The world swindles and deceives, its enticements grand and its lies grander. There will always be someone or something trying to knock us off balance. Frankly, nothing surprises me anymore. Still, I find myself wondering why people seem to care so little about kindness and even less about truth. Personal feelings and agendas seem to stand in the way of our having honest, forthcoming, truthful conversations. We would all do well to recalibrate our emotions, to think critically, not emotionally about the opinions and perspectives before us. Truth matters. Kindness too. We should be allowed to embrace the things we care about, to voice our opinions but not at the expense of kindness and truth, and wee should certainly not live in fear of hurting someone’s feelings simply because we believe differently than they. The world, however, seems to say, “Only certain beliefs are to be shared, only certain voices heard;” thereby, placing limitations on meaningful, truthful conversations. Even so, I know the Lord is with us, right here, right now. Unpopular or not…I choose Jesus.
What we yearn for is not to be found in the ideas, the opinions, the emotions, the perspectives of others. It is not to be found in the material or the popular. Leader or follower we need to make certain it is God’s perspective, the mind of God we adopt—that we are led not by our feelings but by truth. “The heart never takes the place of the head, but it can and should obey it.” (C.S. Lewis) Fixated on our own mental, physical, material, moral, emotional and spiritual needs, we limit what God can do in our lives and in the lives of others. Our yearnings overburden us and do damage to our souls. When we seek—we do find. We find a job if we want one. We find a mate if we want one or when the one we have, proves to be less than what we imagined or we simply change our minds. We are pretty good at seeking until we find or taking...whatever the case may be. Driven to accomplish more, we do; but the cost to our souls, our hearts, our families and our relationships is great. We seek to become better versions of ourselves or so we say, but we cannot, and we will not until we stop looking outside ourselves for the answers. The yearning God placed deep within us is the one we seem to so easily deny. We need to stop being tossed about on the winds of every whim, stop acting like middle school children and seek the wisdom and truth given to us from the beginning. “Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place.”(Psalm 51:6, NIV) The best thing, really the only thing we can do if we want lasting change, change that is eternal, if we want our lives and the world to be forever different, is to do what God expected us to do from the outset…to learn from Him. Nothing in this world will change until we become our true selves—the selves God created us to be. We must become like Jesus not the person our social media accounts say we are or the titles we go by at work, the politics or social cause we follow, or the person someone tells us we are or should be. It is possible to live in the world and not be of it. Our refuge, our strength comes from the Lord, and our truth too. The yearning in our souls tells us there is something more. It is, however, not to be found in our earthly desires—a different relationship, a different house, a new car, a new job, or one of our many addictions. It is not found in what our neighbors or our friends have, think or do. All those things, once acquired, those objects of our desire, do nothing but leave us empty and yearning for more.
There is a powerful evil existing at all levels of our society. That evil, though not new, bears down on us and threatens us. We need to take our eyes off the world, let go of our agendas, stop believing in the agendas of others, and start today trusting in the Lord and walking intentionally upon the path He planned for each one of our lives. “…blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:7-8) What a beautiful picture that paints for the lives we could be living!
Our only true hope is in the Lord. Yet, popularity calls. It, like evil, is an enticing beast. It would have us believe that because something is popular, it is the best, most effective path to follow. What appeals to the masses must be correct. All those people cannot be wrong. Yes, they can be, and they are. Anyone of us can be misguided. Anyone of us can be duped. All over the world people are attempting to erase truth. We seem to have forgotten the opinion of the majority is still just an opinion. Saying something is true does not make it so. Yet, we opt for the comfortable. We condemn, insult and shame those who choose the unpopular. Jesus was not the popular choice. He knew that. “Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his home.’”( Mark 6:4) Even his own brothers did not believe him; however, there would come a time when they could no longer deny the truth. Like them, we all must wake up, take a step back and see not what we want to see or what others tell us to see but what is really there. Sometimes that requires us to learn new ways of thinking, new ways of understanding. Perhaps it requires us to alter our path or choose a different path altogether. It might mean admitting we are wrong. We might for the very first time have to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. We must leave all our worldly desires behind. Being able to do all of that, of course, will depend on whether or not we choose absolute truth or some subjective substitution someone tells us is true. Human beings are funny creatures where truth is concerned. If we want something to be true, we convince ourselves and often others it is. Of course, the truth remains the truth no matter what we say or do, and our deliberate ignorance changes nothing.
Every choice we make has the power to save us and the power to save someone else as well. Perhaps though, our idea of saved differs. I think our “save the world” mentality causes us to lose perspective. We have forgotten what truly matters. We have fallen asleep. We worship little gods and goddesses or maybe we are the god or goddess being worshipped. People wield their power and authority over us. They tell us what they are doing is the right thing, the good thing for all of us, and we follow them. We are led to believe if we follow this social movement or that one, we are good Christians, doing what God calls us to do. It is true…we are called to care for others…the widows, the orphans, the poor. We are called to love our neighbors and our enemies and to do so much more, but we are not called to manipulate the truth to satisfy our agendas. Doing good makes no one immune from evil, but neither does it make us Christian. We need to be wary of the “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” for they are out there. “We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned in five minutes.” (Oswald Chambers) We must, “Be alert and of sober mind. [Our] enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because [we] know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.”(1 Peter 5:8-9)
No agenda, no plan is better for any of us than God’s plan for our lives, and frankly, we do ourselves and those around us a great injustice when we live in fear of hurting someone’s feelings or of going against the grain of society simply because everyone else seems to be walking that route. Personally, I am awake enough to understand and be sympathetic to what other people are going through. But I agree with Oswald Chambers when he wrote, “If sympathy is all that human beings need, then the Cross of Christ is an absurdity and there is absolutely no need for it. What the world needs is not “a little bit of love,” but major surgery. If you think you are helping lost people with your sympathy and understanding, you are a traitor to Jesus Christ. You must have a right relationship with him yourself, and pour your life out in helping others in his way—not in a human way that ignores God.”
These days we are likely to be cancelled or lose a friend or two because we dare to dig deeply and live truthfully. When we no longer allow opinions, feelings, misinformation and deception to blur the lines between the truth and untruth, we leave those behind who demand we believe a certain way or follow a certain cause. Do not get me wrong. People should be free to follow whatever cause or path their principles tell them to follow, but no one should feel forced into believing a certain way. That usually is not the way it goes though. People are fine if we go quietly, but they do not like it when we make our disagreements known. That is why it is ever-more-important that we remain kind, but be keen in our judgment, that we choose truth—the only truth, the truth that sets us free. (John 8:32, paraphrased)
In choosing truth, we choose Jesus, “the stone the builders rejected.” (Matthew 21:42, ESV) Jesus, the One “despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain….”(Isaiah 53:3) Even though Jesus was and still seems to be the unpopular choice, I choose him, and I seek to be like the One I follow. Whatever our choice, whether we choose the popular or the unpopular, we become like the ones we follow.
Even with all the chaos, noise and confusion swirling about in the everyday of our lives, we are called to be still and to be fully present. God created us and placed us in this time and this place with an intentional purpose—a plan for our life. We really need to wake up and be fully present. We cannot do that when we allow the world to be our tempest. Society surrounds us with a commotion at times violently apparent, at other times subtly sly, but led by an evil that is only visible when we make the conscious choice to walk in the light of Christ’s presence. In that light, we are allowed the wisdom to discern “the ones delighting in the evil they do;"and those “under the control of the evil one.”(Proverbs 2:14) We see the ones who “call evil good and good evil, and others who “put darkness for light and light for darkness,” the “bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” (Isaiah 5:20) “For fools speak folly, their hearts are bent on evil: They practice ungodliness and spread error concerning the Lord; the hungry they leave empty and from the thirsty they withhold water.” (Isaiah 32:6) They pretend to be our caregivers—our very salvation—they seek things for themselves, "hating the light, fearing it, for in it all deeds are exposed." (John 3:20, paraphrased)
Whether our faith is mountain-moving faith or mustard-seed faith, we can move to a reckless abandon, a love of God and a bold faith where in every moment of our day we see the truth of what is really there. We will see the miraculous and the beautiful, but also experience sadness and sorrow, moments of confusion and doubt, seasons of trial and times of despair, but in all of those the light of Jesus shines through and our faith steady and unwavering leads us through the brambles and the briers of a darkening forest into the light of the open meadow. There will always be someone out there questioning our faith and what we do and questioning God’s goodness too. We need to stop leaning on our own understanding or someone else’s and lean on the One who has the power to save. God and His Word are as relevant today as they have always been. They have the power to change us. They have the power to change the world. “I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”(Romans 8:38-39)