When Form Takes Over For Substance

When I look at the landscape of how people think and act these days, for both non Christians as well as Christians, there seems to be a disconnect between what a person believes or feels and what are the plain facts before them. People don’t seem to be bothered by the inconsistencies in their lives, let alone in the lives of those around them. It seems people just get entrenched in certain lines of thinking without asking themselves if the things they believe are true or false. Maybe we just hate the idea of finding out that we are wrong about something and thus don’t want to know our error.

It appears people either like living with lies or have lost the skill of using reason when deciding what they believe about life. For many people, the idea of evaluating the truth that is in front of them seems too scary. For some people it’s about being ignorant but for the majority of people I doubt that’s the real answer. “Selective Hearing” is more likely the real truth.

How have we have come to this place of choosing to isolate ourselves from what we used to called truth? Our selective thinking has to be in a large part due to the deceptive nature of what we accept from media, especially social media. News reporting now has shifted from news publications to gossip publications. With so much deception and twisting of factual truth people have gotten used to looking at or hearing half truths and thus become incapable of seeing the whole truth on any given subject, whether it be about a person, politics or even about the existence of God. Reason has been “Exchanged” for living in a make believe world because it feels safer when, in fact, it is not.

Take for example hearing on the nightly news that someone was shot and killed by another person that hated them. What once was called news worthy should be called gossip worthy by so called reporters who expound on “Partial Facts” because they jumped to conclusions outside of the facts. They want to be the first out with their news story because being first more than being correct makes rating. All too often, after a few days of a story braking, new “Facts” appear which dispute the first reported event. We have embraced the bias the news media sold us and we are now corrupted in our thinking. By the time the full story comes out no one really cares about new facts because we “Believe” the first story that the shooter hated the other person.

Here is the worst part about reasoning out the facts from the lies.  Christians are in the same boat as secular people. We tend to listen to our favorite preacher expound on some scripture passage and from then on believe that interpretation without researching the scripture for ourselves. We become “Parrots” rather than students of the scripture and of reason. We lose the ability to have “Critical Reasoning” because we just accept the first explanation we hear rather than doing the work of study. Many times, we seem too lazy to care and that includes me at times.

In the book of Micah, the Lord challenges how the nation of Judah thinks and then challenges them to consider their ways derived from poor facts and poor reasoning. God challenges their poor reason and logic for true biblical understanding. What God spoke to Judah so long ago is what he is still speaking to us today. God lists just three major things that should guide our thinking and behavior.

Micah 6:8 

He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you – But to do “JUSTLY” -To love “MERCY” and to “WALK HUMBLY” with your God?

So here are some things to ponder. God speaks to his people about doing “Justly“. You would think he would have pointed out walking with God first but he doesn’t. He points out the first thing, which is to look at how we treat others. God speaks all through the Old Testament about how badly we treat one another. All the sins of Israel and Judah revolve around how they cheated and lied to each other and how for the sake of money and profit they would betray each other. The funny thing is that Jesus said the same thing because we as human beings seem to never learn the truth of our faith or the lack there of. We somehow or other “Interpret” scripture to really say what it doesn’t say in order to be self directed in life rather than God directed

John, the last living apostle of the original 12 that followed Jesus in his ministry, had asked the question of how could we say we love God and yet hate our fellow man when we can not see God? (1 John 4:20)  The point is that words are cheap but facts don’t lie. Loving God automatically means we are to work at loving each other or we are lying to ourselves and others. Loving Justice must also include loving mercy when it is right and just to do so.

To love “Justice” means we want to be fair in dealing with God and man. Loving “Mercy” means we love forgiving and pardoning when doing so is right, fair and just.

The last point of God’s word through the prophet Micah was that we are to “Walk Humbly” with God. The idea is we are to acknowledge that we don’t know all the facts of life but God does “SO” the only wise and sensible thing to do is walk with his guidance. The idea of humility has become such a distorted idea of thinking we are wrong and worth nothing.  Nothing is the farther from the truth. True humility embraces all the skills and intelligence we have “BUT” we should not be fooled into thinking we know more than we do. Humility embraces our strengths and our weaknesses because it is who we truly are. That becomes our freedom because we refuse to hide from what we aren’t to become all that God has in mind for us to be.

These three simple guiding principles of God given to Micah would solve all our misconceptions that we have embraced in life that are either fabrications or false truths our our own. Soloman said it well about the “Fear of the Lord”, which is not about being afraid of God in a way that causes us to cower away from him.

Proverbs 1:7

The “Fear” of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Only fools despise wisdom and discipline.

Healthy respect for the fact that God knows everything knowable and that he has the power to change things should cause respect and humility in us if we are willing to embrace it.

Questions:

1) Have you been the kind of person that believes the first depiction of a story or passage of scripture? If you are, you are in real danger of being led astray into believing what is untrue and false. ( 2 Timothy 2:15)

2) Do you walk in a healthy amount of humility? You know you do if you constantly seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit in your daily life. ( John 14:25 )

Loving to reason out the truth to walk in wisdom,

Pastor Dale