Skip to main content

Faith

Ravi Zacharias tells a story of his visit to a museum in England, dedicated to Paul Bunyan. At the end of his tour of the museum, he speaks to the clerk and asks "Isn't it amazing that a mender of pots and pans has won such worldwide acclaim?" Her response was that she had never read the work. Ironic, he claims, that someone could work in a museum dedicated to a man whose single most popular book she had never read. Speaking of Jesus' message, his point was that we can be so close to such crucial truth, and yet ignore it or treat it indifferently. He goes on to quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

"Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."

Though he was talking about all humanity, the same oversight can be found in Christians. I don't believe this is intentional, for the most part. My own experience has told me that it's a result of amnesia. We forget what God has done for us, and lose that sense of awe that drives our faith in him. That kind of faith, admittedly, can often be an emotional one that Jesus demonstrates as shallow and perishable (Mark 4:16-17). To reside in a faith with little awe for God, however, could be much worse. It's a faith that fades by degrees. Peter warns of this with the following words:

"For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith [...he lists several expressions of faith]. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins."

Our knowledge of God's truth, he says, is inextricably tied to the practice of our faith. My first response to this is that it smacks of legalism, telling me that my faith depends on what I do rather than on my unearned position in Christ. I think, though, that this is a misguided attitude. Our motivation for practicing our faith is not salvation (whether earning or keeping), but growth: consistent cultivation of a faith that leads to life. Listen to Paul's words in Romans 8:6: "The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace." We find that life and peace by practicing the lifestyle Jesus demonstrated and taught. I'm certainly not there, but I want to be. This is why I'm going to commit to being more deliberate about my prayer life. Usually, I spend a paltry few minutes per day praying, usually uttering the same prayer, usually relating to myself. I'm going to commit, for the next five days (a low goal, I know, but it's a start), to praying for one specific person every day. I don't know who that is yet, but I will. Thanks for reading.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Nice Guy Fallacy

I read part of a poem recently by one of my favorite poets. It reads: I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage The linnet born within the cage That never knew the summer woods. I envy not the beast that takes His license in the field of time Unfetter'd by the sense of crime To whom a conscience never wakes. Nor what may call itself as bles't The heart that never plighted troth But stagnates in the weeds of sloth Nor any want-begotten rest. I hold it true, whate'er befall I feel it, when I sorrow most 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. At base, Tennyson contrasted a life of risk, and consequent pain, with one of security. He sides conclusively with the life of risk, and says he fails to envy those who have faced no hardship. I agree with him; and, for good or ill, his words are just as relevant today as they were in the nineteenth century. Like then, there are those today who choose to live their lives with as little risk as...

Persuasion

At different points in history, governments have devoted men, women, and resources to try to persuade others to their side. One significant example of this occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew how important it was to make sure the German people were on his side as leader of the country. One way he did this was by controlling what people heard. Specifically, near the beginning of World War II, Hitler made it a crime for anyone in Germany to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. These were called the “extraordinary radio measures.” He did this to ensure that Germans weren’t being persuaded by enemy countries to question their loyalty to Hitler. He knew that a German listening to a radio broadcast from Britain might persuade that German to believe that Great Britain was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy. This was so important, in fact, that two people in Germany were actually executed because they had either listened to or planned to listen to a foreign radio broadcast (one...

Experiment

My social studies students and I are studying Islam right now. The other day, we were reading about one of the Five Pillars, zakat (charity in Islam that means "that which purifies"). Muslims believe that giving away money helps to purify it and also "safeguards [them] against miserliness" (1). I asked the class if this was true, that giving money away makes us less greedy. They generally agreed that it does. I wanted to test whether or not they really believed this, so I handed a volunteer a $10 bill. I told the class that I would ask for the bill back the next day. I said that they should pass the bill around among their classmates, and that as a result, there would be no way for me to know who had the bill. For that reason, whoever wanted to keep the money could keep it. Even if I did learn who kept it, I told them, I would not punish that person. I wanted them to be motivated by their own honesty. The next day, I asked for the bill, and a student handed it to me...