SE112402
CHARACTER UNDER CONSTRUCTION
4. Faith
In CS Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity, a classic work on Christian basics, he spells out the fact that when the Bible mentions faith it talks about it on two levels.
BELIEF
What faith means in the first sense is what most people who are not Christians or who are investigating Christianity think of when they hear the word faith. That is:
FAITH means BELIEF. Simple, right?
Faith means believing as true the teachings of Christianity. Most of these you may be familiar with if you’ve been coming to AC3 for any length of time:
- God exists and created the universe out of nothing.
- People have been created in the image of God, but are fallen and separated from God because of morally wrong choices or sin.
- Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine, the Son of God.
- He lived a perfect life and was crucified as a peace offering for human sin and rose again from the dead to authenticate his claims.
- Forgiveness and hope for heaven is now offered in his name.
All Christians in the world have faith in these statements. MEANING, they believe these things to be true. Now here’s where you may be confused. In what way is this kind of FAITH a positive character trait? What is there that’s moral or immoral about believing a set of statements?
If you’re like me you might say… a sane person accepts or rejects this or that statement – not because he wants to or doesn’t want to – but because the evidence for it is either good or bad. If the evidence is good, he believes, if it is bad, he disbelieves.
- If I misjudge the evidence and happen to believe that men have NOT yet actually landed on the moon, that doesn’t make me a person of low moral character does it? It may mean I’m ignorant, or listen to too much Art Bell, but not a bad person.
- On the other hand, if I know the evidence for an idea is just not there, like that the moon is made of cheese, but then I try to force myself to believe it anyway, that would STILL not make me a person of low moral character – just low intelligence.
Last time I looked, it wasn’t a crime to be dumb. Now, if you look at faith in this way, you’re right that it doesn’t have much to do with moral character. However, this assumes that our human minds are always ruled by our logic and reason. But that’s not always the case, is it?
For example. My logical mind may be perfectly convinced based on good evidence that anesthesia works. I believe that properly trained doctors will not cut me open before they numb me up or put me under.
But just because my mind has this belief doesn’t mean that when they clamp that ether mask over my face that I don’t have a rush of panic come over me. I start to think I’m going to choke, I’m going to die, they’re going to cut me before I’m under. In other words, I lose my faith in anesthetics.
Now was it logic and reason that convinced me to give up my belief in anesthetics? No. It was
- my circumstances, and
- my emotions and
- my imagination and
- my irrational fears.
So hear this Allen Creek, reason and faith work TOGETHER. I come to conclusions based in reason and I hang on to them based in faith. Logic works with faith to create a sane, well balanced person.
It’s the person who divorces faith from reason who winds up looking like the obsessive compulsive character played by Jack Nicholson in the movie “As Good as It Gets.” He obsessively cleans and obsessively locks his doors, why? Because once his mind has reasoned something out, he has no faith to hang on to that truth.
There’s lots of different examples of how this works. For example, a young woman knows, based on long established evidence that a handsome young man she knows is a philanderer, irresponsible and untrustworthy. But then, she finds herself with him and he whispers words of love and she starts thinking:
“I bet my love is changing him!”
Then in a few months or years, she’s saying, “I just don’t know what happened to him.” The truth is nothing happened to him. What happened was she did not hang on to her faith in what she really knew to be true about him.
JOHN THE BAPTIST
There’s a man in the New Testament who had faith in Jesus Christ. John the Baptist. He believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the one God had promised to send to permanently deal with the sin problem of the whole world. Now, he held this belief not IN SPITE of his reason, but BECAUSE of his reason.
You see, he had been privy to some amazing evidence.
- First, his father and mother told him of the amazing events surrounding his own birth which was God’s way of saying he, John, was to prepare for the coming of Messiah.
- Then he heard of the amazing events surrounding Jesus birth that indicated he was in fact the Messiah.
So John lives his life with this belief, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that he John, is sent to prepare people for Jesus. He does this by asking people everywhere to examine the state of their moral lives and turn from everything that God finds offensive – and he baptized those folk.
Then one day, Jesus shows up to be baptized, and John is in awe. Here he is all grown up, the one he believed in from childhood, ready to go public. And after John baptized Jesus, another amazing event happens that only confirms what his reason has told him thus far.
As Jesus emerges from the water, a voice from heaven says, “this is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased.”
From that time on John says, “Jesus must move to center stage while I slip off to the sidelines.” Which is what happens. Shortly after John got thrown into prison because his message of ‘evaluate your moral life’, didn’t sit too well with the king whose morals John evaluated.
Now in prison John is down, he’s depressed. Sure he’s seen God do amazing things, but he’s human like you and me and he wonders maybe it’s not true after all. So John sends word to a few of his friends to go to Jesus and just ask him straight up:
Are you the man? Are you the Son of God, sent into the world, the one I was to prepare the way for? Or should I expect someone else?
Now this is what circumstances and emotions can do to faith. They test it, they push it, they tempt you abandon it, to doubt. It’s not your reason telling you to give up on your faith, it’s everything else.
There will come a moment for you, like John, where
- there is bad news, or
- you’re in trouble, or
- you’re living among a lot of people who do not have faith,
- and all at once your emotions will rise up and carry out a blitz on your belief.
Other times, there will come a moment when you
- really want to have sex with that person who is not your spouse or
- want to tell a lie or
- get impatient or
- give in to pride or
- acquire some shady money –
- a moment when it would be really, really convenient if Christianity were NOT true. And once again your emotions and imagination will carry an all-out blitz on your faith.
Now, have any real reasons come up against Christianity? No. So having faith is to do what John did. He didn’t brood, didn’t turn tail and run, didn’t just fold like a house of cards. He asked the questions, pursued answers, got in Jesus face, to reaffirm the thing his best reason told him was true. That’s faith!
Now listen to what Jesus tells John’s friends when they deliver John’s questions:
Go back to John and tell him about what you have heard and seen – the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the lowly are learning that God is on their side!
In other words,
John, I’m so glad you’re hanging on to what God showed you in the light, even though right now, you’re in the dark. So, once again, here’s the evidence, use your own senses to measure it. See, the evidence justifies your faith in me!
At Allen Creek Community Church, you’re never going to find us asking you to accept Christianity if your best reasoning tells you that the weight of the evidence is against it. We’re going to say, check the evidence, use your own senses and reason to measure it, then when you uncover the truth, hang on by faith.
People think Faith is blind, but that’s not Biblical faith. Faith is believing what your reason has accepted as true based on sound evidence, even when your moods change, or feelings change or circumstances change. It’s in THIS sense that faith is most definitely a moral character trait.
Just look at our culture. In divorcing faith from reason, we’ve come to this place where people’s moods totally dominate what they believe about God or the spirit world or marriage or love or anything. My friends doing Recovery say in AA you can make anything your higher power, a door knob is a popular choice for many!
Friend, this is why you can’t be a sound Christian or even a sound atheist without faith – without it, we become a culture of muddy thinkers, all our beliefs are dependant on the weather or the state of our digestion. Faith is a virtue because it’s the art hanging on to things you know to be TRUE despite mood blitzes.
CS Lewis said,
“I do have moods in which Christianity looks very improbable, but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.”
To GROW in Faith then, is one of the things you’ll hear about a lot if you become a Christian. Faith grows by holding Truth in front of our minds regularly. That’s why Christians pray and read the Bible and go to worship like we have at 8:45 on Sundays and attend small groups…
they are reaffirming truth, because belief must be fed.
If you were to interview a 100 people who lost their faith in Christianity, (maybe you’re one of them) how many of them would you say reasoned their way out of it by HONEST argument? Or for most of them, was it more a mood, or a circumstance and a lack of feeding truth and they just sort of drifted away?
John’s faith says to each of us, when I get confused or frustrated, I go back to the truth. I seek it hard, I don’t let my emotions or moods overwhelm me, I become a critical thinker and see reason and faith as partners.
TRUST
But now there’s a second level to this that most people don’t think about when they hear the world faith. The second sense of
FAITH means TRUST.
I want to approach this by asking you how you feel you’re doing with all the character traits we talked about the past 4 weeks? Self Control, Patience, Humility – how’re you doing on those? Had a good week or bad week? What of other Biblical virtues like compassion, love, contentment, kindness –how’re you doing on those? Great? Straight A’s?
I’m not trying to be coy here, I just want us all to see that whenever you start talking about character and virtue, really trying hard to live them out, the place we always end up is: failure. You see, we start with this idea that morality is God’s way of giving us an exam we’re supposed to pass.
That’s brotherhood of man, love one another etc… and this is the foundation of all religions. Religion says that God sets out a bargain, that if we can perform well enough on our side of the contract, then this puts God in our debt and he owes us to compensate us for passing the exam.
- This is why people get this idea that heaven is sort of guaranteed to pretty much everyone because with a moderate effort we’ll all get a good enough grade to pass, especially because we’re certain that God grades on a curve.
- This is why people reject the idea of hell (except for Adolph Hitler and the annoying person in the lunchroom) because God owes us even if we’re mediocre moral performers.
That’s as far as a lot of people want to think about it. But you know, it’s only the people who get serious about morality and character who eventually, not right away, but eventually, like a Mack truck, drive straight into a brink wall. Which is when they realize, they can’t do it!
A sort of despair comes over them and they wonder what the point is of virtue and morality anyhow, because the harder they try the more darkness you see on the inside.
And just when you realize that it’s going to be impossible to ever earn a pass or put God into your debt, this other thought crosses the mind of the people truly trying to be a person of Good Character:
Everything I have, everything I do for God, every service I render to him, every time I actually succeed in character building, all this comes from him anyhow.
We’re like a little girl going to her father saying, “daddy give me 10 dollars so I can buy you a birthday present.” Of course, the father is pleased with the present, but no one thinks that the father is 10 bucks to the good with this exchange!
At this moment, after these discoveries that we can’t pass the exam, and all we give to God is God’s anyhow, it’s only then we can understand faith in the second sense. This is what Jesus was driving at when he said, “blessed are the poor in spirit,” literally, you will be blessed when you realize you are spiritually and morally bankrupt.
Now you might say, oh Rick, you’re talking about the really bad people now, the morally bankrupt. No, actually, I’m not. People who attempt to show no virtue never make this discovery. It’s only the people who try to be good who find out just how deep the darkness in them runs.
RICH YOUNG RULER
I’d like you to meet a guy like that. A man who tried very hard to be good, to earn a pass on the exam, to put God in his debt so that he owed him heaven. His story is told in Mark 10. He doesn’t have a name, we just know he’s young, he’s a leader in society and he’s loaded.
He comes up to Jesus and asks him, “Good Teacher, what good things must I do to have eternal life?” In other words, how can I put God in my debt. He’s a Jew who has a Bible so Jesus just directs him there: Just keep all the Bible commandments. That will put God in your debt.
Now there are 225 moral commandments in the Old Testament, so what do you think Jesus is trying to tell him? He can never put God in his debt or pass the exam. But the guy is determined so he asks Jesus,
which ones?
Basically he’s saying, ‘can’t we narrow it down some, boil it down to some of the general principles?’ I’m always intrigued that Jesus plays along with this guy’s thinking – because he wants him to come to the conclusion of his moral bankruptcy on his own.
So Jesus says,
OK, let me give you the head liners: don’t murder, don’t sleep with someone who’s not your wife, don’t tell a lie, honor your father and mother and love everyone you meet as richly as you love yourself.
Now if you’re this guy do you think you’ve picked up on the message yet? This guy actually thinks Jesus is giving him hope for how to guarantee heaven by moral effort. So he does a quick moral inventory,
‘Yeah, I think I’ve done those. Ever since I’ve been a kid, I’ve kept all those. What else?’
Now again, Jesus doesn’t challenge him on his assessment of his own moral character. Obviously he’s fooling himself and Jesus knows it! But to try and get this guy to come to the conclusion on his own Jesus gives him one more nudge:
‘Just one more thing, if you want to be PERFECT, go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor and then come and follow me.’ And it says, the man went away sadly because he had great wealth.
This was Jesus way of telling the man he needed to have faith in the second sense, the sense of trust. For what did the young man trust? He trusted in his own moral goodness, and it his own self sufficiency. And Jesus was saying, friend, I hope you see, no one can earn a pass – it can’t be done!
CONCLUSION
That moment of despair could have been his true moment of hope. Because it’s only in seeing the bankruptcy of our own moral performance and coming to the end of our self sufficiency that we will eagerly have faith in Jesus (IE. TRUST HIM) to come in to our hearts and share his perfection with us.
The question is, will you let go?
There was once a woman who was hanging out a third floor window of a burning building. Her plan had been to climb down, but she was losing her grip. Just then, firemen arrived with a rescue ladder truck. They wanted her to reach back with her hand, grab the fireman on the top rung and be pulled to safety.
But she hesitated, afraid to let go of the ledge. Her mind told her the ladder was her only hope, but still she would not let go. It’s at this moment friends, that the two kinds of faith intersect. She believed that the ladder would hold her, but the real question was would she trust it and live? Or would she trust herself and perish? If she lets go, she lives, if she tries harder, she dies.
Men and women, some of you believe the beliefs but you have not entrusted your whole life to Jesus Christ alone. Therefore you do not yet REALLY have faith in him.
But…
- Maybe today God has pointed out to you the hopelessness of trying harder. And…
- maybe today God has made it clear that that which is impossible to earn, Jesus already offers you free of charge. Forgiveness, perfect moral character, peace with God. The only cost is faith, you must believe and finally you must trust!
