Keep Stable Series

Oprah Winfrey, at last year’s Golden Globe Awards said, “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.” Her words are reflective of a trend that has been growing for decades now - the idea that truth isn’t the same as reality. Truth is more like something you just personally really believe or something you are willing to shout loudly. Forget facts. It’s now “your truth.”

I find it interesting that the people who usually say such things are also people who are all about science. What does “science” say? That’s a good question! How can science say anything, if truth is going to just be a personal conclusion anyway?

Truth exists. You don’t have to sit back and keep silent while the guy next to you says truth is just about your personal convictions.

I recently watched a recap of the Apollo 11 mission, based on thousands of hours of filmed records from those days in July of 1969. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon, the study and sweat of thousands and thousands of people all came together. Those 3 astronauts were in constant contact with hundreds of technicians and crews back at Houston, TX, constantly checking and confirming a steady flow of information. Can you imagine, as Armstrong and Aldrin guided the Lunar Module to land it on the moon, if Houston had told them, “Well, guys, whatever distance you want to say you are from the moon, you go ahead and speak your truth. Whatever rate of speed you’re descending is up to what you say. Just speak your truth and own it. When it’s time to blast off from there, we hope you have enough fuel.

Henderson back here is the one who decided how much you’d need. We just asked him to speak his truth.” That’s just not how real life works. Real life is lived within a certain framework of natural laws - things that are true; “facts,” we call them. Studying those and building and depending on those is how we landed men on the moon and brought them back.

But, you see, we don’t need that just to get people to the moon! We also need truth for the most basic life functions - family, job, society - everything but politics and media!

You live by some set of standards. Everyone does. They may be wrong standards, but everyone believes they exist!

Romans 2:14

For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.

If there weren’t any absolutes, if there was no such thing as objective truth, then what I’m about to say wouldn’t matter anymore. In fact, if there’s no such thing as objective truth, it really doesn’t make sense for us to even be here right now talking about it!

So, for argument’s sake, let’s just say there are absolutes.

What are they? What standards do we follow?

Ill - This past week I saw a brief interview from 2017 with Helga Sol Olafsdottir in Iceland. She works at a university hospital and counsels pregnant women who discover that their baby has some kind of abnormality - like Down’s Syndrome. She tells the women:

"This is your life — you have the right to choose how your life will look like." The counselor says that terminating those pregnancies is “…preventing suffering for the child and for the family. And I think that is more right than seeing it as a murder -- that's so black and white. Life isn't black and white. Life is grey."

What she was saying is there are no set standards of right and wrong when it comes to human life. In her universe, decisions about human life are personal and always in flux. Life is gray.

Aren’t you glad that Helga isn’t in charge of your life as you get old or are somehow disabled?

God has given us the standard. God has given us truth. It’s in the book. We often refer to it as “Scripture.” That word turns up in the 3:16 we’re looking at today in 2 Peter

2 Peter 3:15-16 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.

The first thing we really need to talk about this morning is that…

1. There is such a thing as Scripture