Harvest Daily - October 25, 2005

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Holding to the Truth

Instead, we will hold to the truth in love, becoming more and more in every way like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.

—Ephesians 4:15

In 1991, an interesting little book was published called, The Day America Told the Truth. The authors polled Americans with the assurance they would remain anonymous. They asked only that their questions be answered truthfully. And they received some very amazing answers. It was shocking to find how many Americans lie and steal and are immoral on a regular basis. The authors concluded that when it comes to right and wrong, Americans were a law unto themselves. Of those surveyed for the book, 93 percent declared that they, and no one else, determine what is and isn’t moral in their lives.

It seems we have developed a have-it-our-way approach to faith in God. We want God to conform to our wishes. It is religion à la carte, where we choose only what appeals to us.

In some churches today, pastors are giving shorter and shorter sermons. They say their congregations don’t have the attention spans to listen any longer. The problem is that these sermonettes are producing Christianettes. I would venture to say that more people in the church today know more about self-esteem than they know about self-denial. They know more about inner healing than they do about outward obedience. We are living in a day in which many Christians place psychology on the same level as the Bible or above it.

This is a dangerous time. We should heed the warning of C. S. Lewis, who, many years ago, said, “If you do not listen to theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones.”