Let’s say there is someone in your life that tells you that it’s best to have many large, deep potholes in the road. Your initial reaction would be to correct that person and tell them no, it’s best to have a smooth, well-maintained road. Then you go on about your business until once again, someone begins to start talking about how much better it is to have large, deep holes in the road. And once again, you correct them and tell them no, it is better for the road to be smooth and well-maintained. But they won’t leave it alone. They keep bringing it up, forming all kinds of arguments, mostly based on their own opinion about potholes or what they’ve heard from other people.
You try explaining to them that a smooth road is safer to drive and better for your tires and your shocks. Still they argue. You try explaining to them the truth that can be discerned from simply observing a car driving down a smooth, well-maintained path, versus a path full of potholes. Still they argue. You try explaining to them that you’ve read the manual and you understand the reasons behind the mechanics. Still they argue. Finally, you try to explain to them that when you truly see the value in each road, you must repair them when they are broken, you must fill the holes when they are empty. But they will have nothing of it, the roads must be allowed to be broken, the roads must have their potholes. You are no longer allowed to say that the road is “broken”, you are no longer allowed to say that the road shouldn’t have holes. When you offer repair, it is seen as reproach. Emotions have become truth.
They ask you why you care so much about whether or not there are potholes in the road? “Let us drive on our potholes in peace!” they say. But before long, they start teaching the children in school that the roads should be full of potholes. Then your children begin to ask, “What’s wrong with driving on a road with potholes?” They teach them that potholes are just a normal way of life, no need to fill them or maintain the roads, just leave the roads alone, just let them be. What they fail realize is that they are not just driving on their potholes in peace, because you have to drive those roads too.
What they fail to realize is that the reason you care so much about their insistence about potholes is because they are teaching a lie. Blinded by their own delusion, they cannot see that the lie they teach is the foundation of their own imprisonment, a paradox to their own self-proclaimed intellectual reasoning.
What they fail to realize is that when a person has made a lifetime commitment with eternal consequences to speak the truth and to seek the truth, then the only thing that person can do when confronted with a lie, is to speak truth. Any deviation from the truth affects all of us. Ask Eve.
The reason we should all care about lies is because scripture says that we are to love the truth, because it is our love of the truth that will save us in these end days, “Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.” (2 Thess 2:9,10). Unfortunately, scripture also says that for those who “refused to love the truth”, God would send them “a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.” (2 Thess 2:10-12). Let me repeat that, “they will believe the lie in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth..”
Truth is important to God, so it should be important to us. And a very uncomfortable and unpopular truth, is that the God of the Bible judges sin. The god of comfortable Christianity may not, but the God of the Bible does. And the sooner professing Christians get to know the God that they claim to worship and serve, the sooner we can get to standing on truth instead of arguing about it. Because holes in the road affect everyone.
“So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.” (2 Thess 2:15)
“Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from any brother who leads an undisciplined life that is not in keeping with the tradition you received from us.” (2 Thess 3:6)
“He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it was taught, so that by sound teaching he will be able to encourage others and refute those who contradict this message.” (Titus 1:9)
“I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.” (John 17:14-19)
Talitha Koum 