1. The most difficult thing to overcome in my spiritual journey is my own sin; not the culture in which I was raised.
2. In spiritual matters, your truth and my truth are the same truth. That’s just the nature of truth.
3. The answer to a spiritual problem in “my fellowship” is not in “my fellowship”or any other fellowship. It’s in the Word.
4. No one controls grace except God. Everybody stands in need of it every day.
5. Arrogance is not in thinking I can know His will, His truth. It’s in thinking I can’t know truth when He traveled through a birth canal to live Truth in flesh, and then offered blood to buy the pillar of truth, the church, and then sent His Spirit to write all truth down for me…and I’m still saying “Knowing truth is a journey with no end.” That is arrogance.
6. Humility is not in rejecting the notion that I can do something to affect my salvation, in favor of “grace alone”. Humility is saying “I’ll do it HIS way, even if that demands human effort.”
7. Human effort is just utilizing gifts of the Creator of humanity. My obedient effort is, in that sense, just accessing grace.
8. It’s not haughty to say “I did something (obeyed) to be saved.” That’s just declaring a decision to submit.
9. Religious truth is not in a nebulous cloud of intellectual conversations between men of great minds. It’s in the inspired writings between Genesis and Revelation.
10. In the mire of spiritual subjectivism, it takes some grit, to ascertain truth (some hours of uncluttered study). But it doesn’t take a genius mind. Just use whatever intelligence God gave you. Your mind to understand Him is part of His grace to you. Connect that gift of grace with the gift in the pages of His Word. Grasp the grace.
11. Since He made you, He fully knows your capacity to understand His Will (truth). And, since He wants you to be saved, He did not put the truth for your salvation somewhere “over your head.” He that believes and is baptized shall be saved,” for one, is a pretty understandable concept.
12. Knowing His truth is not a journey without an end. Don’t let the realization that you cannot, in this lifetime, know everything, keep you from knowing that you know, that you know, that you know you are headed for a sure destination. Just because I can’t know everything, does not mean I can’t know something. And in the “something” is the truth about salvation and His glorious pillar and ground of truth, the church. If I’m missing out on that truth, it’s not the culture’s fault. It’s not the fault of my “narrow fellowship” or my “blinded parents” or a “sheltered upbringing.” It’s not the fault of the talking heads of the day or of postmodernism or its atheism or pseudo-science. It will not be because people who spoke truth did it with a bad attitude. If I miss heaven, it will be my own fault.
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.