Buy Truth

Buy truth, and do not sell it;
buy wisdom, instruction, and understanding. - Proverbs 23:23

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Two quick observations about what probably seems like a rather straightforward proverb.

1. “Buy truth…”

Buying implies that truth has value. It also implies that getting your hands on truth requires cost. Do not expect to come to a quick and easy comprehension of truth. When you were a child, it took you a moment even to understand that two plus two equals four, but never five, three, one hundred, or anything other than four. Even the simplest, most basic truths have costs for people who are not yet adequately equipped to grasp them.

So, start with the Bible’s premise that you do not inherently understand most things that are true. You need to be taught. And being taught requires investments of time, energy, effort and consistency. It takes work to know truth. It takes being wrong, being corrected, and being instructed on how to be right. It takes a willingness to believe that you don’t understand how everything works and might need help fitting some of the pieces together.

Truth is costly, and at the beginning, all of us are even more spiritually destitute than we are intellectually deficient.

2. “…do not sell it.”

The entire world is trying to figure out a way to get you to sellout on truth. They will pester and bully you to sell for any number of reasons: tolerance, acceptance, social conformity, niceness, other people’s feelings, easily gained moral virtue points, groupthink, political correctness, expediency, the wisdom of crowds, popularity, “science”, education, career advancement, you name it.

Make no mistake: it always seems like there’s a good reason to sell truth.

But you cannot love without it. You cannot understand the world around you without it. And you cannot know God without it.

The pressure for you to sell the truth you possess will be immense, and the world will make its unscrupulous offers to you every single day. But if you give in, you will be left, like Judas, with just enough money to buy the field you hang yourself in.

Make your life about truth, brothers. As the world teaches us to save and save, to increase our investments and grow our own empires, make sure that you are spending your spiritual and intellectual capital purchasing real truth. Those kinds of investments never depreciate and will give a return on investment far beyond whatever you can imagine.

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