation from others, you won’t mind—as long as you are able to practice the truth and satisfy God, it is enough. Those who love the truth choose to practice it and be honest. This is the correct path and it is blessed by God. If a person does not love the truth, what do they choose? They choose to use lies to uphold their reputation, status, dignity, and character. They would rather be deceitful, and be detested and rejected by God. Such people reject the truth and reject God. They choose their own reputation and status; they want to be deceitful. They do not care about whether God is pleased or if He will save them. Can such people still be saved by God? Certainly not, because they have chosen the wrong path. They can only live by lying and cheating; they can only live painful lives of telling lies and covering them up and racking their brains to defend themselves every day. If you think that lies can uphold the reputation, status, vanity, and pride you desire, you are completely mistaken. In reality, by telling lies, not only do you fail to maintain your vanity and pride, and your dignity and character, more grievously, you miss the opportunity to practice the truth and be an honest person. Even if you manage to protect your reputation, status, vanity, and pride at that moment, you have sacrificed the truth and betrayed God. This means you have completely lost your chance for Him to save and perfect you, which is the greatest loss and a lifelong regret. Those who are deceitful will never understand this” (The Word, Vol. 3. The Discourses of Christ of the Last Days. Only an Honest Person Can Live Out True Human Likeness). From God’s words, I understood that deceitful people speak and act to protect their own vanity, pride and interests. They’re well aware that God dislikes this, but they still rack their brains to lie, cover for themselves, and deceive. They may seem to protect their pride and vanity, but they lose the opportunity to practice the truth, and if they don’t repent, they will eventually be eliminated by God, and they will completely lose the opportunity to be saved by God. When I realized this, I was stunned. My behavior was just like the states God exposes! As soon as I found that several newcomers hadn’t had gatherings arranged for them, I worried about what the supervisor would think of me if he found out, and whether he’d have a lower opinion of me. I also worried that after the brothers and sisters found out, they would bring up the fact that I kept reminding them to be more diligent in their duties, but that I’d made such a basic mistake in my own duties. I feared they’d think that I was a person without realities who just parroted words and doctrines. In order to protect the good image people had of me, I lied and said the newcomers hadn’t attended the gathering because of poor internet. But I was also worried that the sister watering the newcomers would learn about the actual situation and then report it to the supervisor, thereby exposing the inconsistency in what I’d said. Because of this, I rushed to the watering sister to actively explain the situation. To protect my vanity and pride, I racked my brain as I lied and attempted to cover for my lying. I was well aware that this was against God’s intention, and I felt guilty, but I still didn’t practice the truth. I was bound by my corrupt disposition, and I felt both pained and exhausted. I lost both my dignity as a person and my integrity. I thought that by doing what I did, I wasn’t leaving any loose ends, but in reality, God scrutinizes everything. I was acting like a clown. The more I reflected, the more I felt that what I had done was disgusting, despicable, and sordid, and that my actions had made God detest me. At the same time, I felt an inexplicable sense of anxiety and fear, as if I were truly in danger. Just like God says: “If you think that lies can uphold the reputation, status, vanity, and pride you desire, you are completely mistaken. In reality, by telling lies, not only do you fail to maintain your vanity and pride, and your dignity and character, more grievously, you miss the opportunity to practice the truth and be an honest person. Even if you manage to protect your reputation, status, vanity, and pride at that moment, you have sacrificed the truth and betrayed God. This means you have completely lost your chance for Him to save and perfect you, which is the greatest loss and a lifelong regret.” Although lying allowed me to protect my vanity and pride before others, and to preserve the good impression people had of me, I lost the opportunity to practice the truth and to be an honest person, and I committed an eternally indelible transgression before God. Later on, I wondered, “Why can I not help but lie all the time? What is the root cause of this?”

One day during my devotionals, I read a passage of God’s words: “In this society, people’s principles for dealing with the world, their methods for living and existing, and even their attitudes and notions toward religion and belief, as well as their various notions and views toward people and things—all these things are inevitably conditioned by family. … Let us talk, then, about what conditioning effects your family exerts on you. For example, when family elders often tell you that ‘People need their pride just as a tree needs its bark,’ it is to make you attach importance to having a good reputation, living a proud life, and not doing things that heap disgrace upon you. So does this saying guide people in a positive or negative way? Can it lead you to the truth? Can it lead you to understand the truth? (No, it cannot.) You can say with all certainty, ‘No, it cannot!’ Think about it, God says that people should comport themselves as honest people. When you have transgressed, or done something wrong, or done something that rebels against God and goes against the truth, you need to admit your mistake, gain an understanding of yourself, and keep dissecting yourself in order to achieve true repentance, and thereafter act in accordance with God’s words. So, if people are to comport themselves as honest people, does that conflict with the saying ‘People need their pride just as a tree needs its bark’? (Yes.) How does it conflict? The saying ‘People need their pride just as a tree needs its bark’ is intended to make people attach importance to living out their bright and colorful side and doing more things that make them look good—rather than doing things that are bad or dishonorable, or exposing their ugly side—and to prevent them from living without pride or dignity. For the sake of one’s reputation, for the sake of pride and honor, one cannot rubbish everything about oneself, let alone tell others about one’s dark side and shameful aspects, because one must live with pride and dignity. In order to have dignity one needs a good reputation, and to have a good reputation one needs to put up a pretense and dress oneself up. Doesn’t this conflict with comporting oneself as an honest person? (Yes.) When you comport yourself as an honest person, what you are doing is completely at odds with the saying ‘People need their pride just as a tree needs its bark.’ If you want to comport yourself as an honest person, don’t attach importance to pride; a person’s pride isn’t worth a cent. Faced with the truth, one should expose oneself, not put up a pretense or create a false image. One must reveal to God one’s true thoughts, the mistakes one has made, the aspects that violate the truth principles, and so on, and also lay these things bare to one’s brothers and sisters. It is not a matter of living for the sake of one’s reputation, but rather, it is a matter of living for the sake of comporting oneself as an honest person, living for the sake of pursuing the truth, living for the sake of being a true created being, and living for the sake of satisfying God and being saved. But when you don’t understand this truth, and don’t understand God’s intentions, the things that are conditioned into you by your family tend to dominate. So when you do something wrong, you cover it up and put up a pretense, thinking, ‘I can’t say anything about this, and I won’t allow anyone else who knows about it to say anything either. If any of you say anything, I won’t let you off lightly. My reputation comes first. Living is for nothing if not for the sake of one’s reputation, because it’s more important than anything else. If a person loses their reputation, they lose all their dignity. So you can’t tell it like it is, you have to pretend, you have to cover things up, otherwise you will lose your reputation and dignity, and your life will be worthless. If no one respects you, then you’re just worthless, cheap trash.’ Is it possible to comport yourself as an honest person by practicing this way? Is it possible to be completely open and dissect yourself? (No, it isn’t.) Obviously, by doing this you are adhering to the saying ‘People need their pride just as a tree needs its bark’ that your family has conditioned into you” (The Word, Vol. 6. On the Pursuit of the Truth. How to Pursue the Truth (12)). Through the exposure of God’s words, I finally realized that I had been living according to the satanic poison of “People need their pride just as a tree needs its bark.” This had become my guideline for how I acted and conducted myself. From childhood, my family had always taught me, “In this life, you need to focus on your reputation so that others will think highly of you and have a good impression of you. If you gain widespread notoriety, then even your parents will lose face.” After starting school, teachers often taught us, “To lead a worthwhile life, you need to win others’ praise.” Under the influence of these fallacious ideas, I paid particular attention to how others saw me in everything I did. After finding God and taking on my duty in the church, I still focused a lot on the image others had of me, and I did my duty carefully each day, worrying that if I slipped up for a moment, I’d cause problems and damage the good impression I’d made in the hearts of my brothers and sisters. Even the smallest issue made me feel as if I were in mortal peril and filled my heart with crippling anxiety. To preserve my good image, I didn’t dare admit my mistakes to the supervisor, so I resorted to tricks and deception, and falsely reported the situation with the newcomers’ gatherings. Living by these satanic poisons, I became truly crooked and deceitful, and to maintain my pride and status, I lost the basic principles of being human. I lived such a lowly and worthless life! In trying to be an honest person, when this clashed with the satanic law of “People need their pride just as a tree needs its bark,” I found myself unable to practice the truth or to stand on the side of truth. How could I be saved if I carried on like this? Realizing the serious consequences of living by satanic poisons, I deeply regretted not practicing the truth, so I sought a path of practice in God’s words.

Later, I read God’s words: “To be an honest person, you must first lay your heart bare so that everyone can look into it, see all that you are thinking, and look upon your true face. You must not try to disguise yourself, or cover yourself up. Only then will others trust you and consider you to be an honest person. This is the most fundamental practice, and a prerequisite to being an honest person. If you are always pretending, always feigning holiness, nobility, greatness, and high character; if you do not let people see your corruption and your flaws; if you present a false image to people so that they believe you have integrity, that you’re great, self-denying, just, and selfless—is this not deceitfulness and falsity? Will people not be able to see through you, given time? So, do not put on a disguise or cover yourself up. Instead, lay yourself and your heart bare for others to see” (The Word, Vol. 3. The Discourses of Christ of the Last Days. The Most Fundamental Practice of Being an Honest Person). “You must seek the truth to resolve any problem that arises, no matter what it is, and by no means disguise yourself or put on a false face for others. Your shortcomings, your deficiencies, your faults, your corrupt dispositions—be completely open about them all, and fellowship about them all. Do not keep them inside. Learning how to open yourself up is the first step toward life entry, and it is the first hurdle, which is the most difficult to overcome. Once you have overcome it, entering the truth is easy. What does taking this step signify? It means that you are opening your heart and showing everything you have, good or bad, positive or negative; baring yourself for others and for God to see; hiding nothing from God, concealing nothing, disguising nothing, free of deceit and trickery, and being likewise open and honest with other people. In this way, you live in the light, and not only will God scrutinize you, but other people will also be able to see that you act with principle and a degree of transparency. You do not need to use any methods to protect your reputation, image, and status, nor do you need to cover up or disguise your mistakes. You do not need to engage in these useless efforts. If you can let these things go, you will be very relaxed, you will live without constraints or pain, and you will live entirely in the light” (The Word, Vol. 3. The Discourses of Christ of the Last Days. Part Three). From God’s words, I understood that to avoid being deceitful or cheating, I need to practice being an honest person according to God’s words, and I need to practice opening my heart and fellowshipping with my brothers and sisters, to speak what is truly on my mind. Regardless of the corrupt dispositions I have, the mistakes I make in my duty, or the shortcomings or deficiencies I have, I should learn to open up and lay myself bare, allowing my brothers and sisters to see that, like them, I also have numerous corrupt dispositions and that I am no better than them. Only by being open and straightforward can my heart feel peaceful and at ease. With this in mind, I wanted to open up to my brothers and sisters about my state. But when I thought about speaking the truth, I became very anxious. I was afraid the supervisor would prune me, and that my brothers and sisters would look down on me. So, I prayed to God in my heart, asking God to guide me to practice according to His words and to be an honest person. After praying, I felt motivated, and I gathered the courage to message the supervisor, telling him that I hadn’t told the truth when reporting on the newcomers’ gatherings. After reading my message, the supervisor just asked me why I did this and didn’t say much else. Later, during a gathering, I also opened up and fellowshipped with my brothers and sisters, drawing on God’s words about being an honest person. I talked about how I lied and deceived to cover up my mistakes, and I shared my reflections on and understanding of this matter, so that they could take my experience as a cautionary tale. After sharing, the heavy burden on my heart was finally lifted, and my heart instantly felt at ease.

After this experience, I began to ponder, “Why is it that when others face issues or deviations in their duties, they can treat them properly, but when I face problems, I find my heart filled with troubles? Why does my heart remain uneasy? Besides caring about having a good image in others’ eyes, what else could be the problem?” One day during my devotionals, I happened to come across a transcript for an experiential testimony video titled Why Is It So Hard to Admit Mistakes? It quoted a passage of God’s words that was very helpful to me. Almighty God says: “How should you practice to be an ordinary and normal person? How can this be done? … Firstly, don’t give yourself a title and become bound by it, saying, ‘I am the leader, I am the head of the team, I am the supervisor, no one knows this business better than me, no one understands the skills more than me.’ Don’t get caught up in your self-appointed title. As soon as you do, it will bind your hands and feet, and what you say and do will be affected. Your normal thinking and judgment will also be affected. You must free yourself from the constraints of this status. First, lower yourself from this official title and position and stand in the place of an ordinary person. If you do, your mentality will become somewhat normal. You must also admit and say, ‘I don’t know how to do this, and I don’t understand that, either—I’m going to have to do some research and studying,’ or ‘I’ve never experienced this, so I don’t know what to do.’ When you are capable of saying what you’re really thinking and speaking honestly, you will be possessed of normal reason. Others will know the real you, and will thus have a normal view of you, and you will not have to put on an act, nor will there be any great pressure on you, and so you will be able to communicate with people normally. Living like this is free and easy; anyone who finds living exhausting has caused this themselves” (The Word, Vol. 3. The Discourses of Christ of the Last Days. Treasuring God’s Words Is the Foundation of Belief in God). Through the exposure of God’s words, I saw my own problems clearly. At the beginning, when I was given the duty of team leader, I didn’t position myself correctly, and I placed the title of team leader upon myself. I found that everything I said or did was framed by this title. I thought that since I’d become a team leader, my professional skills and work capabilities had to be stronger than those of the other brothers and sisters, and that my usual behavior should be better than theirs. Having taken on these fallacious views, I didn’t allow myself to make mistakes or deviations in my duty because I was afraid others would think poorly of me. I was carrying such a heavy burden in my duty, and it was so tiring and painful to live this way. This was all because I didn’t understand the truth and didn’t view things according to God’s words. In reality, the church’s arrangement for me to do the duty of team leader was a grace from God, and an opportunity for me to train to make up for my shortcomings. Although I was the team leader, sometimes the results of my brothers’ and sisters’ watering were even better than mine. But I still always thought that, as team leader, I had to be better than others and that I couldn’t make any mistakes. This was truly arrogant and lacking in reason! I am just a corrupt human, so it was normal for me to have deviations or reveal corrupt dispositions in my duty. I should correctly treat this and open up to my brothers and sisters and lay myself bare, and I should summarize the problems from my deviations and mistakes, and reflect on myself. Only then could I do my duty better.

A few days later, the supervisor sent me a message. The message said that a newcomer had attended a gathering, but I reported that they hadn’t, and he asked me to be more careful when following up on newcomers’ gatherings and to carefully check my reports. After reading the message, my heart skipped a beat, and I thought, “I already checked the report, how could I have made such a mistake?” I quickly opened the document. At that moment, I remembered that as I’d had other urgent matters to attend to, I’d only given it a cursory look over and I indeed hadn’t carefully checked the information, and as a result I’d made an error in reporting the newcomer’s gathering status. During the evening gathering, I wanted to share my mistake with my brothers and sisters so they could learn from it. But I felt conflicted, thinking, “If the brothers and sisters find out that I made another mistake, will they think I’m just being perfunctory in my duty? Will they wonder what’s going on with me lately, and be puzzled as to why I keep making mistakes? What will they think of me? Will they think there’s something wrong with me?” For a moment, my heart felt all mixed up. At that moment, I realized that something was wrong with my state, so I prayed to God, asking Him to guide me to practice the truth and be an honest person. I then read God’s words: “If you want to comport yourself as an honest person, don’t attach importance to pride; a person’s pride isn’t worth a cent. Faced with the truth, one should expose oneself, not put up a pretense or create a false image. One must reveal to God one’s true thoughts, the mistakes one has made, the aspects that violate the truth principles, and so on, and also lay these things bare to one’s brothers and sisters. It is not a matter of living for the sake of one’s reputation, but rather, it is a matter of living for the sake of comporting oneself as an honest person, living for the sake of pursuing the truth, living for the sake of being a true created being, and living for the sake of satisfying God and being saved” (The Word, Vol. 6. On the Pursuit of the Truth. How to Pursue the Truth (12)). God’s words suddenly made my thoughts clear and gave me the motivation to practice the truth and be an honest person. I wanted to admit my mistakes to my brothers and sisters, and although doing so might be a bit embarrassing, I’d be practicing being an honest person according to God’s requirements, and living out a human likeness, and spiritually, I’d feel liberated and free. Realizing this, I prayed to God in my heart, asking Him to guide me to practice according to His words, and resolving that no matter how others came to see me, I just wanted to satisfy God. During the evening gathering, I told my brothers and sisters about the mistakes I’d made in my duty due to my carelessness, and I urged them not to make the same basic mistakes that I had made. After saying these things, I felt at ease and liberated.

Through this experience, as I continued doing my duty, I no longer worried about what others thought of me like I did before, and I could face my mistakes more calmly. Every day, I try my best to do what I should and treat things earnestly, and when any problems arise in my duty, if they’re caused by my corrupt disposition, I come before God to reflect, and seek the truth to resolve my corrupt disposition. If this mistake is caused by some particular reason, then I use the mistakes made in my duty to summarize the deviation and correct it next time. Thank God for His guidance! By practicing this way, I have come to taste the joy of practicing the truth and being an honest person.