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Proverbs 12:22 · World English Bible

Proverbs 12:22 Meaning Lying Lips Are an Abomination to Yahweh

Lying lips are an abomination to Yahweh, but those who do the truth are his delight.

What does Proverbs 12:22 mean?

Love does not recoil from the liar the way a person recoils from an offense. What is meant is simpler and gentler: falsehood and love cannot occupy the same mind at once, so where one is chosen the other seems absent.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Proverbs 12:22 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

Love does not recoil from the liar the way a person recoils from an offense. What is meant is simpler and gentler: falsehood and love cannot occupy the same mind at once, so where one is chosen the other seems absent. To lie is to insist on separation, and love, being wholeness, has no place to meet that insistence and can only wait beyond it.

To deal truly is to speak and act from the recognition that no one is other than oneself. In that mind love is not withheld and does not need to be earned; it is already there, delighting, because nothing false is standing in its way.

Lips: the part of the mind that gives voice to its chosen teacher, love speaking wholeness or the ego insisting on division

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Live Proverbs 12:22 today

  1. Pick the one text or email you are avoiding because the honest answer is awkward, and send the honest answer today. The dread is heavier than the sentence.
  2. When you are with someone, put the phone face down and actually be there. Half-presence is its own small untruth.
  3. Under pressure to oversell, in an interview, a pitch, a progress update, give the real number. Trust built once beats a story you have to maintain.

Where am I keeping a small distance that honesty would close?

The same truth in other traditions

Hinduism · Upanishads

The one who sees everyone in himself and himself in everyone has no reason left to deceive. Lying needs two people, and he has found only one.

Buddhism · Metta teaching

Lovingkindness cannot be aimed at someone you are hiding from. Honesty is the open door it walks through.

Judaism · Hillel

Do not do to another what you would hate done to you. That is the whole of it, and a lie fails it instantly.

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