Normal morning rush hour traffic in Pen, Maharashtra, India. The Tata Sumo and the white SUV ahead of it are on the wrong side of the road - a common occurrence. But luckily I never drove while in India. I had an experienced driver.

January 20, 2026 / 0 comments

The Kind of Person You Are

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. They are men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected. But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone.

  • 2 Timothy 3:1-9

This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

  • Romans 3:22-24

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

  • 2 Corinthians 5:16-17

“ ‘What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is. ’ –Johann Gottlieb Fichte”

  • Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

  • C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), was a German philosopher who founded German Idealism.

The quote above is rather simple.  We gravitate to something that is familiar.  Thus when looking at branches of philosophy, we will look toward something that is familiar to our way of thinking.  They speak of the acorn not falling far from the tree, and so do we take that approach when looking at types of philosophy.

We make the same type of choices when we look for a lot of things.  I had a friend who swore by one particular make of car.  He would never ever get anything else.  Then, he corrected himself.  Once he got a car that was my favored make of car and it was the worst lemon that he ever had.  I related that I presently had a car of his make, and it was the worst lemon I ever had.  He laughed and said that his philosophy of automobiles is that you always got the same make.  If you ever went to the competition, you would get a lemon.  His experience was that, and others that he talked to had the same experience.  But we hang on to the familiar and when the familiar is slightly more maintenance than before, we quickly forgive the manufacturer.  But if we had stepped outside the familiar, it was our fault for having done so.

How many times have you seen a member of your family divorce a woman because of one particular fault, just to marry a carbon copy of that woman.  To make it worse, the new wife has ten times the same particular fault than the first wife.

I have heard that many experts cannot really trace the quote, but Einstein has been accused of saying that the definition of insanity is when you keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

But then we come to the Scripture from 2 Corinthians 5 above.  The first two paint a terrible picture of the average person, but then when we accept Jesus into our hearts, we are a new creation.  In being a new creation, we do not have to make the same old bad decisions.  We can make better ones.  We are not trapped in the wash-rinse-repeat world.  With God’s guidance and God’s strength, we can choose a different path, and even a different philosophy.

Praise be the Lord.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.

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