There is an old saying: “if you tell the truth….. you don’t have to remember anything”.
This works……because the truth doesn’t change. Situations can change. Fashions can change. But, the real truths endure. If an idea that you once believed is no longer so (human slavery is OK)…….then it wasn’t the truth in the first place.
The truth has permanence. And this goes against the grain of our modern culture. Today, the ideas that we accept as the truth change. They change with the situation. They change with the people around you. They change with our appetites. We manipulate ideas……and we call them truths…. to get what we want.
An unborn child is not a human being.
If you were born a man……you can be a woman.
Walking out of a store with $800 in merchandise is not stealing.
Climate change is not real.
These are ideas that were absurdities when I was young. And yet today they are widely accepted as true…….they are even codified into law.
I can safely say that as a culture we have entered the “post truth era”. Truth has become malleable. We have become comfortable with amending the truth to satisfy our short-term needs. And the more that we accept ideas that are not true, the easier it is to accept the next untruth…….to use it as though it were true……in order to get what we want. And when that idea no longe serves us, we discard it and replace it with another idea…….a new truth. The greatest abominations of human history have come about as the result of people accepting as truth an idea that was false.
There is another way.
Instead of believing and acting on the current “truth du jour”………running our lives based on what our favorite “talking head” tells us to believe……today, we can follow a set of truths that have not changed for over 2000 years.
The teachings of Jesus are such a set of truths:
Love God
Love your neighbor
Bless those who attack you
Care for the dispossessed…….the soujourner
Most of the people around you will not be doing this. They may even find your behaviour confusing. But each day, you will touch someone. And, maybe, by some small act of kindness, you may change the trajectory of their life.
Such is the power of the truth.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Mark Twain
“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Jesus…..John 8:31-32, ESV
“For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”
Jesus……John 18:37, ESV