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Like a sea of drifting boats with locked motors or sputtering engines just waiting to be picked up, so are the opinions that flow from our fingers across the internet's vast ocean. We wait for them to be picked up. We wait to see who is on our side. Who is in our tribe?
What if someone in desperate need of medical attention is on one of those boats? How will we find them through the mass of bobbing and weaving vessels? How will we find them?
How can we find truth among a mass of opinions?
Facebook - opinions
Twitter – opinions
Instagram – more opinions
LinkedIn – still more opinions.
Mockery grows in some at the rate fear does in others.
As a global pandemic spreads, do we travel or not? Do we stock up or not stock up? Do we go about life as usual or do we push pause for a while?
There’s no shortage of responses to these and a thousand of other questions just like them.
Herein lies the problem with opinions – that’s all they are. They are fleeting and cannot hold the weight of the burdens that come with living in here and now – in 2020.
We exist in a “live your own truth, do what feels good society,” but are there not calls for absolutes among the opinions?
Opinions change but truth – well truth remains when all the opinions cease.
Opinions are defined as beliefs, views or judgements.
Judgements – I see far more of those than anything else.
Truth, truth is constant and according to my favorite 1967 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, truth is: GOD.
Three powerful letters tacked onto the end of a word – a very important word – as if at one time a universal understanding. Oh, how far we’ve come.
Another definition I found for the word truth is stability: the strength to stand or endure.
Will our opinions give us that or must there be something more? Mustn’t there be something definitive? Something stable? Something tried and true?
To the one lying in the drifting boat waiting to be rescued, concerned for your life, there is a truth to be obtained. There is a truth that has been tested and found to be true. A truth that has withstood the test of time.
Pontious Pilate, the governor of Judaea asked Jesus Christ a very important question:
"What is truth?" (John 18:38)
A man named Thomas also asked Jesus an important question.
“Lord, how can we know the way?”
Jesus responded, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me. (John 14:6)
When praying for his disciples before his betrayal and arrest, Jesus made a request and a statement to his father, God. “Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is truth.
In a sea of opinions, we will all drown unless there is a life preserver. We must grasp as something more than opinions and perspectives. We must know truth and we are promised by God himself that if we know the truth – the truth will set us free.
How do I know this?
Because truth set me free.
Jesus rescued me.
I didn’t deserve it. I failed him. I failed everyone I knew. I failed myself and in a crumpled heap on my bedroom floor, nine years ago despite professing to know him for 32 years, I met Jesus Christ.
Now, truth guides me. Not fear or opinions.
Now, I have a purpose instead of wandering aimlessly through this life hoping the next thing will satisfy my longing heart.
If ever the time to tell you has been, friend, it is now. The days in which we find ourselves are serious times.
I had no idea when God impressed it upon my heart less than a year ago, to write a book entitled, What Does God Want You to do Before You Die, there would be a devastating tornado that would take and touch the lives of my fellow Tennessee neighbors.
I had no idea a global pandemic lurked. God knew. The Bible is very clear about the fragility of life and our days are compared to grass – here one day and gone the next.
Right now, with life’s uncertainly heavy upon our minds, will you open up your heart to consider your own life’s fragility?
I am so thankful Jesus did not wait for me to get my act together to welcome me home. In fact, it was just the opposite. The worst day of my life became the greatest when in all of my sin, all of my failure and all of my groanings, he came in.
A love I did not deserve flooded my heart and a peace I’d never known entered. Maybe you’re like me and you’ve uttered the name of Jesus all of your life but you’ve never actually surrendered.
Maybe you’ve considered it, but never got around to it.
Maybe you’ve been so angry at God you couldn’t find His love through the hate.
Now the time is, friend.
Now.
Who can say there will be a tomorrow? Who?
God only knows friend but living with this awareness can fuel your life and give you such hope, purpose and meaning.
You – You were created by a loving God for such a time as this. Will you surrender your life, your past, your fears and most of all your heart to the one who knit you together in your mother’s womb?
Call out to Jesus today.
While it is still today, will you call?