Your lies make it easier for others to see who you really are

Dishonest people are constantly trying to hide. They hide from themselves. They hide from others. They hide from life. And yet, everything they do to hide actually makes what they are trying to hide more obvious to everyone else.

The more a person tries to hide from themselves, the more they will need to do to continue hiding from themselves. Their increasingly obvious efforts and inevitable mistakes make it that much easier for everyone to see. As you lie more and more, you further expose your deepest, darkest secrets, which you mistakenly believe are hidden only because you’ve managed to hide them from yourself. Like a silly toddler who thinks he is hiding from everyone by covering his eyes, you are only fooling those who are as dishonest—and therefore as blind—as you are.

Just as you can’t do good secretly without public consequences,¹ you can’t do evil secretly without public consequences. These consequences will cascade until all things are known by all. The more someone lies, the more easily others can see who they really are.

Honest people hope that others see more of who they really are. They want to see everything about themselves—especially the dark parts—so they can come to God and have him teach them how to be better.² Dishonest people hope others don’t see them for who they really are because they don’t want to see themselves as they really are.³ How differently would you act if everything you did, and every reason for which you do it, were plainly known to everyone? If you would act any differently than you do for any reason other than to account for the limits in understanding and intelligence of other people, you are a dishonest person.