Facts religious and otherwise
"The true freedom from superstition is free service to
religion; the real emancipation from false gods is reverence for the
true God. For high knowledge is not negative, but positive: it is to be
freed from the fear of the Many in order to adore and love the One. And
not merely is this the only real knowledge, but no other knowledge
"buildeth up" the soul. It is all well so long as the elasticity of
youth and health remain, when the pride of the intellect sustains us
strongly; but a time comes when we feel terribly that the Tree of
Knowledge is not the Tree of Life...Separate from love, the more we
know, the profounder the mystery of life becomes; the more the dreary
and more horrible becomes existence. I can conceive no dying hour more
awful than that of one who has aspired to know instead of to love, and
finds himself at last amidst a world of barren facts and lifeless
theories, loving none and adoring nothing." F.W. Robertson said that a
long time ago.
It’s too easy to be duped into loving something rather than
someone. More than one serious thinker whose relationship to God
mattered supremely to him or her has noted that even when preaching and
defending truth it became an end in itself rather than something God gave (and is) to set people
free. No one loved truth more than Christ but when he spelled out his
mission in life—the mission given to him by the Holy Father and in which
he was sustained by the Holy Spirit—he said it was all about people and setting them free. He said,
The gospel is the voice of God that is heard in the
healing of people, in the freeing of people and in the lifting up of
people. The gospel is all about a Person and persons! It isn’t about
some abstraction called "truth" but truth designed to redeem people by
bringing them back to a Person. You will know the truth, the Christ
said, and the truth will make you free. The gospel is God speaking in
and through Christ and creating the elect in every generation (Ephesians
2:17 and elsewhere) and in the elect, as the body of Christ, he
proclaims to the world that he has not abandoned it! The gospel is the
loving Holy Father still coming to his sinful, wayward children as he
did all those centuries past and telling them, "I know the plans I have
for you. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you
hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11
Is it the gospel that gives us the buzz or is it preaching that does it?
Is behind the pulpit or lectern my "stage" and the gospel my "routine"?
Will my life end with my having discovered a world of barren (though exciting) facts and no life with God?
Preachers, teachers and scientists take note.