Don’t brush off Spirit-inspired messages, but examine everything carefully and hang on to what is good. — 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21
I read a news article titled, Election skeptics took over this county. They still don’t trust results. In it, a person who lost an election was positive things were rigged. He said: “I don’t feel like — 2024 — that I lost that race…But then, how do you prove it, right? That’s a whole other thing. How do you prove what you feel?”
Thus is humanity’s problem, in a nutshell. We feel our feeling is right–we want something to be true so badly–and so we look for things that prove it. If we can’t find enough evidence, a good conspiracy theory or two will do.
That’s why the Bible has been so abused, isn’t it? If you pick from it what you want it to say, you have God on your side. And there’s a lot to pick from.
The Apostle Paul knew this human tendency, so that’s why he counseled, “Examine everything carefully and hang on to what is good.” Everyone brings their bias to Scripture, but the determining factor for hearing God’s voice is to “hang on to what is good.”
So, “what is good”? Maybe we find out if we ask these questions:
Is this in keeping with what Jesus taught and how he lived? Is it compassionate? Is it just?
Does this build up another person, or is it building up myself?
How does this make the world a better place?
How does this make me a better person?
Asking these and other questions holds our biases in check so that the Gospel can change those biases. That’s the only way we continue, slowly, growing more into Christ’s likeness. Trying to prove our feelings are right exhausts and belittles us. “Examining everything carefully” in the light of Jesus liberates and opens our eyes to a much more beautiful world.