What Is Truth? Navigating Reality in Today's World 🌍
And if that wasn't enough, the knife is cake as well, okay?
So the reality is, many of the younger generation
are looking around and they're like,
what's real and what's fake?
They can't tell what is, what reality is.
And so we're not just living in a post-Christian America,
we're living in a post-truth America
because they don't know what truth is.
And that's exactly where the Pontius Pilate,
the man who was standing there,
looking into Jesus' eyes right before Jesus died.
He asked the question, what is truth?
He was so confused about what was real
and what he could really found his life on.
Next week, we'll end this message where Jesus ended it
and we'll talk about having a rock-solid foundation
of the truth of God's word to build your life on.
But I will tell you this,
that if we're building our life based on feelings,
based on what culture says,
based on what our family has always practiced,
I will tell you, it is shifting sand.
But we must come back to not just
what the morals of Christianity,
but who Jesus is.
We must lift up the truth.
This house of God is the pillar and the ground of truth.
And in our culture, Isaiah 59 tells us
that truth has fallen in the streets.
Truth has been trampled in the streets of our culture
and online, what is true has been distorted and shifted.
And we have a younger generation that are saying,
wait a second, that doesn't seem right.
And so where did we go wrong?
Well, Romans 1 in verse 25 says,
we have changed the truth of God into a lie
and have worshiped and served the creature
more than the creator who is blessed forever.
So when we start to worship ourselves
and when we start to worship at the altar of our career
or money or people or prestige or whatever else
we're going to put all of our time,
attention and effort into,
my friend, we have forsaken the truth
that God must be at the center of our lives,
not just at the top of our list,
but the center of our lives.
And so the word truth that's being used
in the New Testament throughout all these verses
is the word aletheia.
And the word is certainty or something that is trustworthy,
it's defendable, it's authentic,
but it's an accurate statement of fact.
When Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life,
and no man comes unto the Father but by me,
he was making a statement of truth, of fact.
It's really important for us to know
that this is why Jesus said it,
because they were living their lives
in bondage to Judaism, to this religious system
that was all about man and not about God,
and so he told all of those religious leaders,
he said, you shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free.
The reason why there's such bondage in our culture today,
bondage to feelings of anxiety,
bondage to feelings of lust,
bondage to money, bondage to all of these things
that we are a slave to
is because we have not come back to the truth.
The truth is what gives freedom.
In fact, G.K. Chesterton said,
there is no freedom without truth.
We all want authenticity, but we need to understand
that trusting God in the midst of anxiety,
trusting God to provide for our needs,
trusting God to put the big rocks in the jar first,
that's where we experience freedom, when we put him first.