Faith
FAITH
First Steps out of the Old Life
Luke 19:1-10; John 1:35-42
[How does faith grow? A story]
A [man] sat down with me and abruptly said: “What are you going to do with me? I am a man without any religion. The old is dead and I haven’t anything new to take its place. In America no church would take me, for I cannot believe in the divinity of Christ.”
I could almost see him inwardly stiffen to meet my arguments to prove Christ divine. So I used none. Instead I asked: “What do you believe? How far along are you?”
“Well,” he said, “I believe that Christ was the best of men.”
“Then let us begin where you can. If he is the best of men, then he is your ideal. Are you prepared to act according to that ideal? To cut out of your life everything that Christ would not approve?”
He was startled, and said, “But that is not easy.”
“I never said the way of Christ is easy. Are you prepared to let go everything he will not approve?”
“If I am honest, I must,” he quietly replied, “and I will.”
“Then, whoever Christ turns out to be, man or more than man, wouldn’t you be stronger and better if he were living with you, in you, all the time?”
“Of course, I would be different.”
“Then will you let him into your life?”
“I don’t know how.”
“Then pray this prayer after me, sentence by sentence.”
He did. “This is different,” he said as we arose, “for they always told me I had to believe first. Now at least here is something for me to begin on.”
The next day he came again, his face radiant. “I didn’t know a man could be as happy as I have been today. All my questions and doubts as to who Christ is have gone. And, moreover, I have been talking to my wife and she wants it too.”
Christ had verified himself. He does, when we give him a chance.
Victorious Living
(Week 7, Sunday)
God Guides through Opening Providences and the Natural Order
1 Corinthians 2:9; 12:8; 2 Corinthians 2:12; Revelation 3:8
God guides through natural law and its discoveries through science. We have a primary faith in revelation and a secondary faith in science. But in a sense science is revelation: God speaking to us through the natural order. That natural order is God’s order. It is dependable because God is dependable. God works by law and order rather than by whim and notion and fancy. There was a time when we tried to put God in the unexplained gaps in nature; we said God must be there, for these gaps are mysterious and unexplainable. But when science began to fill up these gaps, God was pushed out. To have relegated God to those gaps was a mistake, for God reveals the divine self in the very law and order and the explainable facts of nature, and not merely in the unexplainable and the mysterious. The law and order express God far more than the unexplainable and mysterious. For this very law and order is of God. God is in it, is the author of it, works through it, but is not strait-jacketed by it. For this law and order is full of surprises and of freedoms. A closed system of nature is now unscientific. God guides through science. Accept that fact.
Abundant Living
(Week 37, Friday)
Further Steps in Corporate Living
Proverbs 25:8-11; Matthew 5:25; 7:1-5; 1 John 2:8-10
Look on others, not as they are, but as they can be. That was the secret of Jesus’ influence on people. He believed in them when they couldn’t believe in themselves, for he saw them, not as they were, but as they could be by his help. That attitude will give you, not a querulous mood of dissatisfaction with others, but a constructive mood of expectancy of possibilities. I find myself responding to Jesus’ faith in me when I have no faith in myself. I have faith in his faith!
Abundant Living
(Week 39, Monday)
A Center of Moral and Spiritual Contagion
Psalm 42:5-8
Those who are in contact with Christ find a constant quickening of faith in life, in one’s self, and in others. I know that Christ believes in me when I can’t believe in myself. So I have to respond to his faith in me. “I live by faith in the Son of God” (Gal 2:20), not by my faith in him alone, but by his faith in me.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 42, Saturday)
Shock Treatment or a New Faith
Acts 15:37-39
A new faith is a gentle shock treatment that sends the life force into new channels of constructive life and activity. A new faith gets our eyes off ourselves and puts them on Christ, and we find adequacy and power in him.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 29, Tuesday)
Being Christian Is the Triumph
Hebrews 12:1-2
Every day you can take hold of life by the handle of fear or the handle of faith. If you take hold of it by the handle of faith, you can find something to rejoice in everything. If nothing in the thing itself, then you can rejoice over the fact that you can rejoice—over everything and nothing. The rejoicing is the victory. Being Christian is the triumph.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 36, Thursday)
The Word of Christianity Become Flesh
1 John 1:1-4
The very center of the Christian faith is the Incarnation, in which the Divine Word becomes flesh; the idea becomes fact. All other faiths are the word become word, the idea projected as an idea. In Jesus, the idea walked. It spoke in human life and manifested in human relationships. It transformed religion from idealism to realism.
Where this faith is sincerely tried, it becomes incarnate as fact. It works in human relationships. And wherever it is tried, it produces something so exquisitely beautiful that we stand “lost in wonder, love, and praise” (Charles Wesley, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”).
Growing Spiritually
(Week 30, Sunday)
Growth in Freedom
John 8:31-36
There is nothing more fallacious than saying, “Any faith is good, provided you are sincere.” You may sincerely follow the wrong thing to a wrong destination. Sincerely sitting in a railway train, believing you are on the right train, won’t get you to your destination if it is actually the wrong train.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 50 Sunday)
I Endorse This with All My Heart
John 7:37-39
Faith is receptivity toward God. Faith is not a talisman that brings certain things because of the faith. Faith is an attitude toward God which makes it possible for God to work. If God gave to us without our faith, it would mean imposing something on us without our cooperation. Faith is cooperating with God. It is saying yes to God’s yes, affirming God’s affirmations.
Mastery
(Week 51, Tuesday)
Joy Is the Christian Word
Philippians 1:25-26
Yesterday we said that there is something deeper than happiness, and that is joy. Happiness comes from happenings, but joy may be within, in spite of happenings. Happiness is the world’s word; joy is the Christian’s word. The New Testament does not use or promise the word happiness; it uses the word joy. And for a reason.
Many people are expecting happiness from following the Christian faith: “God will arrange the things that happen to me so they will all add up to happiness.” When the things that happen to them do not mean happiness, such people are dismayed and feel God has let them down: “Why should this happen to me?” They expect to be protected from happenings that make them unhappy. This is a false view and leads to a lot of disillusionment. For the Christian is not necessarily protected from things that make people unhappy.
Was Jesus protected from happenings that make people unhappy? Was Paul? Their Christian faith got them into opposition, into persecution, into death. How could a faith that has a cross at its center promise exemption from happenings that ordinarily bring unhappiness? Then what is the answer? The Christian faith offers joy in the midst of happenings that make people without that faith unhappy. When Christians don’t find joy on account of their happenings, they can always find joy in spite of them.
Christian Maturity
(Week 37, Wednesday)
All the Good That Is Ours in Christ
To be in Christ is to share one’s faith, for you cannot have a share in Christ unless you share him with others. Nothing is ours until we share it. The sharing of the faith makes it possible to share in the faith. Otherwise not; if you are not winning others, Christ has not really won you.
When you share your faith then you “promote the knowledge of all the good that is ours in Christ” (Phlm 6). “All the good that is ours in Christ”! That is what sharing your faith means; it means telling people around all the good that you have found in Christ.
In Christ
(Week 44, Saturday)
Introduction
The Christian faith is not just a little better than other faiths—a little more moral, more free from contradictory elements, more lofty in its conceptions. It is that, but it is more; it is different in kind. Religions are our search for God. The gospel is God’s search for us. Therefore, there are many religions, but only one gospel. Religions are the Word become word; the gospel is the Word become flesh.
This verse, “And the Word became flesh” (John 1:14) sets the gospel off in a class by itself. And yet while it is in a class by itself, a sui generis, nevertheless it relates it to everything—God, life, the material everything. For it is planted in life—spiritual, material, social. But planted in life, it is different, apart, unique.
The gospel quietly says: “And the Word became flesh.” It reversed everything and revealed Everything.
Without this verse the Christian faith is the Word become word—an idea, a philosophy, a moralism; with it the Christian faith is the Word become flesh, a fact—a redemptive fact, the supreme fact.
Compared with this, the differences between the Christian way and other ways are marginal and indecisive, but this is central and decisive. And compared with this, the questions of the manifestations of the Christian faith are marginal and indecisive. If the manifestation of the Christian faith is not the Word become flesh—a decision—then it is the Word become word—a discussion—hence sub-Christian.
The Word Became Flesh
John 21:18-19
So the Christian faith is not a set of propositions to be accepted; it is a Person to be followed. That Person is manifest reality, so to follow Jesus is to follow Reality, manifested as the Word become flesh. So to follow Jesus is not assent to truths, but the acceptance of Truth, embodied in a Person and reembodied in my person.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 3, Thursday)
The Christian Faith Is Secular Through and Through
Matthew 15:32-38
The Christian faith is secular without being secularized. It is the spiritual working in and through the material. The sacred is secular and the secular is sacred. Unless our religion functions in material terms, it does not function. We are not ghosts; we are embodied beings and we must function in and through the body or we do not function.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 6, Tuesday)
All the Ideas Are Guaranteed by the Fact of Jesus
John 14:10-11
All the principles of the Christian faith have been verified in the life of Jesus; they work and have produced the character of Jesus. And in any battle of ideas the victory will go to those ideas guaranteed by the facts. In the Christian faith all its ideas have been guaranteed by the fact of Jesus. So the final victory goes to him. For you will never get better ideas than Jesus held until you live a better life than Jesus lived. That can’t be done. He is standard.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 18, Wednesday)
Matthew 12:38-42
We pause today to look at what the greatest Hindu of modern times says to the Christians about their faith. I asked Mahatma Gandhi, in the early days when he had just come from South Africa to begin his work of gaining freedom for India, “What would you suggest to us as Christians that we do to make Christianity more naturalized in India, not a foreign thing, identified with a foreign people and a foreign government, but a part of the life of the people and making its contribution to the remaking of India?” He replied without a moment’s hesitation:
I would suggest four things: First, that all of you Christians, missionaries and all, must begin to live more like Jesus Christ. [He needn’t have said anything more!] Second, I would suggest that you practice your religion without adulterating it or toning it down—practice it as it is. Third, I would suggest that you emphasize love and make it your working force, for love is central in Christianity. Fourth, I suggest that you study the non-Christian faiths more sympathetically to find a more sympathetic approach to the people.
Here was the leading Hindu telling the Christians that they should live more like Jesus Christ, the central figure of our faith; to practice our faith without adulterating it or toning it down. A representative of the most syncretic religion in the world, Hinduism, suggests that we be Christians in the deepest sense of that word; that will make us universal. That we use love as our working force, for Jesus came armed with no weapons save the weapon of love. And that we discover any truths in the non-Christian faiths we can, for Gandhi implied that that will lead you on then to the Truth, the Incarnate Truth. A great commission from a great Hindu.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 18, Thursday)
The Word Continues to Be Flesh
Acts 2:32-33
Is this Word become flesh a once-and-for-all event, never repeated? Or is it a continuing principle inherent in the Christian faith? Does it pass over into the lives of the followers of Jesus as continuing fact? Did they become the Word become flesh? Imperfectly, of course, but nevertheless, was it the divine intention that they be a continuing incarnation of the life and spirit of Jesus? And did that happen? And does it happen now when we are in line with the reality of the Christian faith?
I am persuaded that the Word became flesh is not only an event in the time of Jesus; it is a continuing principle, a fact that is inherent in the Christian faith. And this is seen and realized in the coming of the Holy Spirit. The coming of the Holy Spirit was the Word become flesh in receptive and obedient believers. Here the historical passed into the experimental. The Word became flesh, not only in “the body of Christ”—the church—but in the bodies of believers as individuals and persons. There was a collective manifestation of the Word become flesh in the new community and an individual manifestation in the new person.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 26, Sunday)
What a Tragedy When Christianity Broke with Christ
Galatians 1:6-9
A Hindu said at the close of one of my meetings, “As the speaker has gone on, two thoughts have been going through my mind. One was, what a tragedy it was when Christianity broke with Christ. And the other was, what a world awakening would come if Christianity and Christ should come together again.” Is the Hindu right? Has there been a break between Christianity and Christ?
I am persuaded that the real point of departure is at the point of turning the Christian faith into the Word become word instead of the Word become flesh. That is the real point of departure with real results in the consequent effectiveness of the Christian faith in the world. The Christian faith is organized for the most part around the conception of the Word become word. Its “services” are verbal services, ritual; its preaching is not practicing but proclaiming; its religious education is learning about, instead of living out.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 37, Sunday)