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PLAYING THE RIGHT GAME
"Buy the truth and do not sell it; get wisdom, discipline and understanding."
(Proverbs 23:23, NIV)
Maybe you have seen one of those lists of humorous exchanges between caddies and
their players. Among these lists, you'll usually find this repartee, which is
perhaps my favorite:
Golfer: "So how do you like my game?"
Caddie: "Not bad, sir. But personally, I prefer golf."
From this painful retort, we'll draw our lesson today--that a false pursuit,
however earnest, can lead to painful consequences.
It was on the golf course, actually, that a friend once told me, "There's no
sense in winning the rat race. It's a race we shouldn't even be running." He
wasn't speaking in the context of golf, though. He was speaking to all of life.
He was speaking, you might say, the language of Solomon, who regarded most
earthly pursuits as "a chasing after the wind."
Earnestness earns high marks these days. Sincerity beats simple truth. No wonder
we're not supposed to propose that one belief outdoes another. Truth is no
longer about one faith or another; but rather about one or another's faith--that
is, how much do you believe what you believe? Believe it with all your heart,
and that's sufficient unto heaven.
Where, may we ask, is the logic in that?
Put your dollars, say, in a commodity that a "sure thing" next year, then lose
it all when the sure thing becomes a dismal failure. We could say that's OK,
that you believed you would make money. But who would dream of calling that
wisdom?
A number of years ago, I watched in disbelief as a sincere member of a false
religion told an interviewer that she didn't care if her religion was proven
false, she would believe it anyway. This week, I heard a follower of the same
false religion say he could take heart from his religion's accounts of
Jesus--even if that "Jesus" was presented in a blatantly false historical
context.
Community is important, and nearly every church of every belief provides it. But
there is no consolation that we are all in the same boat if the boat we're in
has a hole in it. In such a boat, there is only disaster.
That's why a strong foundation is the most important commodity when it comes to building a
spiritual house. And that's why Paul said of Jesus that He is the foundation on
which we build--the real Jesus, the One who pronounced, "I am…the truth."
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