How Do I Know What's True?

We currently in a series on “Developing A Biblical Worldview”

We’ve defined a “worldview” as a set of basic beliefs, a more or less organized (and most people’s worldviews are less organized) system of assumptions and values because people’s thoughts tend to develop patterns and fit into systems.

We’ve seen that there are many false worldviews like naturalism, materialism, hedonism, and pragmatism to name a few.

Last week, one of the foundational truths in developing a biblical worldview was the fact that God exist and is the creator of all the universe and more importantly He created each one of us because He loved us.

A few years ago Lifeway Research found in a survey that 81% of Americans agree with the statement, “I am concerned about the declining moral behavior in our nation.”

As part of the study, Lifeway Research also asked Americans how they decide between right and wrong on a personal level.

Half (52 percent) say right and wrong never change.

A third (32 percent) say whether or not someone gets hurt plays a role in determining if something is right or wrong.

Americans also consider whether something is legal (24 percent) or whether the benefits outweigh the costs (20 percent) when thinking about morality.

Fewer worry about what the majority of people think (8 percent) or whether an institution gets hurt (10 percent).

Overall, Americans seem guided more by their internal moral compass than by laws.

Almost no one (4 percent) worries about getting caught when deciding between right and wrong.

Postmodernism is a general term used to describe most of the false worldviews.

It will ask can we really know truth?

There may be some truth out there but how can anybody really know it?

Is it possible to know truth? Is it knowable?

The answer is absolutely.

Truth can be knowable.

Jesus said you can know the truth and it will set you free.

And you can know what’s false.

Truth can be discovered.

How do we discover it?

Five ways.

We Know What’s True Through Creation.

We know what’s true through creation, simply by looking around at the world.

We learn a lot about God, a lot about truth, just by looking at nature.

This is why science is so important.

It helps us understand how things work.

It helps us understand truth.

Romans 1:20 says this “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power, His divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so men are without excuse.”

In other words, forget the Bible.

I can learn a lot about God simply by taking a walk this afternoon.

When I go out and start walking around creation I can learn a lot about God.

The first thing I can figure out real quickly is God likes variety.

There’s not anybody like you in the world.

All the different varieties. God loves diversity. God loves variety.

Did you know that there are over 350,000 varieties of beetles.

God wanted a lot of varieties of beetles.

Another thing in nature, I can look around real quick and figure out this guy is powerful.

Ever seen a volcano?

Ever seen an earthquake?

Tidal wave? A wave? Tides? Winds?

It’s very obvious if God made all this He’s pretty powerful.

I know God is organized.

In fact, the more we know about nature the more we realize how much He is.

The whole earth is an ecosystem.

It’s all delicately balanced. And it can get out of balance.

Things that we didn’t even know related to each other we now know are highly organized.

So the more we understand the planet, God’s universe, the more we have to thank God for.

50 years ago we didn’t know about genomes, we didn’t know about DNA, we didn’t know about all these things but the more we understand the more we go, What a God!

How intricately He designed even our own bodies.

When you look at biologists and physicists and you look at the way God wired the world in creation we learn about God.

There is no contradiction between the discoveries of science and faith.

There are contradictions between unproven scientific theories and faith.

But there is no contradiction between discoveries and faith because all truth is God’s truth.

God thought it up before the scientists did.

God designed the laws of physics before any professor of physics even knew about it.

The Bible says in Romans 1:19, “The basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is.”

Did you know that throughout history up until about the last hundred years almost all of the great scientists were also believers.

Many of them were theologians.

It was their love of God that drove them to discover why do we do what we do.

We know what’s true through creation.

We Know What’s True Through Conscience.

There are some things that are hard wired in us by God that we know that are always right and always wrong no matter what anybody else says.

Our conscience tells us this.

The Bible says this in Romans 2:14-15 “Some people naturally obey God’s commands even though they don’t have the law some people naturally obey God’s commands even though they don’t have the law. This proves that the conscious is like a law written in the human heart and it will show whether we are forgiven or condemned.”

Say, we take a random sample of one million people from around the planet and we put them out on a corner in New York City, in Times Square, and we’re going to ask them a moral question. We’re going to say, “Here’s a little old lady, she’s 92, she’s blind, she’s walking with a walker. She needs to cross the busy intersection in New York City. Tell me which of these three options is morally right. One, you can ignore her and just let her go off on her own. Two, you could help the blind lady cross the street. Three, you could push her into oncoming traffic. We instinctively know there’s a right thing to do. You don’t have to be a “Christian” or Jew or Muslim or even a spiritual person. Inside you know that’s the right thing to do.

That’s the way God wired our conscience.

The Bible says this (I love this in the Message paraphrase): “This shows that God’s law is not something alien, imposed on us from without. But it’s woven into the very fabric of our creation. There’s something deep within us that echoes God’s yes and no, right and wrong.”

The Bible says in Proverbs 20:27, “The Lord gave us mind and conscience. We cannot hide from ourselves.”

The problem with conscience is this is one of all the sources of finding truth that is the least reliable.

Because the Bible teaches us that our conscious can be weakened.

Our conscious can be perverted.

The more I violate my conscious, the more out of whack it gets.

It just gets easier and easier to do the wrong thing.

There are some things that are hard wired in us around the world that says that we know what is right and what’s wrong.

We Know What’s True Through Consideration.

We know it’s knowable. It’s intellectual.

You don’t just get truth by faith. You can test it.

Truth is intelligent.

GPS getting me to my destination. It works, so I trust it.

For fifty years this August I’ve been following this map called the Bible.

I have found it to be true.

It always takes me where it says it’s going to take me.

It has never, ever taken me to some place I didn’t expect because it said something different.

So we can through consideration, we can think it.

God gave you a brain and He expects you to use it.

Most people never slow down long enough for consideration.

Most people just drift through life.

The Bible tells us in Proverbs 14:15 “Ponder the path of your feet.”

In other words think through your life. Don’t just kind of go out and drift through life.

It goes to say in Proverbs 14:15, “Fools will believe anything. But the wise think about what they do.”

That means consideration. They think about what they do.

John 3:33 “Anyone who examines this evidence will come to stake his life on this. That God Himself is the truth.”

Check it out.

Read books on the area you want to know more about.

Listen to podcasts

Watch videos

Ask me

We may have a class sometime on apologetics to help you examine the evidence.

We Know What’s True Through God’s Commandments.

Through what God tells us and the direction He gives us in the Bible.

2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what’s true and make us realize what’s wrong in our lives. It straightens us out. It teaches us to do what’s right.”

If I discover truth from the Bible, how do I know the Bible is true?

I know it’s true because of the difference it’s made in my life. I know it’s true because Jesus said it’s true.

Where’s the evidence that the Bible is true?

There’s a world of objective evidence that says that this book is true.

There is both external evidence and internal evidence.

The external evidence is it’s a historical book that you can rely on.

The internal evidence is there is the truth in this book.

External evidence is things like the number of copies of the Bible from around the time that it was written.

That’s what historians look for to see if a book is accurate and true.

For instance a book like Homer’s Iliad.

There’s about 643 copies of that.

If you look back and see all the copies and compare them and they go, “That’s what that book said.”

Or a book like Julius Caesar’s Gaelic Wars.

There’s only ten copies of that.

The earliest one of those was 1000 years from when it was supposed to be written.

But historians still say, That’s probably what the book said.

How about the Bible?

There are over 5366 Greek copies of the Bible from when it was written about seventy or so years afterwards.

That dispels what I’d called the urban legend about the Bible.

The urban legend is out there that somehow the Bible was passed down from generation to generation and so it got changed as it was passed down translated from this language to that language to this language.

That’s just not true.

The truth of the matter is when translators translated the Bible they go back to these 5000 copies from right around when it was written to compare them to see how they all match so we know that it is what it is and says what it says.

That’s external evidence.

External evidence is also stuff like archeology.

The cities are there, the places are there. You can go back and find them.

There have been many times in history when historians have said The Bible’s probably wrong. That’s not really accurate.

Then the Bible has proved itself to be true and the historians wrong.

There was a long period of time when historians said there was such thing as a tribe called the Hitites like the Bible talks about in the Old Testament.

Until about a hundred years ago a man by the name of Hugo Winkler discovered a place with ten thousand clay tables at the Hittite capital.

Now everybody accepts it as a part of history.

There’s also the internal evidence of the Bible itself.

Internal evidence is the fact that something can be trusted.

One of the evidences that people look for is eyewitness accounts.

If it’s an eyewitness account I can trust them.

The Bible is filled with eyewitness accounts.

Moses was there when the Red Sea split.

Joshua was there to watch Jericho fall.

The disciples of Jesus stood in that upper room and all of a sudden saw the resurrected Jesus.

The internal evidence of the Bible is also in the fact of how this book tells one story with consistency.

This book, the Bible was written over a 1500-year time span. It was written on three different continents by forty different authors.

Yet it speaks with consistency on the most controversial subjects of the day.

It tells one story from beginning to end of God’s salvation and love for man and how He came into this world through Jesus Christ.

As true as this book is the truth of the matter is if it stays on my shelf it doesn’t make much of a difference in my life.

The Bible has no shelf life.

I’ve got to pull it down off the shelf so it can get it in my life.

5. We Know What’s True Through Christ.

Last way we know the truth is through Christ.

God came to earth in human form to personify truth.

The Bible says that Jesus was full of grace and truth.

Truth is not a principle. Truth is a person.

Truth is someone you can relate to.

Truth is Jesus Christ.

One of the clearest and the most well know verses in the Bible is found in John 14:6, “Jesus said, I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me.”

Notice He says “I”.

Not a religion. Not a race. Not a ritual. Not rules and regulations. I.

It’s a person. Truth is a person.

I am the way, the truth and the life. He says, I am the truth. Not one truth. Not part of the truth.

He didn’t say I am a little bit of the truth.

He said, I am the truth.

This by the way is what separates Jesus Christ from every other person on the planet.

Every other leader, every other faith.

Mohammed, Buddha, and others come as a prophet of the truth or seeking the truth.

They are looking for it.

So you get all these different leaders saying I’m looking for the truth.

I’m teaching the truth.

I point to the truth.

I’m a prophet of truth.

Jesus comes and says, “I’m it. I am the truth.”

That is an incredible divisive statement.

It’s either right or it’s wrong.

He’s either who He says He is or He’s the biggest liar in history.

It’s impossible for Jesus to be a great teacher.

Because no great teacher would claim to be God if he wasn’t.

What is Jesus when He says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the Father except through Me.’

It doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room.

Everybody’s betting their life on something.

The atheist is betting that there is no God.

He’d better be right or he’s making a big mistake.

I am betting my life, I willing tell you this, I’m betting my life that Jesus is who He said He was.

What are you betting your life on?

John 3:33 in the New Living translation “Those who believe Him discover that God is true.”

What Do I Do With The Truth?

Believe it. The Bible tells us continue to believe this truth.

Do it. Truth is not just an intellectual exercise. It’s something you do. You practice it.

Stand for it.

Don’t be ashamed in a relational, postmodern world that says it doesn’t really matter.

The Bible tells us our responsibility is to never oppose the truth but to stand for it at all times.

We need to be people of the truth in this relativistic age.

Spread it. Spread the truth.

Prayer: Father I know that Jesus Christ, is are the way, the truth, the life. I want to know the truth so the truth will set me free. I want to believe it. I want to do it. I want to stand for it. I want to spread the truth. I’m in. I’m putting my trust in You. In Your name I pray. Amen.