As l have written about before we live in a world filled with opinions. Today they are usually shared very publicly! What I have learnt is that many of these public opinions tend to be very strongly held even though many of them appear to be quite weakly formed. They can feel quite convincing because of how strongly they are stated and the access we have to this information, whether factual or not, is so abundant today that it is easy to find any number of blogs or tweets sharing these opinions. Even though many of the opinions shared are ridiculous it can be quite difficult to avoid some of the debate around them. Although I rarely get involved by adding my thoughts, I too often end up reading the verbal tennis people get involved in. This causes me to ask an important question.

Is it helpful to me?

In short, no! My conclusion is always that after reading them is that I never come away feeling more like who Jesus created me to be. In fact often I come away more disappointed, frustrated, and less hopeful about the church than I was before I read them. I don’t blame anyone else for this by the way – this is on me.

As I was reading Paul’s letter to Timothy in the Bible I came across a couple of verses which spoke to me about these opinion tennis matches.

As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work—which is by faith 1 Timothy 1:3-4

Paul is warning against a few things here but we could apply the idea of ‘myths’ to our opinion based world. I guess many people might argue that these sociological and theological discussions we have online are advancing Gods work, but I would beg to disagree. Instead they too often distract people from God and leave us frustrated with one another. Its not that there aren’t good people saying incredibly helpful stuff but it so often gets lost in the noise of negativity and dishonour. What Paul is saying to Timothy here is that what we say should be advancing God’s work – that’s the standard we should hold our teaching and our comments to.

This year I am learning to avoid reading these discussions and threads and instead I am choosing to read more widely on more reasoned, and less reaction, based teaching. I hope that helps me advance Gods work and gives less air to controversial speculations.