May 12, 2008
Accomplished
In the Letter to the Editor column of my local newspaper a gentleman wrote, “…in my opinion anyone who portrays a half truth as a whole truth is a complete liar. One could even assume the word ‘complete’ [liar] to mean ‘accomplished’ [liar].” I think the writer makes an interesting observation. If you’ve been a Christian for any length of time you’ve probably heard half-truths spoken in the church. Most of us can’t bare the thought of calling a fellow believer, or even a family member for that matter, a liar. When we hear a half-truth our tendency is to make excuses for the offender by rationalizing that it was an oversight, a misunderstanding, or they didn’t have all the facts. How is it I can so easily overlook the offense in others, when I know that if my children tried to speak in half-truths, I didn’t think twice about applying discipline?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Because there is little discipline actually applied in today’s church. Practice is a cumulative thing. The more one practices the better he performs. And not only does performance improve with consistent practice, but so does understanding. Church discipline is not black and white. It even goes beyond fuzzy around the edges. The whites blend through every stage of gray into black. Therefore Romans 14 exists, and I Corinthians 8, and numerous other passages dealing with personal relationship and faith. Whoever steps forward in a matter of church discipline must have the discernment necessary to know whether the gray is white mixed with some black, or black mixed with some white.
-----For although our sins are washed white as snow and we are righteous in the Father’s sight, our ongoing behavior is still tainted by the repetitive occurrence of sin, even minor mistakes and errors. Christ’s blood has supplied the white. Our weakness supplies the black. We are all gray in actual behavior.
-----Lies are deliberate and of the black. Someone once insisted to me that there was no such thing as a half-truth. I could not completely digest his idea, because there is no mortal person in possession of perfect knowledge. Only perfect knowledge is without error or mistake. Any thought or idea we have, beyond the most basic, looses its qualification as total truth. Yet we speak our ideas anyway, simply because we must.
-----Does that then make us all liars? Well, maybe so, since Paul wrote, “Let God be true though every man be false.” (Rom 3:4) I think when we hold our personal views out for others to take as gospel truths, we are in a real sense lying. That is corrosive and divisive to the church. But the rest of the views we put forth as food for thought, even if strongly advertised by ourselves, even though qualifying for the term “half-truth,” I do not believe are worthy to draw disciplinary activity, or even the shame of a label.
-----The black of selfish ambition and vain conceit mixed to gray with the white of holy expressions and righteous activity is discernable. It should be disciplined. The white of
selfless ambitions and godly consideration grayed with the black of imperfect knowledge and poorly honed skills should not be. But of course, that is why we are given teachers and instructed to encourage and build one another up.
Love,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment