For a person who doesn't trust myself I tend to make very bold statements about reality. You may have noticed that if you are tuning in to what I'm saying from day to day.
I think all of us have met people who are very confident that what they are saying is true but a good portion of their life is in total disarray. You listen and think, 'Wow, This is crazy talk. What reality is this person living in?' Then there are others that are very stable people who are also sure of what they are saying and their lives are mostly together and ordered in a functional way but you still think, 'I am not on-board with how this person is speaking.' One is an orderly kind of wrongness and the other is a disorderly kind.
My confidence comes from the Bible and my distrust of self also comes from the Bible. Don't get me wrong I could distrust myself without any help at all. I've made enough mistake to have a healthy distrust for my own judgement but the Bible has made me issue a recall on my own thinking. The whole batch can't be trusted.
This morning I woke up thinking about the scientific method. This method has risen to the top as the way way science is carried out by smart people. An observer puts two and two together and forms a hypothesis from their observation. They make a statement about what they saw. After that they devise tests to prove and disprove that statement. If after many exhaustive tests the statement still stands the hypothesis then gets moved into the fact category.
The reason I don't trust myself is that I know that my I am flawed. My thinking is rigged to come to conclusions that benefit me. My own selfishness shows even if my science is right my ability to apply that science isn't.
People speak about God and say He can be trusted. Some have very circular arguments and clearly strange motives. They demanded that people trust God but that never convinced me.
God's grace shows me that He Is trustworthy. Grace has and does convince me.
Sure there are other things like the amazing accuracy and beauty of the world around me. God made all these things that run like clockwork. He is incredibly ordered while still incorporating a beautiful seeming randomness into His work that only a master artist could accomplish. But that artist could have moved on to other things. He might not know about me and my issues. That artist could be impersonal.
Grace says a man came from Heaven to die on a cross for you and I without us asking or wanting Him to come. Grace has opened a way to experience forgiveness and dignity that has nothing to do with our effort. Grace is perfect. Sin can't mess it up. A person can foolishly reject it but they can't fundamentally disprove it... not on a factual level. In one hundred years there will still be more legal proof that Jesus died on a cross and rose from the grave then there will be that you or I were ever born. Nor can it be disproved on a conceptual level. Grace has no ulterior motive. It gains nothing by what it does.
A gracious God can't be impersonal. No one who would go to the lengths of dying for a person would just leave them hanging out to dry.
Grace isn't selfish. A friend who would (and did) give His life for you is someone who you can trust. Anger can be wrong. Justice can be flawed. History can be changed. Motives can be questioned. Good people can make very bad decisions. Conclusions can lack the proper exhaustive experimentation. But grace is right. I can't see anything wrong with it have looked but the more I look the more amazed I am.
There are plenty of people that speak boldly about the Bible that I heartily disagree with because grace is missing. I look for grace not just knowledge. Grace is reliable.
Because I distrust myself I often take another glance at things. It is kind of like rechecking that you have locked the door when you leave the house. What I look for now is grace. I don't run more experiments. I look to see if grace is in the mix of what I am thinking and doing. If it is I have peace because I know that God will direct and correct me.
Grace and truth go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other.
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