Woman holding a glowing sphere labeled TRUTH amid digital networks and words including Integrity, Logic, Fact, and Falsehood

Truth and Deception

“People, I call out to you; my cry is to the children of Adam. Learn to be shrewd, you who are inexperienced; develop common sense, you who are foolish. Listen, for I speak of noble things, and what my lips say is right. For my mouth tells the truth, and wickedness is detestable to my lips. All the words from my mouth are righteous; none of them are deceptive or perverse. All of them are clear to the perceptive, and right to those who discover knowledge. Accept my instruction instead of silver, and knowledge rather than pure gold. For wisdom is better than jewels, and nothing desirable can equal it.” (Proverbs‬ ‭8‬:‭4‬-‭11‬ ‭CSB – Read the chapter) ‬‬

We live today in a world in which truth—real truth—is becoming ever more important. Because of the rise of AI and the creation of phantom facts and increasingly sophisticated fake photos videos it is difficult to know if what we are seeing with our eyes on a screen is real. This unmooring of our lives and our culture from truth leads to a degradation of trust which in turn makes everything we do more difficult. We need the foundation of truth more than ever before so that our entire culture doesn’t give way to cynicism, doubt, and a host of other civilization-destroying traits. In this kind of a world, godly wisdom is vital. Let’s talk about wisdom’s self-description and why we can trust it even when we can’t trust anything else.

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Silhouette of a man kneeling in prayer on a hilltop during a vibrant sunset.

Morning Musing: Philippians 3:18-19

“For I have often told you, and now say again with tears, that many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction; their god is their stomach; their glory is in their shame; and they are focused on earthly things.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Paul was really passionate about leading people to Jesus. He was convinced beyond measure of the truthfulness of the Gospel, of the reasonableness of the Christian worldview. He vividly remembered the other side, and intimately understood the contrast between the two. He didn’t want anyone to be stuck living forever like he once was and was willing to go through just about anything to keep them from that so far as it depended on him. But he was also honest about the fact that not everyone was going to come around. The us-and-them divide was real. In the next few verses he contrasts one with the other. Let’s take a look starting with the latter.

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Knowing What’s True

This past Sunday we kicked off a brand new teaching series at FBCO called, Reasons to Believe.  For the next several weeks we are going to tackle some common objections to the Christian faith, try to turn them on their heads, and show why, rather than offering reasons to not believe, they actually offer us very good reasons to embrace the Christian faith with even more tenacity than before.  This won’t necessarily be an easy journey, but it will be a good one.  I hope you’ll come along for the entire ride because in the end, we’ll see that having a relationship with Jesus is the most important reason to believe.  In this first part, we face head-on the notion that Christianity’s claim to be the exclusive pathway to truth and life isn’t nearly so arrogant as we are often taught.

 

Knowing What’s True

There’s an old story about a man on a quest for truth.  He wanted to know what was true and what was not so that he could dedicate his life to the truth.  His search eventually led him to seek out an obscure guru who was rumored to have spent much of his life pondering the question of truth.  As a result he was considered most wise on this particular topic.  When the man finally found the wise, old guru he posed his question to him: “How can I know what’s true and what’s not true?” Read the rest…