What is Truth? Authority (Part 1)
Categories: Authority, Léo’s Insights 2019-2020
Tags: truth
We are created with a great capacity for learning. To be sure, some are more proactive in this activity than others, but all of us grow in wisdom as we age; again, some more than others.
Throughout this quest for knowledge, we occasionally experience pivotal moments that cause us to make major shifts in our thinking and/or lives. Most of us can clearly remember such a time when something big occurred. We may not have realized how critical this experience was at the time, but looking back, we can see the importance of that moment and how it directed or redirected, indeed changed our lives.
Pivotal moments are profoundly life changing. Some may be “bell ringers” in that your “bell” got “donged” and you suddenly found yourself in another paradigm. Sometimes it is just a small decision or a simple question that reconstructed your world view.
I personally recall such a moment, oh so many years ago, when I was a teenager. In typical teenager fashion, I was trying to make sense of my rather jumbled world. Laying on the couch in my confused, mid-teens state of my mind, I suddenly realized that everything would make sense if I could just know the truth.
I know, it sounds a bit simplistic, but I was just a young teenager with little life experience under my belt. To me it was a profound revelation! However, this “deep insight” was quickly followed by a question that has to have been asked millions of times before. It was the same question immortalized nearly two thousand years ago when Pilot asked Jesus, “What is truth?”
I knew I needed to find the truth in order to make sense of my teenage “chaos.” So, I determined to get to the task of finding it.
At that particular moment in my life, my teenage mind could not have grasped what was involved in my new quest nor could I have imagined that it would become the driving force of my life. I certainly did not have the understanding that truth is not determined, but revealed and/or discovered and authenticated. Nor did I realize that truth obtained would lead to more questions about what was true.
Years of dedicated learning has certainly resulted in my knowing a thing or two about a thing or two! All that learning combined with all that experience has brought me to that place where I can finally attempt to answer that immortalized question!
What is truth? Although I may have a better idea of how to answer that today than when I first asked it, I can also say that the more I know, the more I realize just how much there is to know and how little I actually do know. That’s the truth!
Learning about what is true will lead to wisdom and wisdom leads us to admit that we don’t know everything. In fact, wisdom is really about having a hunger for truth. The search involves a lot of work and, unfortunately, it usually also involves a lot of pain. Either way, one is greatly and truly blessed when truth is discovered and righteously applied to one’s life.
From that day on the couch so many years ago, I have continually desired to gain wisdom which has put me on a lifelong journey of searching for the truth. Can you imagine my ecstasy when I first read “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the father except through Me” (John 14:6)?
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