It's just too confusing. There are too many. Too many false gospels. Too many inferior products. Too many knock-offs and posers. Too many choices.
I love the illustration (and maybe one of my friends working in the government can verify this for me) of how the law enforcement personnel who track down counterfeit money do not bother to study every possible tweaking of the US dollar bill. How could they? God gave mankind boundless creativity, which fallen humans (me, us) may employ to bend and twist the truth in infinite directions. And the slightest bend or twist, if followed along its course, can project us far from the original. Rather, those personnel study and pour over and memorize and engrave in their minds the real thing. The official authoritative dollar bill, printed by the US government and bearing its seal, which alone has worth (um, a little at least...sigh).
What is my job as parent? What is our job as citizen, pastor, Bible study leader, friend? To exhaust myself with putting out endless fires, to be constantly shouting at my children for doing the wrong thing, to contort our minds with situational ethics til we don't know which end is up? To make a rule for every circumstance, to come out dogmatically on every issue based on my own understanding of what's right at that moment, to declare my soapbox passions clouded by reactions to my upbringing or past?
Or is it to study and pour over and engrave the Real Thing, God's revealed Word--the written expression of His decrees, stipulations, opinions, tastes, and ways of thinking and acting--into the pathways of our minds. To anchor our minds and hearts to the Rock of truth, so we won't be treading water adrift, sinking, grasping, clinging to anything that floats and pulling it down with us. To be so fixed on the gold standard that every aberrant religion, philosophy, message, and agenda immediately looks as fake and bankrupt as it is.
This is security. This is sanity. This is transformation (Romans 12:2).
