It’s been a bad week for the mortgage banking business. IndyMac, one of the largest banks in the country, has failed because of bad mortgage loans. And those two paragons of stability, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have had to be propped up by the federal government over the weekend in order to stabilize them.
At the heart of the problem is what mortgage insiders called “liar loans.” These were loans based on false statements about income and bogus paper work. We are now reaping the bitter fruits of the old human tendency not to tell the truth.
Honesty has always been a problem with us. The church has always championed honesty but has found it difficult sometimes to know whether someone was telling the truth or not.
Walt Grayson recently related a story from the history of Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church, which is located just outside of Mantee, Mississippi. According to the story, when the state fair was in Jackson, two boys from Mt. Pleasant went to see the fair. After their visit, they came home telling stories about a wonderful machine that they had seen. They said that when you put water into one end of the machine, ice would come out of the other end, even on the hottest days. The story was met with a great deal of skepticism in Mt. Pleasant. After some of the church members had heard the boys tell the story, they brought it up in the next church business meeting. During the business meeting, the church voted to turn the two boys out of the church for lying.
One godly deacon in the church thought that the church might have acted a bit hastily. He decided to go down to Jackson to the fairgrounds and see for himself. When he got back, he not only verified the boys’ story, but he also added that you could even put hot water into the machine and it would still turn it into ice. After hearing this story, the church also voted the deacon out.
You have to admire a church that has that much concern for honesty. The problem is determining when people are being honest.
In the Book of Acts, the church at Jerusalem had a couple named Ananias and Sapphira who were members. One day Ananias showed up with some money and a story about how he had sold a piece of land and was giving all of the money from the sale to the church. Peter told him that he was not telling the truth—that he had withheld some of the money from the sale. When Ananias heard Peter say that, he fell down and died. Later, when his wife Sapphira showed up, she told the same story. When Peter told her what had happened to Ananias for telling that story, she also fell down at his feet and died.
If there is anything clear in all of this, it is that telling the truth is important. It may be deemed old-fashioned by some, but the critical importance of telling the truth is as up-to-date as the failure of IndyMac and the precarious health of his double-first cousins, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
