The suggestion that the truth will set you free is another one of those statements whose untruthfulness can be seen from several vantage points. First, and foremost, the problem with the statement is what it leaves out. To suggest that the truth will set you free is only a partial quote from Jesus Himself. What He actually said, in its totality, is “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”Truth alone has no ability to bring about any change in our lives. The Pharisees proved that. Although they knew their Bible as well as anybody in their day, their knowledge of biblical content did nothing for them. To them, Bible study was an end unto itself. In other words, they studied the Bible to know the Bible. As strange as it may seem, that is a terrible reason to study Scripture. In fact, it can make a modern day Pharisee out of you!
We don’t study the Bible to learn its contents. We study the Bible to know its Author. It is only as the Scripture leads us into an experiential knowledge of our God that it has fulfilled its purpose in our lives. Remember that Jesus told the Pharisees, “These are they which testify of Me” (See John 5:39) If you’ve found something other than Jesus Christ through Bible study, you’ve missed the point. Again, we don’t study the Bible to learn it. We study it to learn Him.
The modern church world has taken the idea that the truth will set you free and has mistakenly believed that learning the propositional truths of Scripture will change us. Because of that viewpoint, they’ve turned the Bible into a handbook of religious guidelines. Ask them if the Bible is a book of guidelines for life and most will say no, but watch the way the application of Scripture to people’s lives is made in sermons and Bible studies and you’ll come to a different conclusion about what they really believe.
There is often much application about what we are to now do that mentions nothing about knowing our Savior more intimately. Some may call this sort of teaching “practical,” but I think a better term for it could be “Christianity Lite” because its emphasis is so heavy on religious performance and so light on Christ Himself.
Unless many find a biblical “principle” of some sort and then show how that principle should guide our actions, they think the teaching isn’t practical. In reality, the demand for “practical teaching” in the church world today is a subtle mask for an underlying hunger to do something as opposed to knowing Someone. There’s certainly nothing wrong with understanding the practical ways that Christ wants to express Himself through our daily lifestyle, but the problem that often exists is that “biblical principles” are taught in such a way as to suggest that the aim of “Christian living” is to do right and nothing could be further from the truth. Remember, it’s about knowing Him. All the “doing” will flow from that. When we reverse the two, we end up with nothing more than dead religious works, regardless of how admirable they may look to everybody around us.
We have not been called to live by biblical truths. We have been called to live by The Truth, who is the indwelling Christ. He is our life-source and animates our daily actions, not religious determination to act on information we might have learned. At times when I have shared a message from the Bible that focuses on Jesus Christ and somebody tells me that they wished the message had been more practical, I shudder. Where did we ever get the idea that telling people what to do is a better way to teach the Bible that showing them who their God is? Jesus came to reveal the Father to us, not to tell us how to live. If that was His purpose in the world, doesn’t it seem reasonable to argue that that’s a good purpose statement for those who profess to follow Him?
Many think that if we build our lives around biblical principles then we’ll experience the life God intends for us. The result is that there are a multitude of religious programs designed to help us learn the content of the Bible. We are largely a generation of Christians who think that the better we learn the Bible, the better life will be. “Christian education” has become a matter of memorizing Scripture at the novice end of the spectrum and parsing Greek verbs at the advanced end. But if that’s the only thing that has happened, the result is a person who has some degree of Bible education but still hasn’t been set free to really live. Studying the Bible is not enough. We must engage with the Spirit of Christ through the Scripture to find real freedom. Facts only enlighten us. The Truth emancipates us!
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