6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. 7 Therefore do not be partners with them.
People are trying to lead you down the wrong path every day. Some do it purposefully, hoping to get you to follow. Others do it out of ignorance, believing they have the answers. Even other believers can lead and be led down rabbit trails. If the path leads away from the truth, then those words are empty words. Politicians have mastered the delivery of empty words. And we all know that what is promised can rarely get accomplished. And yet we still believe the empty words. Some of the TV personalities also deliver an abundance of empty words in hopes of getting their hands on your money. In fact, some of the richest people in the world are those who have mastered the art of delivering empty words. We can get influenced by our culture and adopt their words. I am currently finishing up a second Masters degree. During this process I was encouraged to integrate my theology with the concepts I was learning in my studies. But I have instead integrated what I am learning into my theology. My theology is the much larger system. My theology covers all of life. What I have been learning covers only a small portion of life. So I could have shrunk my theology to fit what I was learning, abandoning my worldview in the process. But instead, I incorporated the pieces of knowledge that were in line with my theology and thus the things I learned fit into my larger worldview. So I could glean God’s truth about human behavior and relationships from people with a very different worldview. They had uncovered some of the marvels of God’s creation and placed their own labels on it. But I gathered pieces of that knowledge and placed them into my theology where I had gaps in my knowledge. Of course some pieces I rejected because they were not in line with God’s truth. But how am I able to do that? I love doing jigsaw puzzles. They are easy when you have the picture on the box top. When you know what the whole looks like, the individual pieces can be placed with relative ease. As I studied I recognized that some of their pieces fit much better and more coherently in my puzzle than in theirs. They were attempting to force truth to fit their conception of reality. Some pieces they cut in order to make them fit. When you know the Ultimate Truth then identifying random pieces of other puzzles gets easy. So the way to know what to reject and what to accept is easy. If it lines up with Truth, then keep it. If not, reject it. But you have to know what the whole looks like in order to reject foreign pieces. If we either accept foreign pieces or pass them along to others, we are joining with their deception.
The Arnold Journey 