Truth Still Matters Luke 1:4

“...so that you may know the certainty of things you have been taught.” (1:4) NIV

Random  Thoughts:

Yes, this is only one verse and only one half of a verse at that but I think it’s pretty key. It answers the whole reason why Luke is writing and maybe even the whole reason we need to not just think we believe something but really know we do. 

Truth matters. Facts matter. Accuracy matters. It shapes what we believe and how we live as a result. As much as I want to believe I am still 25, my graying hair and creaking bones are revealing a truth that even L’Oreal can’t completely cover. So I take my vitamins, color my hair and have accepted the fact that merry-go-rounds make me nauseous. 

Luke is about to tell a story that if believed, will change people’s lives forever. It will subject them to hardship and persecution, loss of jobs, ridicule, rejection by their families and even death. It is a story worth living and dying for. And so he tells us that what we are about to hear is for the purpose of being certain that what we have been told is true.

Question:  What truths have helped solidify my own faith? And as a parent, I am a teacher too. To what extent am I not only teaching the what’s but the why’s of my faith? 

Journal Response:

I have gone through several crisis of faith since I decided to commit my life to Christ 25 years ago, my senior year of high school. I think for a lot of Christians, this tends to be true and it it is what makes us grow. Being challenged is healthy and facing our doubts is not revealing a weakness of faith but a necessary growing pain many of us experience when we are pursuing God throughout our lives.

For me, as a baby christian, I was drawn to Christ’s promise to love me as I was. I didn’t need to perform for him, be perfect for him or pretend to be something I wasn’t. He forgave me and accepted me into his family. Period. For someone who had grown up to believe that love was conditional on performance, it was hard not to want love with no strings attached--but also hard to accept. 

By the time I hit college, merely wanting to believe God had forgiven me and that Christ was real because I had been taught it since birth was no longer enough. With a secular campus in which friends and fellow students often held Christian beliefs in contempt and a teaching staff that made no secret of how little they thought of the Christian faith, I began to need more reason to believe in Christ other than my hope that it was so.

I began to dig. Over the weeks and months and years ahead, God provided the proof I needed. Between archeology, mathematical probabilities and philosophical reasoning, I have long since come to the conclusion that my faith is grounded in fact, not fiction. 

Now that I have children of my own, however, they too are asking “why” and “how” and more importantly, “how do you know?”.  So we deal with it one issue at a time. Sometimes my answer is based in the facts that have grounded me. Sometimes my answer is “I don’t know” and sometimes it’s “I don’t know yet”.  I do my best to help them but it scares me to not have all the answers. I am reminded, however, that God doesn’t give me an answer to everything I ask Him either--but he answers enough for me to know what is most important--eventually!