“Lord, you are Lord and I want to live with you”.
Part 3: Our personal value judgements cut through the restraints of uncertainty to restore our freedom and our ability to act
I find this to be a very liberating judgement. I am free from all arguments about facts, about proof, about certainty, and about knowledge. However, rather than what is left – namely personal judgements – being subjective, uncertain, unproven, merely opinions, we instead argue that these are the most important things about being human. Facts are just facts; they mean nothing until we decide to do something about them, but personal value judgements are, by definition, the essence of action.
We can support our choices with a consideration of the difference between truth, facts and knowledge. Somethings are true, and we know them to be true, and, because we have knowledge that they are true, they become facts. However, other things are definitely true, but we don’t know that yet, because we haven’t been able to prove them, and in some cases we never will. This means that those truths will never be known, and so never enter the realm of facts. However, that doesn’t stop them being true. So it is with our personal value judgements. It is entirely possible, maybe even extremely likely, that we will never know if we made the right decision in making the value judgements that we have. However, that does not mean that we were wrong to do so; we might well be right – we just don’t know. And, that is precisely what makes our judgements important: we decided by faith and not by knowledge. In relation to God, if it could be proved that beliefs about God are true, then anyone who did not follow God’s way would be foolish, and faith would lose its dynamic energy precisely because it had become a sensible and self-interested opting for the winning side, rather than a commitment of faith in very ambivalent circumstances, that we choose to commit to God’s way, simply believing and hoping that it is true.
Spiritual Devotion 