I need to know the truth. You need to know the truth.
And we won’t know the truth by listening to our culture – it is full of lies and half-truths and rationalizations. The amount of fake news that is being repeated like it’s true is staggering these days.
Where’s the only place we can find real truth?
God’s Word. The Bible.
I have a huge thirst to know the real truth. I don’t need to hear what he thinks or she thinks or they think or even what you think. What God thinks – that’s what is important to me.
This thirst has taken me on an 15-year journey of reading the entire Bible every year. After several years of reading the entire Bible, I started saying things like “that’s not in the Bible’ when people quoted things that just aren’t there. One of these things you and I hear often is not true – “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle”. Not in there. That’s one of the most misquoted scriptures we hear. My experience has been that God often gives me things I can’t handle so I need to go to him and trust him to help me.
I now can recognize if what someone is saying is in the Bible about 90% of the time. If anyone says something new, I always look it up. Sometimes I learn something new and other times I realize that what they were telling everyone was not true.
What’s also important is that I know what’s missing when listening to a preacher or teacher teach from the Bible. One of the reasons I read the entire Bible is to get a big picture of God, an overall understanding. So I can tell when someone is leaving something out because its too controversial or maybe they don’t agree with it.
I don’t care if its controversial or you don’t like it. It’s in the Bible. That’s the truth. God calls us to adjust our lives to his truth – not the other way around
Unfortunately, I’m hearing about more and more pastors who are adjusting God’s truth to make people happy. They leave out the tough parts because, well, maybe people won’t like it and they will leave the church.
I’ve talked to several good Christian people I know who have left their church because the pastor started veering away from the truth. A denomination that I was a part of for many years decided a couple of years ago that they were going to change what is preached in their churches to fit what people ‘think’ is right, not what God says. That’s a very bad decision which can only lead to negative consequences.
The prophet Amos predicted times like these. “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.” Amos 8: 11&12.
We don’t have to stagger around searching for the Word of the Lord. His Word is in the Bible if we make sure we have a credible Bible. People have actually changed words in the Bible to fit what they think as well.
Any doubt that there is a famine?
Our Bible can be and should be in our hands and entering our minds every day as we read and apply God’s truth to our lives. Our Bibles should be dog-eared and looking well-worn these days because we can’t count on anyone else to make sure we know the truth.
There is a famine all around us but we have what we need to feed ourselves – God’s Word.



