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| If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. |
| —John 14:15-17 |
Has anyone ever told you something that was just really hard for you to believe? You weren’t sure whether or not it was true?
I know that every one of us enjoys stories. A good novel engages us and we simply can’t put it down. Out of the hundreds of television shows, we have a few that we really follow closely. Most surely we have a favorite movie or two. In every case, we feel drawn to the book, TV show, or movie because of the story it tells. Even the so-called “reality shows” actually tell a story, perhaps a goofy story, but a story nonetheless.
We’ve enjoyed stories since those days when mom or dad read to us just before we went to sleep at night. Each one of those children’s stories had some lesson to teach us, or something fun to explain. The person who wrote those stories did so to bring joy to children.
Some of those children’s stories told us about animals that can talk. For example, in the Winnie the Pooh stories, A. A. Milne has created a whole forest full of animals that talk and have adventures. The only human in those stories is a little boy named Christopher Robin. And, he only appears in the stories once in a while. The rest of the time, Milne has written about Pooh Bear, Piglet, Rabbit, Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, and Baby Roo. I actually didn’t discover Milne’s stories until I was in college. I had hoped to write children’s stories, so I did a great deal of research about the children’s stories that had already been written.
If mom or dad read a Winnie the Pooh story to you when you were a child, I imagine you enjoyed it quite a lot. But, I also know that as you grew older, you realized that real, live rabbits, bears, pigs, tigers, and kangaroos don’t talk to each other in the English language. Even so, it was fun to read a story about talking animals because it helped you imagine what it might be like if animals did talk to one another.
Sometimes when someone tells us something, it is hard for us to know for sure whether or not what they are telling us is true. When we have a hard time deciding, we might say, “I don’t believe you.” In order to believe something, we have to know that it is true.
When something is absolutely true, it has a way of helping us believe in whatever that something is. For example, the Bible tells us that, on one occasion, Jesus’ mother, Mary, came to visit her cousin, Elizabeth, before Jesus was born. Elizabeth was also going to have a baby. Elizabeth told Mary, “You are blessed because you believe what the Lord has told you will happen.”
You see, an angel had appeared to Mary many months before and told her that she was going to have a baby, that his name would be “Jesus,” and that he would grow up to become the Messiah. Mary believed what the angel told her. She believed what the angel told her because in her heart she knew it was absolutely true. And, she knew this in her heart because God gave her the ability to recognize that it was true.
Understanding what is true and what isn’t true is a gift from God. And, that is a really important lesson we all need to learn. God empowers the Holy Spirit—who lives within the heart of every person who believes in the life-transforming power of the Lord Jesus Christ—to help us know for certain what is true and what isn’t.
