What do you do with your controversial convictions? What do you do with those costly truths that burn in your heart, those certainties from which you cannot escape?
What do you do when those convictions cause you to question what you’ve been taught in the past or to reexamine the structures and forms you once embraced?
What do you do when those undeniable truths – at least, to you they appear to be undeniable– cause you to make a break with your old surroundings? What do you do when the unshakable confidence that your beliefs are right causes you to view your friends and colleagues as wrong?
What do you do? And how can you be so sure?
What gives you the right to say that you have the truth and the others don’t? They are fellow believers in Jesus, brothers and sisters who love the Lord too. What makes you better than them?
What makes you so positive that you have more light than they have? What makes your revelation more biblical than theirs?
After all, they read the same Scriptures that you read and pray to the same heavenly Father that you pray to. They also cry out for truth and clarity, humbling themselves in God’s sight and seeking to be obedient to His will. Who are you to differ with them? Some of them have been serving God longer than you’ve been alive! And if your own views have changed, what makes you so sure that your new views are right? Maybe in a few years you’ll reject these very views as wrong. How can you be so confident?
These are not easy questions!
To be true to your conscience sometimes means making a break with the past and “going outside the camp.” That is never comfortable.
On the other hand, humility urges you to honor your elders and teachers, to submit and conform.
Yet you cannot deny your convictions. What then do you do?
Many believers choose the safety of...