Fifty people
were killed and 53 wounded in a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando by
an Islamist terrorist. While President Obama called it terrorism, he avoided
using the word Islamic. The Islamic terrorist attack on our military base was
labeled as “workplace violence.” I’m only
guessing, but I suspect the LGBT community will hold the administration’s feet
to the fire and demand the attack be labeled this for what it is, Islamic terrorism.
Unfortunately, we in the church can be just as guilty of watering down our own
words, and those of Scripture. Paul wrote, “For the time will come when men
will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they
will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching
ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the
truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Tim 4:3-4 NIV).
1 comment:
Gail;
-----I determined in my Senior year of High School that my basic direction in living was to be a student of life. This was during the lazy, hazy, crazy days of anti-establishment (gee, I think we could use a little of that today) and do your own thing (as long as your own thing was anti-establishment.) Every kind of idea was floating around, except those well-founded-in-reality, more conservative type ideas. They sank like rocks. So America’s heart somehow opened to these bathless kids dressed in tatters, made lazy by crazy ideas brewed up from LSD and weed hazy minds. I loved my dad and was coming to love my other mom, Dad‘s second wife. They were conservative. I loved my mom and brother and sister, who were drifting left into the muddle of crazy ideas. I was not willing to dismiss attachment to either. The reality of confusion struck me, I suppose, with that challenge to study life for the truth. It seemed rational to me that the truth was the escape from confusion.
-----So, like Pilot, “What is truth” became my question. But unlike Pilot, I expected an answer. And I knew I would get one, because what things are is true in itself regardless of what man thinks or says. The confusion of the times was evidence of the extreme biasness of human nature. I did not ponder bias long before I realized that everyone is so steeped in it that no two people will see much of anything alike at even the fundamental levels of detail, let alone to the most intricate and refined levels. So, how could anyone possibly know the truth while being human with that nature of inescapably great bias? I didn’t ponder the question long. Since you’re going to be biased just because you are human, then by all means, be biased towards the truth.
-----So how can we be biased towards what we don’t know? Well, that’s easy. We bias ourselves toward what we don’t know by knowing what we don’t know is what it is regardless of our not knowing it while knowing what man knows are only possibilities, not answers. Every possibility is worth exploring as far as it parallels the bits of truth you do know. Every explorer has at least a few bits of truth as his embarking point. All found bits of truth are congruent with the whole of truth by the definition and nature of truth. They have that “…ness” about them. And as you follow the bits of truth, attesting one to another by their congruity, they reveal which possibilities are real and which are mere fantasies.
-----Looking back on it, it doesn’t surprise me that I only spent a couple months of thinking before winding up in church acknowledging my Creator and Savior. It impresses me that my relationship with Christ rooted into me while attending a Pentecostal Church and matured in me while attending a Christian Church (that is, a church of the Campbellite movement.) Therefore, I’ve now come to say about truth that it has awareness. If you want it enough to search for it and desire it enough to be changed by what you find of it, then it will come searching for you. If truth is your biggest “must have”, then you are one of its own, and He will not allow His own to remain lost.
-----Oh! Have I forgotten to mention anything about the teachers? Oops. I guess I get a little carried away by those Bible ideas anymore. Must be gettin’ old and senile. The good teachers are congruent with what the Bible says in both their teaching and living. Truth not only has awareness, it sheds light.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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