Time, Truth, and Truth-Telling

I own a Grandfather Clock that I haven’t used for some time now.  We bought it years ago, when we had no sleeping babies in the house; we stopped winding it (or whatever you call what you do to keep the thing going) when we had more sleeping babies.  As it stands in the corner of our family room, it reminds me of the adage “a broken clock is right twice a day”.  Whatever place the hands of the clock stopped at when we ceased using it, they render our clock accurate twice in each 24 hour period, when the actual time coincides with its frozen time markers.

It would be foolish to use a broken clock as one’s source of time-truth, for it would be wrong 23 hours and 58 minutes out of 24 hours.  That is a 99.9% inaccuracy.  In fact without an accurate source of time keeping, the two minutes per day it was spot-on would be unknowable!  In order for a broken clock to be useful even for two minutes, one needs an accurate source of time, a clock that represents truth.

As I thought about this, it caused me to think about truth, our society, and the times in which we live.  More and more, it appears that the mechanism of our culture is broken, and yet like a stopped clock, we still get some things right, there is enough of a focus on morality and ethical matters, such that it appears we are right at least twice a day.  Yet, the only reason we might assess some measure of moral rightness is because we still have the voice of truth, God’s truth, as our basis of comparison. 

Are we, as God’s ambassadors, the Christian community of Bible-believing followers of Christ, going to be satisfied with such gross inaccuracy and unwilling to herald the true time that the clock should mark?  I trust that your answer is the same as mine, “No!”  Yet, as we proclaim God’s truth, exposing great dissonance between truth and belief systems prevalent today, we must do so with gentleness, reverence, and compassion.  We must trust that for some, the gentleness in our answer can help to turn away the wrath that often accompanies the shame and guilt of exposed sin, whereas harshness in our words is sure to stir up anger, unnecessarily.

My hope is that my own contribution to this blogging effort will force me, and help others, to think through some issues that the Christian faces in living by faith in a world that does not encourage doing so.  I have never considered blogging before because I am never so confident that my own thoughts are of great value to others.  But, by the request of my colleagues and by virtue of the responsibility of my calling as a shepherd, I do embrace this effort as something that the Lord might use to help the saints in our efforts to glorify Christ. Jesus prayed that our heavenly Father would set us apart from the world we live through the study and practice of God’s truth (John 17:3). Please know as you read my contributions that, while I have been gloriously saved by God’s grace through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ, I am a work in progress.  My mind is an integral part of that process as I renew it through study and meditation of the truth of God’s word.  Join me in that endeavor!

Author: Art Georges