In following Christ, you are searching for the contradictions, and only the contradictions, between His words and yours. They are the immeasurable differences between the way God thinks and the way you think. They are the truth to your lies. They are the hiddens to your knowns. They are the aletheia to your veritas.
Jesus said, By thy words thou shalt be justified and by thy words thou shalt be condemned (Matthew 12:37).
The justifying words are His words. The condemning words are your own contradictory words. The goal is to make His words to be your words. That necessitates an utter self-contradiction. If you don’t utterly contradict your own words, you can never have His. And if you don’t have His, you’ll never confess Him before men. And instead of being justified, on judgment day, He will contradict you, and you’ll be utterly condemned.
Because His thoughts are not your thoughts, not by an entire universe, you cannot even begin to imagine how different His words are from your own. And that’s important to understand before you begin to hear what He says.
Because if, somehow, you think that His words will express ideas even remotely like your own, you will miss their true meaning entirely.
Jesus said,
It is entirely possible to see and not see, to hear and not hear, and to think that you understand what Jesus says, and not really understand it at all.
At various places along the inner-city loop where I sometimes drive, there are real-time electronic signs that give traffic updates and apprise of various road conditions ahead in order to promote safer driving. Not long ago the sign above the highway was flashing the warning: EXPECT CONGESTION AHEAD.
Every New Testament Bible should come with one of those road-condition-ahead signs permanently attached to it. A really big sign. One that you couldn’t remove even if you tried. One that you would have to drag around with you wherever you took your Bible. An obnoxious and irritating one that you couldn’t turn off, even at night. And it would ceaselessly flash its message of warning in big, bold, bright, attention-demanding letters: EXPECT CONTRADICTION AHEAD.
Here’s the problem with the way we normally listen: our default mindset is one in which we always want to be right. We were born that way. And that innate desire to be right in every situation is the greatest aid we could possibly have in navigating our way through the difficulties of life.
But, that same desire that serves us so well everywhere else is the absolute greatest impediment that we could possibly bring with us when we come to hear the word of God. It creates in us what might be called a non-contradiction bias. We simply never want to be wrong.
Nobody ever wakes up in the morning and says, “My greatest desire for this day is to be absolutely wrong in everything I do. I want to make every wrong turn on my way to work and make sure that I stick my fork in my eye instead of my mouth.”
No. We want to be right. All the time. Every time. And that’s great. Except for here. Here, we want to be wrong. Here we need to be wrong. Here we must be wrong. Because here – according to Isaiah, Paul, and Jesus Himself – we really are wrong!
When we come to God’s word, we must bring not a non-contradiction bias, but rather its very opposite. We must bring, on purpose, every time, without exception, a contradiction bias.
We must come to the word of God saying, “I already know that I am wrong. So wrong, in fact, that everything I think, before You tell me anything that You think, will be an utter contradiction to everything You think. And I understand that in advance. So, with my EXPECT CONTRADICTION AHEAD sign flashing its warning, I’m ready to hear what You have to say.”