Reality Checks for Christians
by Joe Neil Clayton



Introduction

There are only a few pure anarchists in the world today, thank the Lord! Hardly anyone operates in this life without a set of rules. But, the rules people respect may have a myriad of sources. All objective codes of conduct must come from authors who have gained the respect of a following, but some people have a subjective source, counting only their own instincts as their rules. They rule themselves. Yet, all rule-followers recognize that it is best to have some kind of law, whether it proceeds from a previously established authority, or it is devised within one's own mind. No matter what the inner or outer source may be, the trouble with all of us is that, though we are not anarchists, we have trouble obeying authority.
The person who has accepted and submitted himself to the reign of a set of rules established by someone else will nearly always fall short of ideal compliance. Even the person who devises his own set of rules of conduct will often fail to honor and obey them completely.
Following our failures, we may experience a number of reactions. For some of us, the affliction of conscience makes us miserable, until we either return to our self-imposed duty, or salve our conscience by wandering into the paths of denial and self-justification. Other disobedient souls among us may attempt to justify their miscreancy by critical analyses of the law to which they submit, claiming that it is either malformed, or unreasonable, or too strict, or lacking in strong authority.
The inevitable picture we see in this is one of an unstable, undisciplined, unconstrained, and unabashed body of people. Yet, in the almost universal recognition of the need for some kind of law, we could all profit through a law that leads to a stable, disciplined, constrained, and abashed life.
In the midst of our unsteady society, we have a group of people called Christians, who have been challenged to adhere to a superior, exalted, ideal and rewarding existence. All of them acknowledge the divine origin of this idealistic life, but many of them have neither fully embraced it, nor performed it faithfully. They still follow the "conventional wisdom" of humankind, even though it hardly ever confirms, or even coincides, with divine revelation.
Therefore, borrowing from a modern catch-phrase, I propose to set before us some "Reality Checks" offered by God in the Bible to those of us who are caught up in the "Conventional Wisdom" of our age. It is my hope that my readers will be the sort of people who will concede that conventional wisdom is both temporal and ephemeral, and will also acknowledge that the revealed Word of God presents the eternal reality in which we should put our trust.

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