A Note on the Inspection Itself

If you have read this far and found yourself angry, I want to say something to you directly.

The anger is not evidence that I am wrong. The anger is evidence that you have fused something with the authority of Scripture that you may not have chosen to fuse consciously. When examination of a position feels like an attack on God, the fusion has occurred. That is worth sitting with, not because the position is necessarily wrong but because the fusion is always harmful. A faith that cannot be examined is not a stronger faith. It is a more fragile one.

If you have read this far and found yourself relieved, I want to say something to you as well. The relief is appropriate. You have been carrying weight that was not yours to carry, defending positions that Scripture itself does not require you to defend, protecting a coat that was covering the absence of the transformation it was meant to signal. You can set it down. The rock is still there. The knowing is still available. The Spirit is still interceding.

If you have read this far and found yourself uncertain — not angry, not relieved, but genuinely unsure what to do with what you have just encountered — that uncertainty is the most honest response. It is the response of the one who has discovered that some of what they thought was load-bearing is furniture, and who now needs to sit with the question of what is actually holding the house up. That is the inspection working as intended. Stay with the uncertainty. It will lead you somewhere better than the certainty that preceded it.

The question when did you last check the foundation of your house is not rhetorical and it is not punitive. It is the question of a fellow sojourner who has done the inspection himself and found the rock more solid, not less, on the other side of it. The furniture can be rearranged. The assumptions can be examined. The traditions can be held with appropriate humility rather than iron grip. And the knowing that is eternal life — present tense, relational, available now to every person with empty hands — is still exactly what Jesus said it was on the night before He died.

He was right about it then. He has not been wrong about it since.

♦

Soli Deo Gloria

The Michlaude Discipleship Project