How do you know?

How do you recognize what is True vs. what is false?

1. Do you use your feelings? Meaning if you feel bad in any way about something then you “know” it’s false and bad. If you feel good in any way about something then you “know” it’s True and Good?

2. And/or if you feel that the specific thought you are thinking about or saying in the moment is True, then you can “know” it’s the Truth and if you feel that the specific thought you are thinking about or saying in the moment is false, then you can “know” it is false?

3. And/or do you only use your “God given intellect”?

4. And/or when you think that the specific thought you are thinking about is True, then you can “know” it’s the Truth and when you think that the specific thought you are thinking about is false, then you can “know it’s false?

5. And/or do you make decisions based on your "Conscience"?

If we do any one or combination of the above, then we unknowingly believe that we are the final authority on what is True and false rather than God. This means that we act like we are God.

And this means that we are going to think we are always right about everything that we think and feel and that everyone else who disagrees with us is wrong.  These are the sins of pride, stubbornness, foolishness, and thinking we know it all / know enough.

The result is that we are never going to want to listen to anyone else who disagrees with us and we are never going to want to learn any Truth from anyone else but ourselves, which means we will be very ignorant and know little moral Truth in comparison to those who don’t act like this and in comparison to the amount of the moral Truths that exist.

What happens when we are ignorant and know little moral Truth?

We cause ourselves all of our bad emotional suffering.

We are failing to check with Jesus Christ directly, which means that we are failing to listen to Him, we are failing to do correct discernment, and we are failing to check with the offical writings of His directly appointed Church authority as proven to exist through historical facts, and failing to check with the writings of His holy saints.

This is proof that we have no friendship with Jesus Christ or no real friendship with Jesus Christ; but rather an imaginary fantansy in our own minds.

Anyone who fails to have a friendship with God, will have something or someone else in His place.  Some kind of vice / addiction (all are sinful) that we are using as a substute for God in trying to escape or avoid our emotional suffering, which has become your “god” and replacement for Jesus Christ.

And doing so is causing us even greater emotional suffering and unhappiness...not avoiding nor minimizing it.

We believe and act as if we are our own final authority on what is True and false when we fail to ask Jesus Christ and fail to listen to Him for the answer(s) and fail to correctly discern whether what we think we “hear” is from ourselves, an evil spirit, or from God. 

Part of Discernment means always directly asking Jesus' opinion, being open to being wrong, and being open to learning from others.

We believe and act like we are our own final authority on what is True and false when we fail to allow Jesus to teach us Truth through other people and we fail to know how to discern directly with Jesus as to whether or not what people say is actually True or is false.

We believe and act like we are our own final authority on what is Truth and false if we fail to believe that God directly appointed a final authority Church, in order through whom to speak and teach us moral Truth and the Truth about Himself.

And if we don’t know how to listen to God speak to us and we don’t know how to correctly discern who is speaking or whether something is True or false, then we will believe anything irrational and act like we are our own final authority on what is True and false.

It’s our individual responsibility to ask God daily to teach us how, and to send us to the right people, who know how to teach us how to hear God and how to discern Truth.

When we act like our own final authority, then we cannot recognize and accept many moral Truths, we cannot know who God is in many ways, we cannot have a real friendship with Jesus Christ, we cannot recognize and accept most of our own sins, and we cannot be morally right very often, and we cannot be as loving of a person as we would like to think that we are.