It's Time to Get Real 6

[HKHaugan]

It’s hard to resist truth when it gets you right where you live. That is the nature, direction and purpose of Scripture. It’s loaded with those kinds of principles, ideas and insights that cut through and across history and speak to us right where we are. No person is outside its message. It is a directive from God to the mind and heart of every person no matter where they live on this earth.

If we are willing to really look at Scripture with open minds we find basic truths that are common to every person. What we see is humanity the way it really is inside. Every person is born new, needing to learn how to develop as an individual in the context of a common physical, social and spiritual universe we all share.

The pages of Scripture contain all the ingredients to understand our individual aloneness, its plight without God and its satisfaction and completion in God. It contains the bottom line, the final realization of our restoration, recovery, purpose and destiny in the person of Jesus Christ. He is the touchstone, the key and the ultimate reality in whom we find balance. In Him we are free to judge and be judged, evaluate and be evaluated, repent and be forgiven, confront and be confronted; all done in His Spirit through His Word.

His Word carries the truth to rearrange how we think, the Spirit to adjust our choices and the promises that transform the heart. No one is exempt from the human analysis Scripture presents. Following its lead is the one way, the ultimate truth and the working outline guaranteeing eternal existence.

From Adam and Eve to the present every person comes in this world through birth disconnected from God, lives a certain time here, dies and then goes into one of two destinies in eternity. This condition bears and bares the reality of sin, that irritable immediacy of self-concern with the fear and pride it produces, evidencing the spiritual chasm it has made between God and the human heart. At each moment the certainty of uncertainty grips our temporary lives illustrating how sin and evil work against us.

But one sterling quality in one sterling person emerges through Scripture’s pages, faith. As people from Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and the prophets believed, so their examples prepared the way to see Jesus as the ultimate perfection of faith. The Cross is His statement of faith and the Resurrection is His signature. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—(Eph.2:8 NIV).” What a precious gift from God enabling us to embrace His ultimate reality!