Leadership Journal

Dear Son,

As your graduation from high school approaches, I've been thinking about the question, "What is the most important foundational truth I could share with my legacy before he leaves home?" That's how I came up with …

Don't be alarmed. I'm not dying … not that I know of. But if I were, if I was suddenly hit by a car and you saw the accident and ran over to me and asked, "Dad, what's the most important thing for me to remember as I carry your legacy into the world?" here's what I'd say: There is absolute truth and that truth is spelled J-E-S-U-S.

The world and its philosophies will try to sell you on the idea that all truth is relative. They'll say, "What's true for you may not be true for me." Logic defies this notion, though. In fact, the statement, "I know there is no absolute truth" is flawed.

In response to that statement, you could ask, "Are you saying that you know it is absolutely and always true that there is no absolute truth?" And the person who made the statement will either storm off, or, if they are intellectually honest, begin to see the flaw in their argument.

The only basis for them to be able to claim that they know something absolutely is that absolute truth exists. And the most important reason it exists is because someone with great intelligence invented it. Someone actually wove into all of creation, and into our logical minds, that there must be things we can trust absolutely.

Will apples always fall down when you drop them? Will the earth always turn in the same direction as it rotates? Will water always freeze at 32 degrees? Will 7 times 7 always be 49?

The answer to all those questions becomes obvious when you look with intellectual honesty at creation. "YES!" the universe screams, "There IS absolute truth. The One who created all of this created absolute truth."

I've seen college students get really messed up when they study philosophy, because they start getting all these weird notions that come not from observing the created universe, but from watching too many sci-fi movies. They get these ideas that we may not even be sure if we really exist or not, or the notion that all truth is relative and that each society just has to work out its own morality.

Follow that relativistic thinking to its ultimate conclusion, though, and you get to a group of people who firmly believe that it's okay to do anything to anybody, without any consequence. That's a kind of people I wouldn't want to get very close to.

One of our greatest enemies is relativism. Once we start eroding the foundation of the fact that absolute truth comes from an absolutely truthful God, we will slide right off the man-made muddy hill into the abyss of man-made philosophies, and we'll sink.

Relativism grabs the one thread that is loose inside our brains, and it starts pulling. Start with relativism and you begin to unravel everything you ever trusted.

Pretty soon you think, "Well, maybe the stuff in Scripture really isn't ...