WHEN TRUTH MATTERS
Truth doesn’t change because of relevance. Truth is truth. Culture can be relevant. Truth is contextual.
One day my son Benjamin asked me a question that I believe was the catalyst for a change in my own thinking. About Benjamin, he’s a deep thinker. He was only nine when he asked me this. He was reading in Exodus and he came upon the place where Moses is turned aside by the burning bush. Just as Moses is about to walk into his life changing encounter, God told him to stop and of all things, take off his shoes. “Why did he do that, Dad? Why did God ask him to take off his shoes?”
God was asking Moses to place himself at His mercy, to have complete faith in His motive. That translates beautifully in the life of a believer. When you really scrutinize what it means to have faith, it’s also about making yourself vulnerable. Vulnerable’s root word comes from the Latin, vulnerā, it means to wound. Vulnerable literally means “woundable.” When I am staring at a blank white page or canvas I have this initial fear that what I am about to attempt will be a failure, but if I am not willing to convey what’s inside, then I already fail.
God has placed this gift within us, earthen vessels, to glorify Himself in us. Through our lips in speech or song, our hands on canvas or sculpture, our body and feet in dance, every member is designed to create praise from vulnerability.
Think about what Jesus said about prayer. He said not to make vain repetition like the heathen, right? Well, why not? That’s a valid question, don’t you think? Here’s my opinion: He’s looking for His reflection as the Creator in you. Reciting a list of memorized words can be beautiful, no doubt, but they’re not your words.
Be creative in your approach to Him. Be willing to be wounded by people who don’t understand you or your vision. In the end nobody will know what you thought or felt unless you expressed it. Even God, the Creator, manifested, or made Himself visible, to the world as the man, Jesus Christ, the express image of God.
That’s a beautiful illustration about what God is trying to do through us, but here’s the point, God told Moses to take his shoes off in the desert and then told the Hebrew slaves to make sure they had their shoes on before they left to go to the desert. The fact that God told Moses to take off his shoes was irrelevant to the Hebrew slaves the night they were fleeing Egypt, even though it was true.
Why, because it was out of context. The truth here didn’t have to be relevant, it had to be contextual. If we are going to express the truth of God’s word today, it won’t be because we change it to make it relevant, truth doesn’t have to be relevant, in fact most people are getting tired of the watered down stuff we’re pumping out today. So much of what we are doing in the name of being relevant just becomes fodder for the next cliché. Truth, though, needs to be presented in a way that can be put into the context of the lives of the people you are reaching for. {From Cardboard Astronaut : Truth Is Irrelevant}
I was driving in rural Kentucky one day and I came across this old run down store. The front porch had been hit by a large truck years before, (I was told this by an elderly gentleman who was working on the building) the roof was sagging, and there was an entire section of the wall completely knocked down. I stopped to take some photos and was struck by an image. There, in an old worn latch was a pin, locking the door.
Truth is Irrelevant
There was an eight foot hole immediately to the left of the door (which I walked in through) where the cinder block wall had collapsed, but the door was locked. At some point that little pin was significant. A man or woman placed it there with all confidence that it would protect their stuff, and in theory, it worked, but in the context that it’s in now, it has no application. Did “truth” change? No, but the context did. The point here is not about relevance, a latch and pin are always relevant to a door, it is about where the door is.
Some of my darkest days have been when I woke up with the knowledge that most of the things I believed and said I stood for were just concepts and theories that I was not actually living, and not only that I wasn’t living them, but that I hadn’t forged any avenues to apply them.
The hardest days, for me anyway, have always been church days. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Church, but so many times I am frustrated with myself when it’s all over, because I sing songs and make these incredible declarations about what I think and know about Jesus and His passion to reach the lost and help the helpless and the broken, but I haven’t and I don’t. The ideas and theories were true and relevant, I identified with them, but I didn’t actualize them into the context of my life.
The fact that Jesus can heal is true for every culture and era, but until a believer takes the theory, in whatever form it was presented to make it “relevant” to him/her, and contextualizes it, bringing it into action in their lives, it is irrelevant, regardless of how “relevant” it is.