This week's Good Word written by David McGrew ~
John 14:6 “ I am the way, THE TRUTH and the life. “
Growing up as a boy, in my time and place, I very typically had a somewhat fragile relationship with the truth. I was used to bending it to my needs in the moment.
Without making excuses or casting blame, in a world where you felt isolated and surrounded by ignorance, thugs, and bullies, it was a go-to tactic of self-preservation.
The problem with having a tentative relationship with the truth is that it alters and hardens a person’s perception of reality. Even a child’s. The great danger of course is that deception and lying are the core elements of virtually every other sin a man can commit. If you can’t lie well, if you don’t learn to lie to yourself, you won’t get very far into sin without it destroying everyone and everything around you. No one wants that, so you learn to cover, hide, alter and outright deny in an attempt to hold life together.
Later on through, after deception and sin have brought us to our knees, that harsh jolt of reality in meeting THE TRUTH; that jolt we now call being born again, begins a dramatic reset of our relationship with truth. All truth.
Whether it’s a slow or a fast, or even a complete, reboot depends on many things, but it’s inevitably true that staying alive to Christ both costs, and pays, through whole new understandings of reality.
Growing awareness to the depravity and deception around you, awakens understanding to the deception and depravity you might of once thought of as reality. That can have some unpleasant moments.
Christ is THE TRUTH, and as we come to trust and believe this, we understand he’s worthy to be the lens we view the universe and its fulness through.
With some fear and trepidation, we finally grasp that we can’t turn truth off and on. If we deny the realities that we don’t want to accept, we alter our ability to receive the truths we do want to accept. We are not the standard of truth.
To stay alive, healthy, and growing requires us to see truth as more than data and facts. It requires an approach that goes beyond the handling of cold information. An intimacy is required for both the person of Christ and the truths that He rules by. An intimacy, that increasingly invites us to receive, “a love of the truth.” It is that love of the truth that guarantees our ever-upward growth in His kingdom.