When my wife and I were having our first child, we determined that it was pretty important to make sure that she and our daughter were provided for if I were to die unexpectedly, so we researched the options and I took out my first life insurance policy. I set it to withdraw the monthly premiums automatically from my bank account and don’t think about it any more. The only time I thought about it was when I changed my bank account and received a letter from the company to make sure the premiums continued to get paid. I am concerned that this is a similar story to how many experience “praying to receive Jesus.”
We saw yesterday that the word “believe” is the central instruction on being “saved” from our condition of separation from our eternal creator. So, what is it to “believe”? It seems that in our times it is mostly understood as “think the right thoughts” or “know the right information” or “agree with a set of expressed truths”. But this is not what it is primarily about. “Believe” in the Bible comes from the verb form of the word for “faith”, but our English language doesn’t have a verb form of faith. To believe something is faithing. Active faith is belief. Certainly one must know something about the specific truth to believe it, but it is not merely knowing something, it is acting on our knowing. These actions can be big or small, but it is active.
The most concise chapter in the Bible about faith is Hebrews 11. Read how it begins: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people…” and the whole chapter goes on to list action after action of people believing.
It is the orientation of one’s life and actions around the person of Jesus, his death and resurrection, and forgiveness of our sins. By the way, I think this is why baptism is mentioned so many times (though not always) with “believe”, it is active faith, a public proclamation. In an excellent, and exhaustive work on faith, Paul Tillich expresses this even more emphatically:
“Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of man’s total being. They all are united in the act of faith. But faith is not the sum total of their impacts. It transcends every special impact as well as the totality of them and it has itself a decisive impact on each of them.” (Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
, 1957 ; p4-5)
Secondly, the Bible doesn’t instruct us to just say a prayer to receive Jesus and we are done. I have been wondering if people walk away from Christianity because they did the prayer thing and it has no further impact on their life. Like a life insurance policy, just make sure the premium gets taken out of the “bank” once a week by going to church (or at least twice a month). To be fair, I admit that this isn’t the teaching of most churches, but it has become too familiar in the action (belief) of peoples’ lives in American Christianity.
Furthermore, I am even more concerned about this in Christian believers’ households because the angst of many parents until their child “prays to receive Christ”, after which they stop the continual teaching, mentoring, and encouraging their child because “now they are ‘IN’ for eternity”. I celebrate BIG TIME when a child expresses faith in Christ, in fact one of my nieces took that step on Christmas Eve! But let’s treat re-birth (born-again concept from John 3.16) in the same way we treat birth. Could you image, parents give birth to their baby and then just let life happen, because now their born? Life wouldn’t “happen” very long and these parents would be in jail shortly after the baby’s life ends. After birth, we nurture new life, we continue this in such a way until they are able to live independently. This is a strong burden of mine after 18 years of working with teenagers, many of whom give a testimony of praying to receive Christ at a young age and yet are no different than their peers who have never had such an experience. Believers, we must disciple our children in a continual conversion process and a series of commitments at various life stages and crises.
It is reported that one of the greatest influencers of converts in recent history, Billy Graham, said, “Being a Christian is more than just an instantaneous conversion – it is a daily process whereby you grow to be more and more like Christ” (multiple internet sites attribute this saying to Graham, but I was unable to find any source citation) It is important to emphasize both an instantaneous conversion (although many times imperceptible) as well as an ongoing transformation.
Tomorrow I will bring this series to a close with an additional part of this point and a then bring it back around to where I started 9 days ago.
Great posts Brian! I appreciate your post about cultivating new spiritual birth. Do you think part of the problem could be due to faith being too narrowly defined? It seems that part of the reason faith is viewed as spiritual ‘insurance’ in our time, could be because we have honed in on a single aspect of a much greater concept of faith (as you mentioned in your post). People often equate faith with the intitial act of faith (or spiritual birth), and then refer to other aspects of the spiritual life as something other than faith. Could it be that the analogy of birth is not equal to faith but a part of it? If faith is merely the initial birth, then it is a once-and-done event, but if faith is a greater (and possibly multi-faceted) concept, then shouldn’t we view faith as initial saving-faith, as well as growing faith, and persevering faith? This might be opening a can of worms, but it seems relevant to this issue. Thanks for the stimulating posts.
Brian,
Your questions about the nature and life of faith call to mind the theological kernel that has driven me through much of my education and ministry these past 6 years. The modern concept of faith, especially in terms like your life insurance policy analogy, is so drastically removed and divergent from the 1st century conception of it that we can read your question about “where in the Bible does it say to ask Jesus into your heart” as the basis of faith and be dumbfounded that its nowhere to be found!
Im currently reading a book called “After You Believe” by N.T. Wright, whom I would consider to be the epitome of a truly faithful Christian scholar today, and he is dealing with this very question/topic. As I have believed for years now, Wright eloquently extrapolates the meaning of faith as a lifelong development and embodiment of CHARACTER (particularly, Christ-like Character). What happens in the “instant” of entering a relationship with Christ is merely a beginning, albeit a life-changing one. Nonetheless, it is ONLY a beginning, and if it isnt followed by volumes and pages of our lives’ stories of loving, learning from, following, and sharing Christ, then I find it hard to say that that “moment” could even be called a beginning… it was just another moment IF it doesnt set one on a wildly spiraling life of passionate pursuit of God’s Kingdom. Granted, this pursuit looks starkly different for all people, but everyone’s story of faith, I believe, shares some common strands; the one of interest here is what N.T. Wright denotes, in accordance with many others including my self, as CHARACTER. Like you wrote Brian, faith is the life of CHARACTER that “orient[s] itself” around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Unfortunately, Christ-like character is what is most lacking in modern western society today, and yet it is the heart of the hope to build God’s just and equitable Kingdom through our collective faith in the Messiah, and it is essence of why that Messiah Jesus LIVED, died, and rose again: so that we could perpetually make manifest His Character through our lives of faith, the character that will lead us to change the world into God’s Kingdom together.