What you believe doesn't matter compared to what is actually
true. From a spiritual perspective, a
belief in God or Jesus isn't very significant unless that belief is actually
true in reality. If it turns out that a Christian's belief in
God is actually wrong, then the fact that they had tremendous faith in that
belief doesn't matter at all. People
these days seem to have the idea that what you believe about something matters
more than the reality of what you are believing in.
Having faith in something doesn't make it true, nor does it make it more likely to be true.
Similarly, lots of people believing something doesn't make it any more
true. Supposedly a thousand years ago,
lots of people believed that the earth was the center of the universe. That still didn't make it true. It is possible for individuals to be deceived,
which leads to people having faith in things that aren't true. Therefore, it is possible for groups of
individuals to all be deceived as well.
And since our society seems to be removing cultural obstacles to
deceptive practices, expect a lot more people to be a lot more deceived in the
future. Truth is no longer valued the
way it has been in the past.
Timothy Keller has a great line that illustrates the problem
with that approach: "Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to
weak faith in a strong branch." As
a guy who spends a lot of time climbing trees, I really like that example. The interesting thing about the scenario he
presents is that both cases preclude forward progress or growth. Strong faith in a weak branch can lead to a
jarring fall, no matter how much faith you have in it. Having more faith in it could actually lead
to a worse fall, instead of carefully testing it before fully rusting it. That fall may prevent one from trusting ANY
branches in the future. But weak faith
in a strong branch will also halt progress upward. Believing that a branch isn't strong enough
to support you, will stop you from utilizing it on your accent. So, upward progress requires both the
discernment to identify weak branches, and also the faith to actually trust
your life on ones that are solid.
Spiritual growth works the same way. We must be able to identify deceptive
falsehoods about God and his purposes for us.
But we must have enough trust to be able to believe the truth that God
is constantly revealing to us. Otherwise
we will never be able to develop spiritually, and grow closer to God. It is the nature of relationships to be
dynamic, constantly strengthening or fading, and there is no reason to think
that a relationship with God would be any different.
That growth based on trust is the foundation for other
relationships as well. One of the
interesting things about marriage (I am told, from multiple sources) is that
you never stop learning more about your spouse.
This should not be too surprising, since most people would agree that
you never stop learning about yourself.
This is partially due to the fact that people are always growing and
changing. But people are incredibly
complicated, and no one but God can really know everything about us.
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