Hello everyone! After cycling into and out of the Sea of Forgetfulness, this blog finally has a post errrrrr, 8 years (?) after the last one. Since that last posting, my wife and I have had a third child, completed seminary, moved towns, I have become the lead pastor at a church, and I gained and lost and gained and lost 20 or so pounds in who-knows-how-many cycles. But in any case, I am posting this as a way to keep myself accountable in writing out some reflections that I have been wanting to write and combine into a book. Right now, my working title is Why Faith?. My hope is it will be a series of thoughts on the nature of faith in Jesus Christ while also considering perhaps why faith is the currency of the life we are called to live with God, and how faith frames and gives us clues to the meaning of our existence itself.
So over the next few months I am going to try to post each new section I write in order to get the thoughts out and have an audience read them. So feel free to come on the journey and let me know your thoughts as we go! This first post is really a prologue for the book, telling how I began to be interested in this question of "Why Faith?" I suppose it is a question that is interesting to any believer, and really-- I think-- should be interesting to everyone. Because, whether you like it or not, faith is something we all have in some thing, or some one or some way. All of us will have to step out and trust beyond our knowledge. Why is that the nature of this life we live? Well...here goes:
Why Faith? Part I:
Prologue
I tend
to have years-long, running conversations with God. Often, these conversations will center around
a question—low-simmering and ever present—that I have sauntering around in the
back of my mind. Back at the beginning
of 2015 one of these questions was, “Lord, how will unbelievers and the people
to whom I minister see you?” What
I meant was, how can people who live every day not thinking of or considering
God’s reality behold and live for the One whom I believe is more present and
real than any of us? You would think if
knowing God is as important as I say it is in my ministry, and as important as
the Bible says it is that God’s presence, necessity, and priority would be an
ever-pressing reality in front of everyone.
I have
attended and performed some funerals where God was talked about like he
was seen, found, and what mattered to the deceased the most; but I then
uncomfortably realized during the proceedings really God was an afterthought
thrown on top of the true memories of the person’s life to sanctify for the
mourners his or her existence that really subsisted on college football, lotto
tickets, and 12-packs of Mountain Dew fetched by his or her dutiful stepson
from the corner store every week. God was
just the one the family mentioned when I-- the buttoned-up preacher—showed up
for the funeral. He was the one who vouchsafed the life to come, no matter if
He was thought of much in the life that was lived. Please understand, I’m not judging these
folks: people live how they live and do what they have to do in this world that
is so very often dark and painful; and if that deceased person finds mercy, love,
and understanding anywhere, it will be in the arms of her Creator who I know she
encountered when she left behind her mortal coil. But, these funereal experiences have served
only to underline the question: how will
people see God when they are looking at and seeking everything else in their
lives—everything that is so entertaining, so satisfying, and so very watchable—but
Him?
So it
was this question that had walked around to the front of my brain again in 2015
when I was at a conference for college students. I asked within my soul, “Lord, how will these
kids see you?” and then almost in direct response, the speaker at the
conference began, “Lord, today I pray for spiritual sight for us
present. May we see you and your beauty.” Ok, God had my attention now. The speaker went on to cite 2 Corinthians 4:4
which states that the “god of this age has blinded the minds of
unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the
glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
He then continued on to say that we as Christians then reveal the unseen
God and restore the vision of Him obstructed by sin, by undertaking the rest of
that passage revealed in verse 5: we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, and
ourselves as the people’s servants for Jesus’ sake. Through our proclamation and our service, we
could—with God’s grace—make seen and reveal as all-important the God who is
often unseen and left as unimportant. So
maybe preaching Jesus at a person’s funeral dedicated to SEC football isn’t
a bad place to start after all.
I refer
to that memory often in my daily ministry, and it helps me keep going. However, I can’t say that I have never asked the
question again. Rather, I feel the
question has continued on to deeper levels—there are times in my ministry when God
has been more manifest, and times when He has seemed more distant, but in all
times there still has continued this dynamic of searching and reaching out to
see Him. Surely, we all do start as
blind from the “god of this age”; however, why can’t life be an ongoing “Damascus
road” experience like Paul had when God knocked him to the ground and showed
him eternal reality? Why can’t it be a
parade of constant, forthcoming revelation caught like candy from God’s very
own float cruising down the main street of my life? In other words, why is faith the modus
operandi, the currency, of the life lived unto the Lord? Why the digging,
the searching, the seeking? Why is God a
God that we must seek (Jeremiah 29:13), or a God to be found? Why do we walk by faith and not by sight (2
Corinthians 5:7)? Why is it that without
faith no one can please God (Hebrews 11:6)?
And finally, how can one who is not even considering these Biblical
truths catch a glimpse of God in the first place, let alone have faith in Him? Why Faith?
I
cannot say that what follows in these reflections will be the answer to
this question. It would be a singular
act of hubris to pretend that I can, once and for all, explain one of the
deepest mysteries of our eternal existence.
After all, is faith really faith anymore once you understand it? Instead, what follows are some of the
meditations and thoughts I have had in order to understand faith in my own life
in order to dive even deeper into faith in the One who has made me and saved
me.
To
paraphrase Anselm, the 11th century bishop of Canterbury, we don’t
understand in order to have faith; but rather, we have faith in order to
understand. If anything, I hope this
book will not cause you to want to have a detached, encyclopedic knowledge of
the ways of God—like you were a biologist logging and noting the behavior of an
eagle. How cold and dead is such
knowledge when applied to the ones we love.
And that is just who God is: Love—Love who has invited us to love Him
through Faith, and so understand facets of God’s heart that no observer could
ever discern from afar. If anything, these
are observations about God not obtained through binoculars, but hopefully more like from
a son knowing the smell of his own dad and the feel of his arms as he holds him
when he tucks him into bed. I hope as
you read, any insight will not make you necessarily want to know more,
but rather love more; and from that love you will be drawn into deeper
and deeper faith in Jesus Christ. And
who knows? If you haven’t yet seen this God I will try to describe, maybe you’ll
look again.
