Well this is the first of these blogs that I have done here. It is a slightly strange thing writing something like this and wondering if people end up reading it, and if they do, who are they and what do they think??
So if that is you... welcome!
I thought I could kick this whole thing off by actually talking a bit about knowledge and truth. So yeah - we're starting with the light stuff :-)
The scriptures say that "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free". But what is truth, and how do we know it? I have spent much of my Christian life trying to arrive at the knowledge of this kind of truth, and I think there have been moments in my life when I do seem to have particular clarity - and this clarity helps propel me into a place of freedom.
But as I have thought through my faith a lot more, I have begun to realise that my faith is actually.... 'faith'.... And the more I seek to know things, the more I realise that I don't actually really know too much at all. The more I seek to know about God, the more God's infiniteness seems to impose itself on my rather small human brain.
So how are we to know the truth? I think perhaps for me I had seen knowledge and truth from the wrong perspective. So there are a couple of thoughts I would like to propose here:
Firstly, we can often think that knowledge and truth are an endpoint. We think that what we are doing is trying to work our way through to figuring out the idea/truth/point of it all. We are trying to arrive at truth. But the more I have thought about things, the more I have walked with God and the more I have studied etc, the more I have realised that every piece of truth is a beginning, not an ending. We are not aiming to arrive at truth so that then we can simply believe it and move on. Every moment of truth provides us with a whole new set of questions.
In the bible, Jesus says that the most important thing is to Love God, and to Love your neighbour as you love yourself. Now we can take this as a great piece of truth and satisfy ourselves with that.... but that is actually not the point. It might be true... but it is not yet a walk of truth. It proposes a whole new set of questions... What is love? Who is God? Do I love myself and what does this mean? If not, why not? Who is my neighbour? And on and on it goes... Each of these questions leads us on a journey to take the true thing that the scriptures might say, and to actually allow it to resonate with our real, actual, everyday lives so that it can become truth in and through us.
Which actually requires intentionality from us. It requires us to actually care about what the scripture says, not just read it, believe it and move on because we've got our piece of truth.
Truth becomes a journey, not an endpoint. And it becomes a journey of relationship with God... as Christians we are not looking for ultimate knowledge about God but disconnected from God. We understand that our walk as a disciple is connected to actually coming to know more of who God is, and to be intimate with Him.
Which is perhaps why in the bible Jesus says "I am the way, the truth and the life". Jesus is truth. If we really want to know truth we do not find it in a bullet point, a doctrinal statement, or in our own revelation. We find it in walking with Jesus Christ.
This is real truth...
...truth that sets us free
...relationship
...journey
...Jesus Christ.
When we see truth simply as an endpoint, we can become arrogant about our realisation of truth. We can start to act like we have it all together and we look at others and tell them they should become like us. We can become the authority on situations and conditions. We see ourselves as the ones with the answers.
But in actual fact, our truth is in knowing and walking with Jesus Christ. And we are on a journey to know Him and to follow Him. A following that requires humility and servanthood. A following that requires us to leave behind comparisons and competitions, to leave behind posturing and ambition, to leave behind hypocritical attitudes, and to realise that our job is not to tell people how they should be like us, but to invite people into the journey of walking with Christ so that they too may know the truth - and it can set them free.
