Worship | Reporting from the King's Court...

Every day at 8:30am, Maxwell staff spend a few minutes together worshiping the Lord. Every week, a different faculty member is assigned to the week's worships. This week, it's "Mr. Webb's" turn. I'll be publishing my worship thoughts to the site every morning (hopefully). Today's worship: God reveals his self to us through His word.

STAFF MEETING ROOM - There are 3 major signs of good journalism: solid fundamentals, clarity, and accuracy. Across the globe, people in my future field are preached to and preached to again about making these the 3 points that govern our lives. An ok writer does one really well, a good one, perhaps to. But only the best of the best, the cream of the crop, will have mastered all three.

Stephen Glass, who worked for The New Republic from 1995-1998, was a young man who came incredibly close to the trifecta. His writing fundamentals were second to none – his co-workers at TNR loved editing his articles. His grammar was perfect, his composition flawless, and his usage, across the board, was on par with some of the great writers of the last few decades.

And his clarity, brilliant. Glass had the ability to take a scene like the Republican National Convention and describe it, leaving you feeling like you’d just walked through it yourself. His sentences would meander at a slow pace, purposely, not to confuse the reader, but he wasn’t bland, by no means. He’d take his audience with him one direction, then pull the mat from under them, leaving them momentarily confused, then giving way to pure intrigue. Glass was as close to being a master as anyone.

But, on May 8^th, 1998, Stephen Glass was fired from The New Republic. His crime: fabricating a recent article. Fact-checking on his piece “Hack Heaven” had proven to be an impossible task, as the only source to check facts off of was the journalist’s own notes. The New Republic had to act fast to save face, and Glass was immediately released from the magazine because of his alleged forgeries.

Harsh? Accusations of inaccurate pieces can destroy any publication – remember the New York Times? – and TNR had to do what it had to do. It looked, from the outside, like a very aggressive reaction by the paper. But when news of Glass’s other phony pieces came out, it explained a whole lot more.

In a nutshell, Stephen Glass, the almost-master who had nailed down fundamentals and clarity, forgot the most important characteristic of good writing: accuracy. Of the 41 articles he’d written for TNR in 3 years, 6 had been completely fabricated, 21 had been partly, and many more were still suspected. Glass had smashed the cardinal rule of journalism, and since his firing in 1998, his only work in the field have been a few, isolated free-lance articles (about ethics in journalism, ironically).

Oh, and he got paid 6-figures to write a “fictional” book about a journalist named Stephen Glass who fabricated over half of his professional articles. And he was given a hefty royalty when that book was made into a movie, Shattered Glass. But the name Stephen Glass is stained now, and without a doubt, he will never work in journalism again.

Isn’t it nice to know we’re not in the same situation with our ultimate handbook? The Bible’s President/CEO/editor-in-chief, God, has released a statement in His book, verifying that everything we will read is accurate.

¹⁶Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and useful one way or another--showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting our mistakes, training us to live God's way.

¹⁷Through the Word we are put together and shaped up for the tasks God has for us. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

His word is here to guide us, to tell us what he likes, to tell us what he doesn’t, to tell us what he expects, to tell us what he wants for us. He reveals his traits, his character, his personality, not so we’ll know he’s willing to destroy a country if it displeases him, but so we’ll know him. He wants to be close to us, and since he can’t (or won’t) appear physically in front of us, he does it the closest way he can: through his word.

Ok, so God dictated how much he loves us; how do we know the reporting was accurate. Scripture again verifies this fact.

²¹It's not something concocted in the human heart. Prophecy [and let me expand that to everything else in the Word] resulted when the Holy Spirit himself prompted men and women to speak God's Word. (2 Peter 1:21)

He’s fact-checked what was written, and it has his stamp-of-approval; the “embedded reporters” who spent time in the Lord’s presence got the written description of our Heavenly Father dead-on. His word is arguably the best way that our God has revealed to us who he is. Are we reading it?

Today, as the Sabbath nears, I challenge you to take some extra time to look at the part-biography/part-autobiography of our Father. It’s calming, it’s enlightening, it’s accurate. And it’s a good read.

-cw