How open is your heart and mind? Are you open to seeing and hearing the truth? Are you seeking to discern the truth among the rhetoric, half-truths, and lies? Or is your heart hardened and your mind refusing to discern the truth? Are you willing to have a change of heart?
We see and hear a lot of rhetoric, half-truths, and outright lies. Artificial intelligence is used to create video and sound bites that appear to be real. People speak half-truths to pull us in so that we might believe the lie that underlies the small tidbit of truth they used.
We see many instances in the Bible in which the people’s hearts were hardened. Many of us will immediately think of Pharoah, but Jesus referenced the hard hearts of the people in the first century. Because of their hard hearts, they could not discern the truth He was speaking and teaching. They could not see the underlying truth He spoke through the parables.
How well do we see or hear the truth Jesus was (and is) speaking? We all approach the Bible with biases. Some of those biases were taught to us when we were children, and we continue to carry them decades later. Unfortunately, those biases are so ingrained that we refuse to open our hearts and minds to see and hear the truth. In some cases, we are just as blind as the Pharisees who were leading the people of Israel (Matthew 15:14).
How do we open our hearts and minds? We discard our biases to the degree possible. We remind ourselves to read God’s Word for the purpose of discovering the truth, setting aside what we think we know. If we do that each and every time we read, we can slowly divest ourselves of our biases and see God’s truth.
I pray we all seek to set aside our biases when reading God’s Word. I pray we take our blinders off. I pray each one of us will read God’s Word with open hearts and open minds, seeking the truth. Take the blinders off. Set aside your biases. Seek the truth of God’s Word.
Mark 4:33-34 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
Marty Pressey 