Battle For Truth

Why do I read? Why should you read, and never stop? To find the Truth. Why is the Truth important? So you stop believing the lies. 

When I read I am filling myself up with the Truth. God's Truth. Life's Truth. How do you know how to live, if you don't know the Truth?

And simply by reading the Truth I am shutting up all the lies. Turning the Truth up so loud I can't hear or remember a single lie.

The world's lies. The American Dream's lies. Western Christianity's lies.  Teachers, coaches, bosses, family, the media-they have all lied to you. Did all of them mean to? Of course not. They just never stopped to question what was taught to them. They just believed all these people and things because we aren't told to question anything. But you need to! You need to. 

Every moment of every day the Devil is using something, someone, anything, anyone to trick you. And we have been tricked. I mean, come on, that was his first offensive against the Kingdom of God: a lie, a trick. It worked then, and it is still working now. It's his best weapon. 

"It wasn't just my faith that was being shaken. I began to wonder what personal ideas I believed that weren't true. I believed I was not athletic enough; too stupid, I believed I had to go to college; I believed the Astros were a more important team than the Mets; I believed jeans that cost fifty dollars were better than jeans that cost thirty; I believed living in a certain part of town made you more important than living in another. I looked up at the cosmos and it had no scientific proof that any of this was true...the cosmos was just spinning around up there, as if to create beauty for beauty's sake, paying no attention to the frivolity of mankind. And I liked the cosmos. I liked the cosmos very much. It seemed to understand something, perhaps, humanity did not understand." -Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

We see or hear or are exposed to, on average, three thousand commercials a day. Every one of them promising something that isn't true: buy this product and your life will be complete; it will be perfect. All lies. Every single one of them. We are trained to believe lies, and we can't tell the difference between truth and lies at all anymore. We don't even take the time to question them. Not really anyway.

Find something that can drown out the lies with something that whispers or yells the Truth, God's Eternal Truth, into your body, spirit, mind, and heart, and do it on a regular basis. For me, it is reading. For me it is music. For me it is art. It is nature. It is unconditional love. Learn to recognize the lies, and to ignore them, and learn to replace them with the Truth.

Tonight, and lately, my emotions are clouding the Truth. The American Dream is clouding the Truth. I can't tell left from right. Up from down. I am so thirsty for the Truth tonight I don't know what I am going to do. The lies are like an infection in my system and they are trying to take me over. If I don't keep reading God's Truth I am going to break. Because, whether you believe me or not, sooner or later, the lies will break you down to nothing, and you are going to have to start over. And start over with nothing.

So why wait? Take the battle to them. All of them. All three thousand a day.Take the battle to the serpent spinning scripture that will only separate us further from God. Attack him before he attacks you.  Battle for the Truth.