Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” 

John 14:6A

Welcome to our world. It’s full of liars.

Liars on the internet. Liars in churches. Liars running for office. Liars reporting the news. Liars selling dubious products. Maybe even liars in your own family. Lies, lies, lies.

Somebody should do something about this!

Well…In the 1920’s, a new profession was born: The fact checker. Time Magazine had a dedicated staff of fact checkers, making sure every article had integrity and earned the trust of its readers.

As lies continued to propagate, so did the fact checkers. Now there are over 300 organizations dedicated to checking the veracity of claims people make. There are organizations dedicated to fact checking the fact checkers! You can even visit the site allsides.com and vote on how left or right leaning a different fact checker is.

Does anybody else think this is all kind of ridiculous? I guess that’s where we are, and not only in the public sphere. There are liars all around you. You may be one yourself.

So when I tell you that Christ is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, why should you believe me?

Don’t even try to use a fact checker on Jesus. He didn’t deal in facts. He offers no verifiable scientific process for salvation–only divine love, and this mysterious human ability called faith. So, what’s to say Jesus wasn’t just feeding us a line?

John Wesley didn’t do fact checking, per se, but he did practice FAITH checking. He would read scripture and then read what others had written about it (tradition). He employed logic and even science, not to quantify faith, but to refine it (reason).

Finally, he turned to his own life to see how God had uniquely spoken to him (experience). Methodists call these four sources the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

These sources are somewhat subjective, and only offer some bumper rails for us as we navigate our lives. They help us to be careful and diligent as we try to parse truth from lies the best we can.

I urge you to employ fact checkers like snopes and politifact for guiding you in our “post-truth” world, but don’t stop there. Using tools like the quadrilateral can help inform your faith.

It may seem like you’re surrounded by liars, but humans are more than that. We are created, at our core, to search for Truth. You may never have it all locked down in a nice and neat little box, because even truth can be messy and chaotic.

Until we emerge into a “post-lies” world, we may all need to up our discernment game. There are definitely some blatant liars out there, but don’t let caution keep you from connecting with others.

If you’re ever not sure, remember this:

In God you can trust,

but for everything else, it’s not a bad idea…

to verify.

Have a great week,

Mitch