Hope and Direction

love7-300x189Living in the Spirit
June 15, 2016

Scripture Reading: Psalm 42 and 43

O send out your light and your truth;
   let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy hill
   and to your dwelling.
Then I will go to the altar of God,
   to God my exceeding joy;
and I will praise you with the harp,
   O God, my God.  

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
   and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
   my help and my God. –Psalm 43:3-5

How is it that people with very similar backgrounds can understand the world so differently? We have been coached by a society that says: if you just have enough information or knowledge everything will be OK. Yet in our world we neither trust information nor knowledge. It is all suspect most often because it does not pass our own litmus tests for truth. I usually want to know who paid for the research before I bother to read it. The same is true of polls. I took a whole three-hour psychology course in college learning how to construct polls with the least possible bias because it is truly impossible to develop a poll with no bias. I have noted recently that the media reports on a variety of polls targeted at addressing the same issue. I guess they hope it will open the door for us to glean some sense from the diverse results.

Don’t get me wrong, I think information is crucial and knowledge is important. In Matthew 6:21, Jesus is quoted as saying: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Before we examine information, before we drink deeply from the well of knowledge, we need to meld our hearts with the heart of God, the provider of spiritual and eternal truth, who brings hope and direction to our lives and establishes the foundation of love on which all our thoughts and actions are to be based. If something doesn’t pass the test of love it is not of God.

Prayer: Lord, hone our discernment so that when we act, we act out of love and when we react, we react in love. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, 
Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.