"Buying Truth"

"Buying Truth"      

    

    "Buy the truth" (Proverbs 23:23).

   While salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ involves the freest gift ever given, it remains the case that regarding our knowledge and understanding of God and His truth, we must in a very real sense "buy" it.

    By this we simply mean that in order to better know God and His person, character, and way, we make choices to apply ourselves that involve the sacrifice of other things.  When we read the Bible, for example, we may forego sleep, or entertainment, or other literature, or activities, or time with people, or many possibilities regarding how we spend our time.  We pray and thus steer our minds to conscious communion with our Heavenly Father rather than allowing wandering thoughts, or consideration of other matters, or communication with human beings to distract us from fellowship with God.  We meet with believers, whether in regularly scheduled services, Bible studies, and prayer meetings, or in personal get togethers that may take place when we could be doing countless other things.  And we give thanks in times of blessing, seek our Lord in trouble, and walk with Him rather than merely allow life to come and go as if God were not present and involved in revealing Himself and His truth.  All of these devotional determinations require foregoing activities, thoughts, and relationships in order to seek the One who abides as the Life of our lives.  We give or give up in order to receive.  Thereby we "buy the truth."

    Nothing approaches the value of knowing God and His truth.  No amount of time, effort, attention, thought, and action is too great to pay if our "purchase" leads to growth in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus.  Thus we do well to seek God's evaluation of how we spend the spiritual capital that leads to either benefit or detriment in our relationship with Him.  Solomon understood such truth as well as an Old Testament saint could comprehend, and we close with his wise counsel…

"Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold.  For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it."

(Proverbs 8:10-11)

Weekly Memory Verse 

   For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

(Ephesians 2:10)