“Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ.”

Right now it is hard to filter through all of the news, voices of social media, soundbites and video clips that are designed to sway and position us to a point of view.  Establishing truth has become harder and harder and believe me I know, it is tiring to pursue it and we can become resentful for having to do so because establishments that were once held up to providing truth have become slanted and more consumed with editorializing than just providing the facts.  But, we have a responsibility to ourselves and others to pursue the truth, filter out the rest, and stay grounded in what we know as fact, not what we think might be the truth.  It’s not just in our society that we need to do this, it is within our work and with those we work with.

I’m just going to say it; as believers who profess Jesus as our Lord, we must self scrutinize and self uphold truths to a higher standard.  We have the standard of representing Christ and what He gave for us.  This weekend we will celebrate a free country.  But not all who have the protections of the freedoms of our human-written Constitution experience or feel the daily freedoms that others do.  And because of this, we should be more committed than ever to filtering out what is not the truth and returning to, as Paul tells us to do in the verse above, the message and teachings of Jesus to establish ourselves within those truths and then share them out to others.  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control is what is needed more than ever today and that His truth is what is the real truth and is what can only set us fully free.

To those in the United States, Happy Fourth of July.

Reference: Colossians 2:8 (New Living Translation)