Experience Cards
By Elin Henderson
“O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth.”
Galatians 3:1a (NKJV)
Sometimes, life is like the game Monopoly. You buy, you sell, you win, you lose. You look forward to those “experience card” spaces where the unknown waits for you! What new experience will I get? “Straight to jail, do NOT pass go, do NOT collect $200”? Or “Win a free ride on the Reading Railroad”? Our lives are built around experiences. We are an experience-driven people!By Elin Henderson
“O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth.”
Galatians 3:1a (NKJV)
Yet, there is a separate and essential component to our Monopoly experience cards called “TRUTH.” Experience and Truth are two factors on a precarious balance. Experience without truth can be misleading. Truth without experience can be empty and meaningless. From a human perspective, which is easier to measure? Our natural default is always Experience. We can see it and feel it. Truth can be abstract and distant, difficult to discern. The balance is then set with Experience as the Judge, and Truth as being judged by it.
But we, as believers, live by a different standard, a balance on which the reverse is true. Truth is the essential factor by which we weigh all of life’s experiences. Truth in the unchanging form of God’s Word, revealed by God’s Spirit to our human hearts and minds, influencing our actions and behavior! While experiences can change from person to person, truth remains the same. “God is the same yesterday, today and further” and He is, after all, “the way the TRUTH and the life.”
He often does use experiences to reveal truth to us and to help us grow. The key is to get to know Him as the Truth, and His Word as the revelation of that Truth. Then, our scales will be able to properly discern the different experiences that we encounter.
In the second and third chapters of Galatians, Paul gets after the Galatian believers and asking them pointedly: Who has fooled you? You are hung up on experiences but have forgotten the Truth. They had lost sight of the truth of the gospel (2:14) by looking to experiences (in this case, circumcision and outward conformity or, in other words, “experiences”). Let’s not follow in their footsteps and become so experience-focused that our scales become skewed.
The next time life deals you a unique “experience card,” pick it up without fear and measure it against the truth of the Person and Word of God and see what He has in store for you!
GOING DEEPER:
1. What recent experiences do you need to throw onto the balance of truth?
2. How well do you know the “TRUTH” side of the scale? How can you better apply yourself to the study of His Person and His Word?
FURTHER READING:
III John 4; I John 5:6; I John 2:21; II Timothy 2:15
Oakwood’s missionaries Elin Henderson and her husband Phil serve as church planters with New Tribes in Mozambique, Africa. Elin is mother to ten-year-old Callie and eight-year-old Elias.
