speak your truth?

We hear it all the time--

"Speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have."

~Oprah Winfrey

“You know the truth by the way it feels.”

~Anonymous

“Live authentically. Live your truth.”

~Neale Donald Walsch

“Face your fears; Live your passions, be dedicated to your truth.”

~Billie Jean King

“You don’t need to get anyone else to agree with your truth.
You just need to live it.”

~Alan Cohen

I could keep going, but honestly it's a little depressing to me. It seems like the whole world is telling us that there's only one thing that matters: each of us is supposed to be true to whatever we feel like is the truth for us.

We see it in the media, we're bombarded with it by self-help gurus, and we're passing it on to our children in the message that our entire goal is to make sure they have happy lives.

But here's another quote:

" The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally."

~Flannery O'Connor

Oxford Dictionary defines truth as "that which is in accordance with fact or reality." Too often, people talk about truth as if it were subjective--your truth and my truth don't have to be the same because our viewpoints are different and therefore change what we see as being true.

Here's the most important quote about truth:

"Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. 

No one comes to the Father except through Me.'"

John 14:6

Jesus didn't say He was "a" truth--He specified that He is the only truth. The truth isn't subjective. We can't choose for something to be true because we agree with it and like how it makes us feel. At the same time, we can't say something isn't true simply because we don't like the sound of it. More and more, that's becoming the default for people. We look around and pick and choose, deciding what should and shouldn't apply to us.

We've decided that we don't need God to tell us what is right and what is wrong...and we've been doing it since the Garden. After all, that was the initial temptation: eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so that we don't have to rely on God to tell us what is right and what's wrong.

Because, you see, when someone else tells you what's right, you are held to their standards. And we've decided that it's too hard to live up to God's standards, so we just want to be left to our own. In all honesty, the issue isn't thinking we are too good for God--it's the knowledge deep down in the depths of our souls that we can never live up to God's standards.

So as is so often the case, we see our failures and want to make sure no one else sees them. We want to hide all the ways we don't measure up, so the easiest way to do that is to say that the bar isn't really as high as people are saying. If I can just lower the bar, I can soar over it with ease.

We disguise our lowered expectations the way we disguise most of our insecurities and failures--with bravado and false pride. G.K. Chesterton once wrote, "A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed."

In Isaiah 55:8&9 we're told:

"My intentions are not always yours,

and I do not go about things as you do.

My thoughts and My ways are above and beyond you,

just as heaven is far from your reach here on earth."

We want to be good enough. We want to believe that we are fully capable of understanding the mysteries of the universe on our own, that we are smart enough to decide for ourselves what is right. We think that at our core we are basically good, that we can just "follow our heart" and decide what is best.

But we aren't.

At our core, we aren't good enough. We aren't smart enough to decide what is best. As part of creation, we don't have the ability to step outside of what was created and see the big picture. We can see the here and now--and only a small part of it at that. And as to the idea of "following our hearts"? We're told in Jeremiah 17:9,

"The heart is more deceitful than anything else
and mortally sick. Who can fathom it?"

Our hearts lead us astray all the time. That's why we are urged to pursue wisdom, not to follow our feelings.