Don't Believe Everything You Think

At church last evening my pastor began his sermon on the Lord's Prayer saying that we've all heard "Don't believe everything you read" and "Don't believe everything you see"  Then he said something that continues to rattle around in my brain.  He said, "Don't believe everything you think."  


How easily we deceive ourselves and how desperately we need to take the things we think and run them past the truth found in God's Word.  I know this is true.  I have said things like this to others in my more than 35 years in ministry.  But there was something about the way he said it that caused me to stop and consider again the importance of the Bible as my North Star. (Some of these thoughts may also be fueled by seeing "Inception" twice.)  How quickly I assume that my understanding of reality is the correct one.  How wrongly I assume that my thinking on issues is accurate.  How often I am wrong.


I did listen to the rest of the sermon, but his opening was worth the price of admission.  I'm off to spend to some time in the truth, asking God to show me what is real.

Full Maturity

In my personal life, my ministry, my church and my Home Group, the issue of maturity keeps rising to the surface.  What is it?  How do we know when we get there?  What do we do with those who claim to be mature (or others make that claim for them) but who are emotional basket cases or who inflict emotional and spiritual harm to others by their words, attitudes or actions?  

I would abandon ever defining or seeking to achieve maturity, seeing all the evidences of spiritual immaturity, but then I run into passages like the one from Paul's letter to the Christians at Colossae which says, "Him [Jesus] we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. Colossians 1:27-29 (ESV)  Paul was putting a lot of energy (provided by God) into doing things that would be used to present EVERYONE mature in Christ.

In Paul's letter to the church at Ephesus he writes, "And he [God] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Ephesians 4:11-16 (ESV)

So while me may never be able to say this:

I do think we can get to the place where we can recognize in ourselves, and in others, the maturity that God calls His children to.  Why else would Paul insist that maturity was an attainable goal and especially so when looking for leaders in the local church?

But when we think about maturity, we would all do well to look for biblical definitions of maturity rather than those handed to us by our church culture.  The church cultures tends to be skewed toward the amount of biblical information one possesses in one's memory while, by contrast, Jesus and Paul looked at other measurements such as loving God and loving people or not being tossed around with every new idea but growing up into Jesus.

As usual, I have no definitive answer about what maturity is, but I'm getting clearer on what maturity is not.

The Help

I am almost finished with the book, The Help, by Kathryn Stockett.  (Already I highly recommend it to you.)  The story takes place in 1963 in Jackson, MS.  It recounts life in white households with black househelp, particularly those women who helped raise the white children.  The question that keeps coming to mind as I read is "What would my own response have been to white/black relations if I had lived in the 1960's South?"  I'd like to think I would have been one of those who would have treated blacks as equals, created in the image of God.  But there were institutional and societal barriers in place that made this complicated.  Would I have been willing to cross those barriers?  What is the equivalent barriers today that I have been unwilling to cross to connect to people who are unlike me?  I don't have answers, but I do have lots of questions.