Exposing Ourselves to Truth [Clarification Series, Part 4 of 4]

[This is part four in a series of four. If you haven't already I highly encourage you to go back and read part one. I feel like this will make much more sense if you read the first ones, well first.😄 You can do that here: Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3]

A year or so ago I came across a story in Judges. You can find it in chapter 17. This guy named Micah stole his mother’s 1100 pieces of silver, apparently has a change of heart and decides to give it back. She is naturally delighted to have it returned and dedicates the money to the Lord. She decides to that by making a carved image and a metal image with 200 of the silver pieces. Somehow these images end up in Micah’s house and he makes a shrine, a sort of mini temple for his gods. A random Levite comes into the country, sort of traveling through, and Micah hires him to be the priest of this mini temple. He says to himself, “Now I know God will prosper me because I have a Levite as priest.” This might seem like a weird story to use but just hang on I will explain. Most of us are familiar with the 10 commandments. The second one being the one about not making any graven images. We would say the 10 commandments are pretty important and give us an idea of what God likes and doesn’t like. This guy Micah, should have known this, especially as an Israelite. But he apparently doesn’t (there is the possibility of him just being disobedient.) He simply knows that the Levites are supposed to be priests. So He gets a Levite to be the priest to his household god not knowing that he is breaking the heart of God the whole time. I read this is was just like, wow. For one thing, I didn’t realize this story was in the Bible and for another I was sort of blown away at how little this guy seems to know about God. Then I was like, how much of this could be said about me? Do I know just enough of the Truth to get it completely wrong? Do I know just enough about God to prove that I haven't even begun to know Him at all?

Statistics say that only 11% of Christians have read the whole Bible. That means that 89% of us our walking around only knowing a fraction of truth. One of the enemies favorite phrases to use is, 'Hath God said?' How can we fight him if we don't even know what God said in the first place? Is it any wonder that the lies of the enemy have begun to take over our lives?

Statistics also say that within an hour of hearing someone teach or preach, you have forgotten 50% of what the speaker said. Within 24 hours you have forgotten 70% of what the speaker said. By the end of a week you have forgotten 90% of what the person taught. If you are relying on a church service to keep you up to date on the truth, you are only getting 10% of the fraction of the Bible the pastor taught on that Sunday. A minuscule amount in the great scheme of things.

I say all these things to say that it is so important to expose ourselves to truth on a DAILY basis. Especially when we think of mind wellness. If you remember nothing else I say in this series, I hope you remember this-- Seek the Lord. Daily. Get into His Word, spend time in prayer, get to know the God that you serve. For once you begin to know Him, your thought life, well, really your whole life, will change. You will be able to spot the lies and toxic thoughts so much more quickly.

This is a topic I feel so strongly about that it's hard for me to put it into words. I feel very ill equipped to get this point across because it's so so important. But I know that I know that I know that this is pivotal. Our mind wellness depends on it.

note: I want you to know that I love discussions. A discussion is where you share your different view points, think deeply, and the goal is to understand each other better, if someone changes their mind, fine, but it's not the end goal. I HATE fights. Fights are where you call each other names and assume you know what the other is thinking, it is manipulative and ugly. A fights end goal is to prove how right you are and how wrong the other person is. The reason I am saying all that is this, if I detect any kind of 'fighting' going on in the comments or coming into my emails, I will simply hit delete. I WILL NOT TOLERATE FIGHTS. But please know, I do welcome any kind of discussion.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash