Everybody’s got their opinions, and so everybody has advice. It’s advice about where to send your kids to school, what restaurant gives you the best meal for your money, how much you should have in your 401K… it’s everywhere. In fact, these “sayings” are so prolific that at some point you step back and realize that they can’t all be right. Take, for example, the issue of food.

Am I supposed to be eating a plant-based diet?

Can this soda I’m drinking really peel paint off my car?

How many antioxidants should I be taking in before I actually begin to resemble a blueberry in appearance?

Do I really have to eat like a caveman?

Sayings, sayings, sayings, and thanks to technology, there is no shortage of sources from which these sayings can come. How do you know who to believe? How do you know what to believe? The problem is that all of these sayings have an “other hand.” As in, “I know vegetables are good for me, but on the other hand…”

How refreshing, then, to come to a saying that has no other hand:

“This saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’—and I am the worst of them” (1 Timothy 1:15).

Here finally is a saying that stands on its own accord. Here finally is a saying that has withstood the test of time. Here finally is a saying that has no other hand. And because it does not, it is worthy of full acceptance. Not partial. Not partly. It is worthy of full acceptance.

But as I navigate this day, a day like most any other, when I will be tempted to compromise on morals and values, when I will be prone to seek the approval of others or worry incessantly about whether my statement was smart or witty enough in their presence, when I will pay undue attention to things like my clothing, hairstyle, or kind of car I’m driving… on this day, I have to wonder just how fully I have accepted that which is worthy of full acceptance?

So today, I say with Paul, that this is as intrinsically and as gloriously true as it was centuries ago: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.