Pastor Mike Ashcraft at Port City Community Church gave a great message last Sunday on knowing what you believe. I could not have agreed more with what he said and the idea behind it. We live in a society today where we are supposed to tolerate most beliefs, and we replace values and moral convictions with the fear of hurting someone's feelings. And so we are creating a culture (and I see this daily on campus) of people who have no idea what they believe, only what they don't believe. Instead of taking a stand a moral or spiritual issue, we choose rather to laugh at those who do by thinking that they should just be more tolerant and accepting.
This is the result that we get, people who only know what they don't believe. People who don't believe in God, or hell, or certain moral truths. Saying things like "evil exists so God can't," or "sending people to hell isn't fair or justifiable." And while everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, we need to know just that- our beliefs. We need to know why evil would erase the possibility of God, or why hell isn't fair; we need to know what we do believe. If you don't believe in God, what do you believe in?
As Pastor Mike put it: you have system of beliefs, you live according to that belief system, and you trust that system is profitable for you. Whatever we believe, whether we know it or not, we believe because we think it benefits us in some way. It is also important to realize that we can think wrongly. Believe it or not, we aren't always right; we all make dumb decisions on a daily basis. Most importantly though, as Pastor Mike said, don't define your life by what you don't believe. You don't believe in God? So be it, what do you believe in? Walking around criticizing everyone else that actually has a belief system (no matter if it's right or wrong) is what we do when we are in middle school. Know what you believe, understand why you believe it, and then you can begin having a discussion with those who believe differently.
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