Article June 17, 1939 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: Truth and Sincerity

with contributions from Samuel H. Roth, William T. Ellis

[Samuel H. Roth, in the Daily News-Times, Neenah, Wisconsin] "The truth shall make you free." We need not fear the truth when we live to have a good conscience before God. It is only when we stand upon one leg and try to maintain our balance by supporting some untruth that fear needs to strike the heart. The truth of our Master was given to make us stand erect in a world that was, and still is, off balance. Everywhere we find folks talking ceaselessly about freedom. Moral freedom, religious freedom, economic freedom, and freedom from everything. Now, is that what Jesus meant by freedom through the truth? We must answer that it is not. What he had in mind was a new way of life. "Give me liberty or give me death," said a great American in the early days; and we do well to think of what he meant, too.

Freedom through the truth is not license to do as we please. Liberty has to have safeguards as well as any other good privilege. We must be the servants of something. We must be under some law, and the law that the Master gave us was the perfect law of liberty, the law of Christian love. Freedom on any other terms is not freedom, it is license. Indeed, it is likely to be greater slavery. The freedom of which Jesus spoke did not infringe on the rights of others; it was no trespasser. . . .

Then freedom through the truth gives to each, not only a chance, but a new purpose. Suppose a person is the slave of some pet sin. How does he get free? certainly not by sitting down and bemoaning it, and thinking how bad it is, and doing nothing about it. He gets free by some positive course of action. . . . He finds a new end in life; he finds a real purpose in his living and doing. He gets true freedom in life by finding a power that is greater than himself, and he learns obedience to that power through worship and loyalty to his conscience.

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