We don’t need the movies to show us how much of a disparity there is between truth and lies, though the twists in plot and suspense often remind us. We all hold certain values, and if we’re honest, we might admit how often we fail to honor them. And yet, there is something peculiar about how our minds work. We can so easily bracket our own lives from an acknowledgment of how consistently we miss the mark. It is like a built-in avoidance mechanism.

The issues of self-deception and denial are more serious than we care to admit. Tendencies toward self-pity, self-preoccupation, self-righteousness, and self-aggrandizement are intense and dangerous. Or as Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr describes it: “Sin is thus the unwillingness of man to acknowledge his creatureliness and dependence upon God and his effort to make his own life independent and secure.”(1)

One of the most helpful insights I know toward sorting through truth, lies, and deception is in Scripture’s calling us out of ourselves and always towards God. We are reminded often that the human heart is more deceitful than anything else. “Who can fathom it?” asks Jeremiah. “God alone, who searches the heart and tests inner motivation.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Acknowledging Creatureliness →

It was a cold February at Christ of the Desert monastery, high in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Behind the chapel, author William Bryant Logan noticed an open grave, the disturbed red soil waiting in a tall mound beside it.

“Has a brother died?” he asked a monk.

“No,” he answered, “but we cannot dig in winter, so we opened this grave ahead of time, just in case.”

To many of us, an open grave is unnerving, the thought of soil disturbed and waiting entirely unwelcome. “An open grave is an open mouth,” writes Logan. “It exhales all the suggestion of the dark.”(1) In the Western world in particular, we have a complicated relationship with death, dismissing as much of it as we can manage from sight, mind, and society. An open grave is a gaping wound we prefer to turn our eyes from.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Open Grave →