And You Didn’t Even Know I Liked Poetry!

One of the most popular ideas today is that sincerity trumps truth. Over and over again, we hear the following statement (or something very close to it): “It doesn’t matter what one believes as long as he or she is sincere.”

Gospel preachers, elders, Bible class teachers, and a host of other members of the body of Christ have tried to help people to see the fallacy in that type of thinking. Because of their concern for the souls of those who are religious, but wrong, they have employed a variety of methods, lines of reasoning, etc. to help people to see…

• that there is such a thing as absolute truth (cf. John 8:32)
• that it can be known (cf. John 8:32)
• that it must be obeyed (cf. Romans 2:8: Gal. 3:1, 5:7)

We have tried to reason with the uninformed and/or misinformed by using the apostle Paul as an example. We have suggested that his statement that he had “…lived in all good conscience before God until this day” (Acts 23:1) included the time when he was zealous in his attempts to destroy the followers of Christ. There could be no doubt about his sincerity. There can also be no doubt about the fact that he was wrong.

Sometimes a type of a logical argument is employed to demonstrate the weakness of this “sincerity only” type of thinking. It has been pointed out that sincerely believing that black is white does not make it so, or that sincerely believing 2 + 2 = 5 will not keep a teacher from correcting the student, or that those who sincerely believed that the world was flat were correct in their misunderstanding.

Anything that has the potential of having an impact on our eternal destiny is very serious. The little poem below is not meant to be an attempt to treat such a serious subject in a flippant manner. I came across the poem in some reading I was doing recently and thought that it might be another weapon in the arsenal of those who are attempting to persuade those whom we love and with whom we study to know, believe, and obey the truth.

If you are like me, you may smile a little as you read this poem.  You may also start thinking, “You know; there’s a lot of truth in these four lines.”

Shed a tear for Jimmy Brown;

Poor Jimmy is no more.

For what he thought was H2O*

Was H2SO4**

*water

**sulphuric acid

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