Jonny Heart: May 2008

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Another Discussion on Faith

I want to be honest with you, I am not sure that I totally understand faith. Now I know that as a future minister this causes a bit of a problem. If I don’t even understand it how am I suppose to tell others about it and expect others to know of it? So I will tell you what I have come to understand as faith up to this point in my life. The Hebrews writer puts faith in terms for us to better understand, “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Okay, that is not too difficult to understand but this does not really work as a working definition. After giving this phrase in verse 1 the writer then goes on to list 16 or so people who were noted as having great faith. Yet in all 16 people I could tell you where they all doubted God. I think it is okay to doubt, it makes you human. I would say that verse one would be an example of perfect faith, the kind of faith Jesus had in his father. So I strive to grasp better the idea of faith.

There are for certain, some points faith is tied to.

-Faith is tied to experience. Like a child you grow up and become an adult and mature. No longer do you dally in the ways of youth, but you learn what is appropriate and right, same thing with faith. Faith grows by life experiences. When you begin to see that God really is working for your good then you will step out on that limb again even for greater things allowing your faith to grow.

Here is an example. You have a rich man and a poor man. The rich man does not have to worry about where his next meal comes from because he can afford it, he worked for pay and his faith rests in his money to provide for him. On the other hand the poor man cannot afford to pay for his next meal and does not know where he is going to eat next. He has faith in God that he will provide for his needs and when God comes through for him, and he is able to recognize it then his faith grows, for he sees the fruits of his faith.

The more life experience you have the more cause or reason you have to be a warrior in your faith. Yet I urge you not to forget the young David who at an early age believed God would help him fight a seasoned soldier and win. In most cases, I have found the more life experience a person has in times of struggle and living in a view of faith the stronger his faith has become. He has more evidence to back up his reason for believing in God.

-Faith is based from reason not emotion. J.R. is actually talking about this very issue on Sunday. If we relied on our emotions to feed our faith then little things such as a rainy day affects our faith. Or our tempers when driving would control our faith at that time. Instead of faith being based on emotions it is based from reason, the conscious choice to believe Christ in the teeth of anger and the awful days that make us tired.

C.S. Lewis said this, “It is not reason that [takes] away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other… Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. Of r moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience.” –Mere Christianity pg. 139-140

I think to many times youth go to CIY or some major worship network and their emotions get raised, then make rash decisions based on those heightened emotions and that is dangerous.

-Faith and works always seem to be in some sort of battle. Paul says we live by faith alone and James says we faith without works are dead. Who is right? Which is right? The answer is yes. The idea of grace takes away anything you do for salvation, which includes your faith and works. You can never have enough faith or do enough works to merit salvation. So do not worry about either regarding salvation, salvation only comes from grace which God gives you. It is by faith we trust God to give us his gift but his gift is his alone to give.

Now we have the choice of either being an insane person or a sane person. The insane person would say with his mouth he believes in God but does not conform to the teachings of Jesus. The sane person would say with his mouth he believes and follow through with conforming to the teachings of Christ. You do not attempt at these new teachings with the view of doing this to be saved but because God has begun to save you already. Not working to receive heaven as some sort of gift but because a sliver of heaven already exists inside of you.

People argue so much over this tussle between faith and works probably because both ideas are in the Bible. Philippians 2 says, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” and the opposite, “It is God working inside of you to the completion.” God does all the work or you do the work. The real job is not to argue over faith verses works but to see how they are the same. Saying God did this and I did that does not work because God does not exactly work like the man beside you but inside of you. You reach an idea of working together inside and out.

This reflection of faith probably does not express the true meaning of faith, like I said earlier I am not sure entirely what faith is. As of now this seems to be what I understand and think about the matter and was probably much clearer at the beginning

Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."