Life Coaching: Do We Really Want Hear The Truth?
/“The entirety of Your word is truth, and every one of Your righteous judgments endures forever.” Psalm 119:160
How often do we ask ourselves, “do I really want to know the truth?” For me personally, I think I want to hear it, but when looking into God’s word, I sometimes think I’d rather just live my life blissfully ignorant when confronted with some of the more difficult truths. Like “love thy neighbor” and "forgive 70 times 7.” And my personal favorite “let patience have its perfect work.” I am beginning to sense a theme here…
On a scale of one to ten, how truthful do we believe God’s word really is? I mean, do we assign Levitical law a 2 on a sliding scale of relevance, yet reward grace with a 10? It is my belief that contemporary church does exactly that. We have somehow minimized the Old Testament, and rewritten the New to make it say whatever we think is relevant in the moment. We pull out the Old Testament stories when we want to prove a point about faith, endurance, beauty, etc., but don’t talk much about Jepthah’s daugther or Jael and the tent peg. It’s my belief the reason we do this is because we don’t have an explanation for these stories that fits our agenda. We have re-created God into our image instead of conforming ourselves into His.
Here’s the thing, folks…there are things in the Bible we cannot explain. There are things in the Bible we don’t understand. There are things in the Bible we probably don’t need to try to figure out. There are things in the Bible that make us scratch our heads. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) We don’t understand middle Eastern culture; and 2) We try to read the Bible in light of today’s societal norms. We can fix Problem Number 1 by reading up on middle Eastern customs and traditions. That sheds a lot of light on some of the biblical teachings. Problem Number 2 is much more difficult to fix. We tend to see the world in light of where we live, our neighborhoods, our communities, even our countries. And that’s something you just can’t do with the Word of God. The Bible is just not a normal book, so there’s no need to make it fit modern society’s views, and no need try to normalize it. We can’t. We can’t normalize a book that was written for eternal significance.
I am not in any way intending to minimize the Bible for what it is—the written Word of God. Rather, I am trying to emphasize how society and how we, as Christians, have taken something holy, sacred, and perfect, and squished it into something that would be unrecognizable to most early Christians. If we take the Book of Acts, for instance, it is a perfect blueprint of how we Christians should be living our lives. Yet, we insist on commercializing, packaging, and modernizing something that needs no alteration. The words in the Bible are what they are—written with humanity in mind for eternity. It is a shame we even needed the Book, and we wouldn’t have needed it if Adam and Eve had behaved themselves. We could be walking with God in the cool of the evening, enjoying His manifest presence every.single.day. but NOOOOO…..but that is a story for another day.
I am simply trying to say this: the Word of God is absolutely perfect. Read it. Embrace it. Let it speak to you. Let it heal you. Let it minister to you. Read it at face value. Read it for spiritual value. Read it for financial advice. Read it for emotional support. But read it through the eyes of your spirit, not through the eyes of societal programming, political correctness or even patriotism. Our obligations as Christians are well above our obligations as American citizens. If we did one tenth of what we are commanded to do, we could end war, world hunger, slavery, and murder. We would love our neighbors, forgive them, embrace them, lead them to Christ, and live in harmony as much as possible here on this earth.
