The Value of Truth (Notes on Discernment)

I’m going to try to post a few (perhaps disjointed) thoughts about discernment as we go through our spiritual discernment study in the month of February.

When we talked about this yesterday morning, we took a brief look at a couple of comments that Jesus made about truth.

One familiar verse is in John 8:32 – “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  But it helps to see the other half of what Jesus said:

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Being a disciple of Jesus – and being truly free – has something to do with the truth that we find in Jesus’ teachings.  There’s the idea of something ongoing here, but also the idea of salvation itself.  The very basis of who we are as disciples of Christ.

In His prayer in John 17, Jesus makes another interesting comment about truth – again connecting it to the idea of God’s Word:  “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” (John 17:17).

The truth of the teachings of God have something to do with how we are saved, and sanctified.  God uses the truth to work in our lives.

Of course this idea of knowing what God says and what He teaches us is all throughout Scripture.  Take for example Ephesians 1:13:  In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit…

The idea of following certain teachings isn’t, of course, unique to Christianity.  But in this day and age, there are those who want to take any unique teaching out of any religion and try to come up with a common religion for everyone.  Or those who want to deny any kind of truth at all.

But the Bible doesn’t see the world that way.  The biblical writers – and those who came after them in the early church – had a strange obsession with truth.  Whether you accept their view of truth or not, there’s no doubt that they believed that facts and people and history were important things – absolutely essential things – to their Faith.

Along with truth comes the need to know what it is, and what it isn’t.  That doesn’t mean that we must know all truth – or be right in everything – in order to find this salvation and sanctification.  But there are certain things that we see and experience through the window of the truth.

Truth is a common theme in the book of John in particular.  God-in-the-flesh arrives on the scene in chapter 1, “full of grace and truth”.  And at the end of the book, the Apostle John writes that he himself is telling us the truth.  Why?  “That you also may believe” (John 19:35).

In His famous conversation with Pilate (John 18:33-38), Jesus makes the bold claim that “everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice”.  Pilate’s answer is meant to be rhetorical – “What is truth?”

But then he walked out, never taking the time to find the answer.