Gary Collins, Christian psychologist and author, wrote a book several years ago whose title grabbed my attention. The book, "Easy Believism," challenged the reader not to take for granted the journey of faith, nor to embrace without genuine consideration the truths of faith that many accept without question. I found the book to be a refreshing challenge in a religious environment that was all too often a stagnant sea of compliance.
When the apostle Paul wrote about working out one's salvation, I don't believe that he meant it was to be done in a vacuum. The tenets of faith are little more than formulaic patterns, unless they become real, thus empowering one to truly live. Jesus spoke of freedom in the context of knowing truth. ("You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.") Paul wrote of his burning desire to "know Christ and the power of his resurrection." Faith is a personal journey: to know and be known...to be transformed and to be used of God to transform.
Moving therefore, from easy believism to a thoughtful, thought-provoking faith, is a perilous, but oh-so-rewarding journey. It begins with an open heart and mind, a willingness to listen and learn, and the courage to ask uncomfortable questions...to live in that prickly place between absolute certainty and nagging question. Faith, after all, as the writer of Hebrews says, is "the essence of things not seen."
To struggle and strive toward an authentic faith is to wonder as you wander, to step into the unknown believing that God is there, and that together, you walk toward the "knowing" relationship that Paul desired to attain. That is a journey worth taking...a pathway worth wandering.
Jim Abernathy
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I’m afraid that we are becoming and have become a generation of uncritical thinkers in this country. Truth is relative. Truth doesn’t matter. This isn’t just my own personal observation over the last several decades. Dr. Allan Bloom’s research and university experience published in his landmark 1987 book “The Closing of the American Mind” indicates that by the time most young adults arrive at college they are already convinced of the relativity of truth, and that their college education only serves to confirm their strong affirmation of moral relativism. The church can be that way today too, but we must resist these ways of the world, because our God is a God of truth, and those truths are absolute truths. The apostle Paul urges each one of us to not be conformed to this world but to be transformed. How? By the renewing of our mind to God’s truths. Only by this renewing of our minds to God’s truths will we be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2). Paul is saying that after we are born again in Christ, renewing our minds is the starting point to transforming the inclinations of our hearts, of struggling to rid ourselves of the old man that still dwells within us. Knowing God and knowing God’s will is what our sanctification is all about and what our faith is all about. It’s about having a personal relationship with God through Jesus, and desiring to know and follow His truths. Our journey of faith is all about finding and discerning God’s truths and applying those truths to our lives and to our world. This is our purpose in how we live our lives. When Jesus was asked by Pontius Pilate who He was, our Lord responded by giving to Pilate His life’s mission statement: “I was born for one purpose in this world, to bear witness to the truth. All who are of the truth hear My voice.” (John 18:37). Later, just before He ascended, Jesus called all believers to continue this mission of bearing witness to the truth, to be Christ’s witnesses. This theme of knowing God is prominent in all of the apostles’ writings. Paul said it this way to the early church at Philippi: “Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Phil. 3:8-11) Paul then speaks of pressing toward the goal of our sanctification which he calls “the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 3:14) Knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord . . . that I may know Him. This is what Paul urged the early church to keep always in view in their daily lives. Similarly, John’s short epistles were very much concerned with knowing the truth and rejecting the false. He passionately urged his brothers this way: “And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.” (1 John 5:20)
ReplyDeleteOf the truth . . . bearing witness to the truth. Knowing God . . . knowing His will . . . doing His will. These are our goals in our lifelong journey of sanctification. It’s certainly a pathway worth wondering . . . that we may know Him.