INDIFFERENT TO TRUTH?! You've Got to Read This!!

One of the most debilitating issues facing any person, especially the Christian today, is our unwitting indifference to truth. Follow me. We learn many truths in God's word in such a way that we can repeat them verbatim. But that's where it slogs down. So pervasive is this pattern that we can miss the gargantuan mountain in front of us--a mountain of biblical virtues that bear no resemblance in real life--but SHOULD! It's one thing to learn something, quite another to LIVE it out! Stay with me. It's crucial for us to persistently test our belief system by asking, "Do I really believe this?" When we ask this question (which may sound innocuous at first) we must relentlessly persist by giving ourselves no "wiggle room" to worm our way out of a bone fide life-changing response. 

Scripture actually recognizes this "tendency," this Spirit-hindering trend to pass over truth willingly yet ineffectively. This is futile and if persisted in will lead one to disallow Scripture from having any honest effect upon their life! Please hang in there with me! Deuteronomy nails this point home. Listen:

DOING TRUTH

"Now this is the commandment that the LORD your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them . . ." (6:1). Note, he did not say he taught them so that they might KNOW them but DO them! THERE IS A DIFFERENCE, a difference which has been devastating to the church! We can attend church and think that we have done our "duty" when we hear and learn what the preacher is saying. That's good, . . . well, . . . sort of. It's NOT good unless we internalize the truth, own the truth, LOVE the truth as if it were ours! There's more . . .

FORGET GOD?!

When you have entered the promised land and have received all the great blessings which YOU did NOT earn (cities, houses, and vineyards, and food), "THEN TAKE CARE LEST YOU FORGET THE LORD . . ." (vv. 11-12). Forget? What does it mean "forget?" Oh, WE know what the word "forget" means. "Not remembering"--right? It's more than that. What kind of forgetting is this? The Dictionary of Biblical Languages (Swanson) explains the Hebrew to mean, "to overlook, or disregard; to lose sight of the significance of," or, "to have an improper response to the thing being considered." Here is the kind of forgetting that treats God as a side-line item, a nice truth, even an important truth, but non-essential, perhaps even (dare I say it) irrelevant?! Really? God, irrelevant? He may as well be, for the little "air-time" he ever gets in many "Christian's" lives. They know his name, but not his heart. And that is NOT to know him. 

Point? Please! Let us not accept the hearing of truth in such a way that it does not at the same time MOVE us, AFFECT us, PERSUADE us, or DELIGHT us! "Take care lest you 'treat as insignificant' either God or his Word." Turn objective facts into unending treasures.