2 Cor 5:16-17 reminds us that all those who have come to faith in Christ are new creations, and as such, we must leave our old ways and old ways of thinking behind. To be a Christian is to live by the truth of God’s word. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer, born in 1918, whose Christian faith clashed many times with Communist dogma. As a writer, he wrote stories about the truth which criticised the government heavily and as a result, he was imprisoned and subsequently lived in exile. One of the things he wrote was that ‘people need to live by the truth. Live not by lies.‘
God’s truth must be the guiding principle of life, but we live in a world where many ideologies clash with it. Our world sees no need for God or His values; the move away from truth has permeated our society, arising in part from the evolutionary view which sees human life as nothing more than an accident (and therefore having no intrinsic worth or value.) In recent years, the Government has even approved DIY abortions, with few checks on this; experimentation on embryos is another example of how little worth we place on human life. Nowadays, ‘relative truth’ is often talked about, but God says that only the truth can set free.
Col 3:12-14 indicate the kind of fruit we are expected to grow, fruit that will look very different to the things the world prizes. Matt 5:13-16 talks of Christians being salt and light in our society, but we need to let our light shine and not hide it from others. The fruit of truth, of a life lived according to the truth, has to be seen in our actions.