It is amazing just how many different ways of life are shown to us today. Television brings a constant stream of sure-fire diets, get-rich-quick schemes, cures for everything under the sun and advice on almost any topic. If the TV fails, try the Internet; it has endlessly more.

You and I are the audience and we don’t know what to think most of the time. I mean, who can you trust? Who is right about a thousand and one topics? We don’t care much until it affects us. If you have arthritis or cancer, you will want to know if there is a way to cure it. If you want to invest your money, you will want sound advice.

The trouble is that so many lauded schemes simply fail. You don’t have to go far to hear of diets that don’t work, cures that are no cures, grand schemes that are a rip-off.

It gets serious

How sad that a cancer patient can raise tens of thousands of dollars to go to an overseas destination where he or she is promised healing and no good whatever comes of it. How sad that millions of people right now live with superstitious ideas that are valueless and dangerous. But in our day, we can’t even talk about such beliefs because of political correctness. We champion pluralism and make tolerance the highest virtue. The test is not ‘Is it true or false?’ but whether you can live happily with all the contradictions that abound and say nothing about them.

We forget history

Most people used to think the earth was flat. The consensus was wrong. In China, the feet of baby girls were bound up and not allowed to grow normally. It was the accepted thing. As late as the 19th century, doctors saw no reason to wash their hands as they went from patient to patient, thus spreading disease. In India today, rodents are permitted to eat more grain than the populace. Outworn, outmoded forms of pagan superstition which date back many centuries have resurfaced in the Western world, claiming devotees in the contemporary scene.

Yet we maintain that because everyone has the right to their particular belief, no-one should dare suggest that they may be wrong.

Sincerity is not enough

It is futile to say that as long as a person is sincere, nothing else matters. How easy it is to be sincerely wrong. How heartless it is to observe someone moving toward their own damage or destruction yet feeling no obligation at all to try and stop them. An old proverb says; “There is a way that seems right to a man but its end is the way of death.” All religions are not the same. Contradictions abound. The test of truth or falsity must be applied.

Listening to authority

We read the crowd was amazed at the way he taught. He wasn’t like the teachers of the law; instead, he taught with authority. They saw that he was different; radically different. Jesus Christ showed Himself to be more than a mere man. He was God in flesh. So, when he said; “I am the way, the truth and the life; no-one comes to the Father but through me,” we had better take notice.

The Christian faith has no need to steer away from close examination and investigation. By its very nature it embraces truth and shuns falsity (though, obviously, this cannot be said of everyone who claims to be a Christian).

The tide of human opinion ebbs and flows, however, there is something lasting, changeless and trustworthy about the Bible and its central message—Jesus is Lord. This can be proven by experience. When we know him personally, we stop searching because we have found life, life more abundant that so many are seeking in the wrong places and in the wrong way.