I’ve always been somewhat baffled by protests. I don’t mean the earnest, sometimes violent, types of protests, like I grew up with in the sixties, or the kinds that have been storming the Arab world this past year. Those kinds of protests include action, and they are often effective in making changes. The types of protests that bemuse me are the pure opinion rants. PETA, for example, held a “Save the Seals” protest on the online game World of Warcraft in 2009. They got some players to start killing baby seals in the game, then invited other players to try to stop them. I don’t know how it turned out – it made news when they planned it, and precious little has been said since. One comment I saw summed it up pretty well: “Uhmmm how about we actually help the REAL baby seals?!?” I’ve been hearing about seal-saving protests since I was in grade school, and yet the practice continues, because killing seals for their fur is a very profitable venture. And the only thing that has made a dent in the practice has been boycotts. In other words, loudly stating your opinion en-mass doesn’t impress the industry very much. But start cutting into their profits, and that’s another story.
In America, we’ve been conditioned to believe people care about our opinions, and we’ve been encouraged to share them. We’ve come to feel empowered by our freedom of speech, and most Americans will vehemently defend that right. But what most seem to forget is that sharing the opinion itself is not what matters … it’s how that opinion makes you act. Most politicians don’t care how you stand on an issue, they care how you will vote. Manufacturers aren’t moved by knowing what your favorite flavor is, they’ll make the ones they know they can sell. If they can’t sell enough to turn a profit, they won’t make it, no matter just how strongly, or how often, you tell them that you want something different. Opinions only matter to others to the degree they change the way you live, and what you do speaks far more eloquently to the world than what you say.
And your opinions do, in fact, very much change the way you live.
The Bible tells us to “Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life” (Pro. 4:23). On the surface, that verse seems to be a simple injunction not to let your heart turn to evil, but look at the rest of the chapter. It’s all about living righteously, and not living in an evil manner. Why then this reference to the heart? Because it matters to how you will live. Good people will sometimes do wicked things, and wicked people will sometimes do good things; but to change everyday life, to alter the very fabric of how you behave, requires changing your heart. Your heart contains the total of all the opinions you hold to yourself to be true. There are numerous psalms and proverbs that tell us to meditate on the Law of the Lord (which is to say, His Word), and the goal of that is to change your heart … that your actions and life might also be changed as you grow to know Him better.
One of the trickier aspects of this dynamic is that in order for our opinions to change our heart to what is right and good, our opinions need to be correct. When it’s a surface issue, it’s relatively simple to deal with; if we hear something wrong, or learn it wrong, then we find out it was in error, we can correct it and move on. More insidious are the things we have taken in so deeply they are already lodged in our heart. I knew a gentle, godly, and well-respected Christian who once mourned to me that he felt awful about himself, because he has “lost his first love.” Anyone who spent ten minutes with him could tell he clearly loved the Lord … so what did he mean by that? He was upset that he was no longer as excited about his faith as he was as a new believer. His faith had grown stronger, fuller, and deeper, but he held the opinion that it was a flaw that he no longer felt like dancing in the streets over it and this mistaken opinion made him sorrowful and stood in the way of his walk with the Lord.
The Bible has an answer to this kind of problem as well: “And by this we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before Him. For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things,” (1 John 3:19-20). Add to that what Paul wrote in Romans 14:4, “Who are you to judge another’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. Indeed, he will be made to stand, for God is able to make him stand,” and 2 Tim. 1:12, “… for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day.” What it boils down to, is that God is doing a work in us, and we need to be confident that it will be a perfect and complete work, and what He has done already is well and truly done.
So, what is your opinion worth? Is it just noise, empty words you toss out to the world to no effect … or is it a life-changing opinion, founded on the Word of God and nurtured by His grace and Spirit?