Faith In Jesus

When we hear the phrase "faith in Jesus," what does that mean?

It means that when his teaching is difficult, we will do it.

It means that when we don't want to do what he teaches, we will do it.

It means that when it is countercultural, we will still do it.

It means that when it will make us unpopular, we will do it.

It means that when it requires sacrifice, we will do it.

Faith is all about trusting in something.

The first Saturday in May is always Free Comic Book Day. How are you all enjoying your free comics?

What? You're saying you didn't go and get your free comics?

That's the thing. Free doesn't mean forced. There were free comics given away on Saturday, May 4th, at comic shops around the nation. Yet if you didn't go get them, you don't have them.

Grace is free. Faith is free. You just have to take it. You just have to express it.

However, when we talk about faith and grace being free, we can ignore the fact that when you take the free grace and acknowledge faith in Jesus, your life will change.

This was tough for the Christians in Rome to understand when Paul wrote them his letter. A lot of them were Jews. And they had placed their faith in the Old Testament law. Paul was saying, "Place your faith in Jesus." The Gentiles also wrongly placed their faith. Instead of the law, they placed it in freedom, and Paul was saying, "Place your faith in Jesus."

This is also tough for us. Our world, even the Christian culture, tells us to place our faith in so many things that are not Jesus.

If you believe that there is nothing greater in life than being high or enjoying pleasure, then you will spend your life chasing the next high or temporary pleasure. If you believe that there is nothing greater in life than spending time with your biological family, then you will spend time investing in your biological family. If you believe there is nothing more important than sports, then you will spend your time training yourself or training your child.

However, if you believe there is nothing more important than following Jesus, then you will spend your life looking for ways to serve Him. If you believe that there is nothing greater in life than being part of the family of God, then you will align your biological family time with family of God time. If you believe there is nothing more important than spiritually training yourself, then you will invest your life in loving others, studying together, and praying.

What you believe in matters. Your true beliefs influence every action of your life.

When we have a problem serving God, setting aside time for God's family, loving others, studying together, and praying, it doesn't mean that we don't have time for those things. We always find time for the things we really believe in. It doesn't mean that those things are impossible in our life. We always make possible the things that we really want. It means that we have a belief in Jesus problem. We have either created a fictional, pseudo-Jesus that doesn't make those radical calls on our life, or we have just justified away the radical call of Jesus on our life.

So Jesus is saying, you can spend your time having faith in Him and live the life you were created to live. Or you can have faith in one of the many idols of this world. The choice is yours. Faith in something temporary that will not get you where you are supposed to go. Or faith in something beyond our greatest imagining.

You do have faith in something. The question is whether that faith is in the right thing and will get you living the life you were made to life. The good news is that life with Jesus is like a free gift. You just have to take it. It would be like a motorcycle giveaway. Even if you won, you would still have to put the key in and take it home.

The big point that faith heads toward:  Jesus' sacrifice covers our sins - if we have faith - to empower us to live like He lived, as a sacrifice for others. Faith is the key that unleashes God's work in our lives and in the lives around us. We have faith, and we bring that faith forward. From just something written about in a letter from Paul to the Christians in Rome nearly 2000 years ago to real life in your houses, in your churches, and in your community.

Sharing the Gospel is Surrendering our Life

There is a pendulum swing in Christianity. For so long, the church has focused solely on words. Following Jesus, in this paradigm, was a belief statement to be believed. If you believe that Jesus is Christ, the son of the living God, repent and are baptized, then you are saved. So evangelism naturally focused on getting people to believe the right things in their head. Salvation, in that world, comes through having the proper beliefs and doctrine combined with a few religious practices, not through having a transformed life of love. A good evangelist would present the gospel to people through sharing it and asking them if they accept it. It was about bringing them to a decision point. And if they accepted the belief statement proposed, we would baptize them. As a follower of Jesus, if you weren’t presenting it in such a way as to make the person come to a point of decision, then evangelism was not effective.

If you were with me at Hilsboro Family Camp this year, you would have seen the death throes of doctrine only. It seems like a session could not go by without one of the sermons being on us having correct doctrine as if correct doctrine alone mattered. If you were to preach a sermon on love and not mention proper doctrine, then you were doing a disservice to the gospel according to the preachers of doctrine only. But in that world, it is okay to preach a sermon on doctrine and not mention love. Oh, how they must hate the teachings of Jesus in the gospels. He preached on love many times without mentioning doctrine.

Now, we are seeing a shift to not using words but just being loving. This is just as much of an error as the previous error. It’s the pendulum swinging back and forth. In this model, people just do loving actions with no intention of sharing the gospel because what people believe is fine for each person. We should not meddle in people’s beliefs.

It’s like someone watch one too many Star Trek episodes and has taken the Prime Directive, “Nothing within these articles of Federation shall authorize the United Federation of Planets to intervene in matters which are essentially the domestic jurisdiction of any planetary social system, or shall require the members to submit such matters to settlement under these Articles of Federation; But this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII”, too seriously.

The happy, or should I say difficult, middle is where we need to be. We need to love people and also look for opportunities to share the verbal message of the gospel, but we realize that Jesus’ love, like the color blue, cannot be described through just words; it is best exhibited through our loving actions. This most often comes about through natural Christ-filled living among friends, co-workers, and family members. We need to broaden our natural sphere of relationships, whether through nurturing hobbies we do with other people or joining clubs or groups, in order to have more people we come into contact with.

And we need to create ministries within our churches that will allow us to show God’s love to people outside of our normal sphere of relationships. I think we are doing a good job, but we’re only beginning. Being a Christian is living with two, on the surface contradictory, beliefs. We understand that we are fallen sinners yet we realize the potential that God has designed us for. We live in grace when our fallen nature wins out, but we strive toward perfection.

Sharing the gospel is about surrendering our life, dying to our own will and desires, and living life the way Christ would have us live. It’s about letting Jesus live through us and reflecting Him for those around us to see. We need to live in such a way that when people see us, they really see Jesus.

The Satellite Sheik "Ahmad al-Shugairi" - On Fundamentalism

Although he claims to not be a sheik, Ahmad al-Shugairi teaches religion over the Arab networks. His show attempts to express moderate Islamic views to the fundamentalist culture in the Middle East. The glimpse that he gives us into the struggle between the moderate and fundamentalist Muslims sounds very similar to the struggle within Christianity.

For his fifth season, all of the episodes have been filmed in Japan. He wants to show the Arab world that the Japanese "are implementing a lot of the things that we are just preaching." He claims that the Muslim culture focuses only on "alcohol and sexual issues." If they abstain from impropriety in those two areas, then they think they think are right with Allah. Beyond that, they are not focusing on the teachings of Islam. It sounds a lot like the problem facing many American Christians. Focus on a few true points and lift those up to the place where your adherence to them makes you presume you are right with God. Forget that God desires your whole heart and not just a handful of actions and abstentions.

Here is a portion of the On The Media interview between Brooke Gladstone and Ahmad al-Shugairi:

I'm just trying to make the Arab world feel jealous from the Japanese streets. I mean, I ask the Arab world, if the Prophet Muhammad came today, who will he see implementing his teachings more, the Japanese or the Muslim world? A big question mark.

And I say that, by the way, also about the U.S. Most of the prophetic teachings are practiced in the U.S. much more than they are in the Islamic world. Our problem is we focus on two major things and we just shove everything else aside. We focus on alcohol and sexual issues.

So we see the U.S. — they're open in these two arenas, so we say we're better than them because we don't have those. However, we forget that these are two out of a hundred. Barack Obama’s presidency is a great implementation of a human virtue that Prophet Muhammad and Jesus before him promoted, which is all humans are created equal.

When you see an African American leading the most powerful country in the world, out of election, not out of force, and this cannot be implemented anywhere else in the world, anywhere else, this needs to be acknowledged.

This made me examine myself, the church I am in, and Christianity as a whole. Are we living out the gospel more than those who do not even claim to be part of Jesus' Kingdom? Do we just cling to a few practices, albeit true practices, and claim that those practices or abstentions make us right with God? Do we preach doctrines so often that they become hollow and meaningless? Are we living out life as the body of Christ here and now; are we Jesus' hands and feet in this world?