Today we run into one of the most popular and often quoted versus in all of scripture, usually quoted in a paraphrase, as “the truth will set you free”.
Has it so often the case, the quote is mis-used, and he’s completely out of context as we can clearly see today.
Here’s the full sentence from which that phrase is plucked:
“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to realize that most of us have miss used what Jesus was saying. There are clearly three parts to this.
First, he begins with the word “if”. If white? If you abide in my word. That is to say if you hold fast to what I’m saying, you practice what I’m preaching, or you apply the wisdom that I am giving you. If you do that, then…
Second, ...THEN, having abided in my word, you will be my disciples and you will know the truth. In other words, it is by doing that we will be knowing. Jesus isn’t asking us to understand, he is asking us to act, to apply his teaching. When we do this, the promise is that we will understand more deeply; action begets wisdom.
Third, so once we have abided, we will be in a position to understand the truth, and then we will be set free. it isn’t the truth that sets sets us free...it is in applying Jesus’ teaching.
And, it’s important to reiterate that I’m not talking about salvation here… Jesus is not teaching us that we have to apply is teaching in order to be saved into “go to heaven”; this is about wisdom showing up and being leveraged in our lives.
The most frequently quoted verse in all of scripture leaves out the most important part of the verse; ironically, not surprisingly, it’s the hard part, the doing.
I know I have spoken about this before, but there is a principal I heard of years ago called hard/easy. It says it if we do the easy things, make the easy choice, can we do that first, life will be hard later. But if we make the hard choice, the wise choice, now, it will be easier later. We don’t get to choose whether something is hard or easy, We just get to choose went to experience each of those. The one that we defer is amplified by time. Living life committed to making the wise choice, sometimes viewed as the harder choice, first and foremost, leads to greater life satisfaction later.
Today, I want to look for an opportunity to apply hard/easy, to abide in God‘s word in a moment when I would prefer not to; applying the wisdom that in doing so life will be better later.
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