Bible Passage: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17 NIV)
Scripture Reading: John 17:17; Acts 17:11
When the Pilgrims left Europe for the New World, they famously landed at Plymouth Rock in the northeastern United States in 1620.
But that wasn’t where they wanted to be. They were actually aiming for the sunny south.
The original plan was to land in Virginia, where the extended sunlight, milder winter, and fertile farmland would make establishing the new colony easy.
Instead, they drifted off course, landing far away from their target, making their first winter a brutal New England one instead of a mild southern one. The fact that they survived that terrible first year is remembered in North America every fall as we celebrate Thanksgiving.
They were thankful to have lived, because the journey was much harder than they had planned. All because they went off course.
In a way, it’s not really their fault. Before compasses and more modern navigation tools, sailors used the stars to determine their direction, which was a challenging science at best. With nothing precise to measure their direction against, drifting off track was an understandable occurrence.
The same is true for us.
We believe the ultimate bedrock of truth is God’s Word (John 17:17). In His Word, we find the most important way that we can measure whether something is true or not.
The early Church began calling the Bible the “canon” of Scripture—”canon” from a Greek word meaning “measuring rod,” or, perhaps in our modern usage, a “tape measure.”
How do you know how long a piece of wood is? Place it against the tape measure. A tape measure reveals the truth about how long something is.
How do we know what truth is? Whatever the idea, place it against the canon of Scripture. Scripture reveals the truth of what God wants us to know.
We admire the Bereans of Scripture—devout Jews who were nonetheless open to a brand-new idea about Jesus being the Messiah (not tied to their “itching ears,” which, as we saw yesterday, can take us away from truth). But they didn’t just automatically accept it—they tested it against Scripture to see if this new idea really was true according to the Word (Acts 17:11).
May we strive to be men like that—open to God’s truth, even if it challenges an idea we hold, but never failing to use Scripture to test everything, measuring anything we hear against God’s canon, and letting it guide us to His truth.
Prayer: Lord, may Your Word guide me in everything I do, say, and know. Any idea I am holding to, in any area of my life, that is not truth—may Your Word correct me and get me back on course. Amen.
Reflection: Think about your political opinions for a moment—how are you using God’s Word to test them and see if these ideas are true or not, as the Bereans did?
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