February 16, 2020

Grounded in God

Lead me in Your truth and teach me, For You are the God of my salvation; On You I wait all the day

(Psalm 25:5).

If our thinking is not solidly grounded in God, then our outward lives can never be what they ought to be. We will be like a ship with no anchor unless we tether ourselves to the truth about our Creator. As A. W. Tozer said on the very first page of his classic The Knowledge of the Holy, "The gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God."

It would be impossible to overemphasize the importance of thinking truthful thoughts about God. "Lead me in Your truth and teach me," prayed David, "for You are the God of my salvation." Paul wrote of those who "exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25). Thinking about God at all is better than not doing so, but it’s vital that we think about God as God has revealed God’s self to be and not as we may have imagined God to be. If we worship something other than God as God is, then we are worshiping an idol, a subjective creature that we ourselves have made. And nothing is more disastrous spiritually than to worship a creature, whether one of God’s or one of our own, rather than the Creator God’s self. Thus we must never cease improving our thoughts about God, seeking in every instance to bring our concepts into conformity with what God has revealed of God’s self in the Scriptures.

Actually, it is important that we think truthfully about whatever we think about. Each of us is an individual part of an interrelated cosmos. We can’t relate ourselves rightly to what is around us if our thinking is based on erroneous perceptions. So our highest commitment must always be to objective reality, and never to personal opinion. "A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets" (Arthur C. Clarke).

In your spiritual life, guard against illusion. Beginners in faith are extremely vulnerable. It is not surprising that they mistakenly accept illusion as truth. Many who seek God succumb to this.

...Gregory of Sinai