Quiet, Personal Faith

by Brian Knowles

“When you reach a certain point in your own spiritual development, you begin to take certain things as axiomatic. You realize, for example, the futility of arguing doctrine with anyone. You can’t change people’s basic ideas. Once they’ve internalized them, they’re ensconced for life. The more you want someone to “see” your point of view, the less likely they are to see it.

You realize that you can’t re-engineer people to conform to your own ideas of how they should be – and that includes your children, your husband, your wife or even your parents, friends and employees. We are who we are, and that’s that. Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit on the inside of us, the dye is pretty much cast from an early age. Once you get to know people, they tend to act predictably.

We all tend to hunker down in comfort zones. Once there, we flood the moat, pull up the drawbridge and try to insulate ourselves from the chaos that’s going on in the world around us. Change is threatening, so we resist it….”

(this article is an excerpt from the January–February 2006 edition of the Sabbath Sentinel)

To read the rest of this article, which starts on page 17, click this link: https://biblesabbath.org/tss/517/tss_517.pdf