“If anyone tells me it is an easy thing to speak the truth, I should tell him that he had never tried it.” GM
Facts vs. Truth
This sermon, “The Truth,” is for those who are ready to leave “These Things We Believe” for “The One in Whom I Trust!”. This sermon has been a timely and insightful sermon for me. As I am writing these words, I turned sixty-nine, and MacDonald’s thoughts have taken decades for me to be ready to hear and consider. In this sermon, he distinguishes between “facts” and “truth”. To me, in this time of my life, being right is overrated. Facts fall within the context of being right or not and in the facts we think we find understanding and control. I can truthfully say I have at least turned the corner on this one and care little for this major source of strife and division!
Facts are more about outcomes. Truths are more about presence even when we are disappointed in the outcomes. Our Heavenly Father is not faithful because He did this or that. He is faithful because HE IS!!! Christianity was never, to my chagrin, about me getting what I want or fixing what I need fixing, but about being in relationship with Them!
I Am Truth
Truth is a person and Jesus claims this revelation for Himself! Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6 NAS). Therefore, truth is reserved for the highest knowing possible.
Liar, Lunatic, or Lord – C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
This truth has become essential in my everyday life. We are not called upon, for example, to believe the facts about the incarnation, but the truth of it! In contrast to facts, MacDonald asserts that truth is about the meaning, purpose, and intent of something or someone. To be “right” about Jesus is to have read a book about Him. But, to know Him as the “Truth” is to know Him intimately, face-to-face. Reading about Him and learning facts about Him does not lead us to relationship and trust, but knowing His thoughts, mind, heart, intents, and purposes does! To know the Truth of Jesus is to trust in His faithfulness, and faithfulness is one-hundred percent relational.
Truth, as found in the imagination of man, is the power to recognize and think God’s thought about something or someone after Him! To look into the face of a flower, a butterfly, or experience thirst and quenching is to see God’s face and ours!
I Am Truth is the introductory blog for the Sermon below: