Show a man his failures without Jesus, and the result will be found in the roadside gutter. Give a man religion without reminding him of his filth, and the result will be arrogance in a three-piece suit.
~Max L. Lucado (1955- )
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
~ paul, The Least of The Apostles, in Galatians 5
Oh beloved, it is true. There is truth. And truth does not change. Truth is simply reality as defined by G_d and it reigns free forever in the Light of the council of the ages. Nothing ever changes truth, as it has no viable challengers. So, though a liar mount a great assault on the truth, it matters not how great the liar is. Further, our refusal to accept anything true in no way makes that truth untrue. All things dwell in truth’s light across the æons in the eternal court of ideas.
Truth wins.
And just as true as the statement above is, is the truth that those who have found The Truth must – both submit to It – and contend for It. But, in contending for the truth, it is imperative that we must refrain from entering any place of contention or division with another.
There are many eddies and currents within the flow of those who are truly believers in Christ Jesus. We manifest ideas and thoughts and interests and actions in a burst and spray of Light from the seven Spirits of G_d who operate in the Church. And as surely as the body has only One Head (who is surely THE Way, and THE Truth, and THE Life), it has many members who function in amazingly different ways.
Can we see it? Seeing other theology as wrong – and then acting to quash that thought – creates cancellation and turbulence in the power of the Church to operate in the world. Instead of us jostling like the diligent ants we should be, we are squaring of like rams in heat and simply hammering away at each other. Oh yeah, somebody might win some day, but so what beloved? The victory will be worse than Pyrrhic. The hundreds of thousands of souls lost in the battle each day – will the toll be worth it? Will we really be happy that we have hammered our sense of the tense of some verb down everyone else’s throat?
Meekness, we know, will inherit the earth. And meekness is giving up the right to be right.
What if we simply presented the truth?
What if we simply and profoundly loved each other?
What if we allowed the Holy Spirit to lead us in the symphony He is writing to the glory of the Father about our Lord Jesus Christ?
What if we simply put our eyes on the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and marched into His marvelous Light?
What if we followed His overt command in Scripture and abandoned fear – and simply held to the vital tenets of our faith?
We seem to have no trouble condemning our brothers for sins that show their weakness. But why is it that those sins which uncover our own fears and weaknesses are off limits? What if we truly asked Him to search our hearts for the anxieties therein and asked Him to truly remove them?
This fool of a writer has seen it work under the worst of circumstances. Love has triumphed over darkness and lies. It seems that our error is worrying about the errors we see in others. We become afraid that somehow falsehood will grow and take over the world forever – even though history has always and ever proven that truth wins.
So, yeah stand for truth… and may we even die for it if called to do so. But, may we all with the same vehemence, abandon the finding of fault we are all so wont to do in this place we call the Church. It is simply not doing any good.
