Dear Editor,
Have you ever thought much about authority?
We are all under some form of authority.
Who have you allowed to have authority over your life?
When you stand to declare your thoughts and opinions, what is the authority from which you established your foundation?
In the world we live in people justify their opinions and thoughts by that which they know.
Where did you acquire your knowledge to base your opinion?
Many of the people we listen to have acquired great knowledge through hours of study. Everything they have studied has been learned and taught to them by someone else.
Who is the authority behind all this knowledge?
When you submit to an instructor or an author of a book or any other form of teaching, why do you believe what they teach?
Do you realize that you are submitting to an authority every time you accept someone’s teaching?
So, my question is, have you ever traced the line of authority backwards to find out who is really instructing you?
You and I do not have any knowledge of our own. We have acquired everything we know from those who have taught it to us. We have had experiences in our life but they are all interpreted by the knowledge we have.
What if the knowledge base from which you look at the world around you has a false foundation? You wouldn’t know it. So, you would base everything that you experience upon false assumptions.
What if everyone around you is being taught from a foundation that is built upon false ideas? Not only would you not know it but everyone around you would be deceived, and what you and they taught to others would start from a wrong base.
What if we have decided to submit ourselves to an authority that is not true?
How would we know?
If we do not know the truth and those around us do not know the truth we will begin to determine our own truth and lead everyone else into the same false beliefs.
We must all search for the truth. We must quit accepting things people say just because it fits our desires. We must find the truth and begin to base our foundation upon the truth.
So, who has the truth?
God is truth.
God is all knowing.
All true knowledge then begins with God. If what we hold to is not based in God’s truth, the knowledge we gain and attain is false, and it will lead us down a path of deception.
No matter how well intended we are, if we have submitted to a false authority, we will not be able to make life work out the way it was intended to be. We will be without a true foundation so we will continually chase every new idea that comes along till we find something that works for us.
If the idea we elect to accept is not based upon God’s truth, no matter how well it works, we will fail to succeed in the end.
Throughout the Bible, God lets us know that He is the Authority over all things. Jesus tells us that He is the truth. He tells us that His teaching is the true foundation and everything else is shifting sand.
To try to build on any other foundation will not work. You may ask why not? To build on any other foundation is to raise someone other than God to the level of God.
Why won’t this work?
No one else can sustain the universe. No one else can save man kind. No one else can sustain his own existence. Everything created is dependent upon the Creator. So, He is the only truth.
Some would say that we evolved from nothing to this point. If this were true there would be no way of knowing it. Knowledge had to exist before we could know anything at all.
There has to be an all knowing being for us to have a basis for what we know.
Therefore God is the Authority over everything and our only hope is to reestablish our lives upon the true knowledge He makes available to us.
What Authority have you submitted to?
Pastor Thomas R. Swain,
First Church of God,
Great Bend