The Truth Will Set You Free

31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
John 8:31-32

JFK Jr. died in a plane crash in 1999. Investigations that followed revealed that he was a pilot trained to fly by sight and not by instrumentation. In other words, he needed to look out his window. But on the particular day he died, he left several hours after his scheduled time to depart, and it was getting dark while the weather had turned against him, obscuring landmarks he would normally trust in. He had only logged 48 minutes of training with an instructor in night flight and night landings. The follow-up report stated that the tragedy happened because of "Kennedy's failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation."

Kennedy didn’t know how to trust his gauges. His body was lying to him. He couldn’t see out his window. The G-forces in the plane were not helping him get home. He was in a deadly situation that cost him his life and the lives of his passengers. They found his plane with the bodies inside at the bottom of the Atlantic a few days later.

The Bible teaches us to walk by faith and not by sight. This means we have to trust our “gauges” not what we feel or see. What are those gauges? Peter, Christ’s apostle, tells us.

“Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”
2 Peter 1:4

Peter says that we trust in promises. That means we base our lives, and truth itself, on gospel promises, not on temporal circumstances or feelings. God gave us the ability to feel, but sometimes our feelings lie to us. Sometimes they are unreliable. When we walk by faith—we live according to what God says is true. Then our feelings, if and when we have them, will be based on something truly reliable.

There is spiritual power here.

When I went through a long, dark wilderness in 2001-2005, it was this principle that saved my life. I learned to base who I am on what the gospel says about me, on what Jesus already did on the cross, not what I needed to do to rescue myself. I clung desperately to gospel promises. That was when the dark night sky turned pink, then orange, then the full morning light.

Jesus said the truth would set us free. Will you lean into it? Will you throw off the whims of the soul and the weight of circumstance and risk it all on the gospel? It’s a rock on which we stand. Like the old singer-songwriter once said, “I did not make it, no it is making me.” The truth shall set you free.