A number of years ago, in the 1970s, police in Delray Beach, Florida picked up a woman from a shopping mall known to her neighbors as \”Garbage Mary.\” Mary appeared to be delusional and destitute, she was clothed in rags and plundered through the garbage to eat, and seemingly had no idea who she was…So police took her to the local Psychiatric Institute where she was evaluated and eventually admitted. She was filthy—and so were her cat and her apartment. When they searched her two-bedroom apartment, authorities discovered that it was filled with trash. Police found the garbage everywhere: in the refrigerator, in the stove, in the sink, in the cabinets, even in the bathtub. But that’s not all they found in her apartment…

You see as police were searching through the filth and house of horrors that was her apartment, they made a startling discovery…They found stock certificates—Mobil oil stock certificates worth over $400K. They found title deeds showing her as the owner of oil fields in Kansas, stock securities from prominent publicly traded companies, and multiple large bank accounts with her name on them. It turned out she was an heiress, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer and bank director from Galesburg, Ill. who died in 1974.

You see Garbage Mary had no conception of who she was, and as a result, instead of living the life she could have lived as a princess, she lived the life of a pauper. And because she was incapable of thinking rightly about her identity, she ended up living wrongly, destitute in abject poverty. All because she did not know—and in sad fact, could not think rightly to know who she was, her identity…And I think her tragedy illustrates well both the reality and relationship between thinking and living. Living is a corollary of thinking—how or what you think determines, how and what you live. And the relationship between thinking and living is positive. Right thinking leads to right living. Wrong thinking leads to wrong living. And it’s this axiomatic truth of life that leaps from the pages of our story this morning instructing us beyond just the physical realities of life, to the far more important spiritual and theological realities that determine our eternal destinies and upon which they rest!

Right thinking leads to right living leads to right judgement and nowhere is this truer than when contemplating the identity of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Savior of humanity. Right thinking—which is to say a true understanding and knowledge of Jesus—leads to right living—which is to say living a life of faith through Jesus in obedience to God’s will for your life—leads to right judgement—which is to say a continual practice of sound discernment between truth and error, righteousness and unrighteousness, applied to every area of life including how you live in relationship to others, but especially concerning your relationship to Christ.

And the seemingly but not actually circular reality of this axiomatic paradigm of spiritual life is that you cannot rightly think about Jesus and therefore rightly live before Jesus, and ultimately judge justly like Jesus until and unless you first bend the knee to and believe in Jesus—and what he and the Bible claim about his identity are true—God, Lord, Savior, and King. Which is to say—you must first have faith and believe in Jesus Christ as he has revealed himself in the flesh and on the pages of Scripture—then and only then can you ultimately think rightly, live rightly, and judge rightly.