What is faith? As per one of my favorite definitions (of which I cannot claim the credit of invention), "faith is believing the Word of God and acting on it, no matter how I feel, because God promises a good result." Faith in the Biblical sense is not, first of all, grounded in some intellectual adherence to a particular set of plausible but unproven assumptions. It is not reasoning and conniving and rationalizing my way to a solution which maximizes my profits and minimizes my losses. Faith is grounded in a person. It is taking God at His word, and accepting what He says as reliable and true, not because of my honest evaluation of the relevant lines of evidence, but because of who He is as a Person, and who He is as my Friend.
This is so hard for me. One of the greatest difficulties in my walk with Christ, I am coming to realize, is my inability (in my flesh) to turn my brain off. Now, please don't get me wrong. I'm by no means advocating some kind of quasi-evangelical anti-intellectual habits of slovenly thinking. I will stand by my conviction that worship is never complete if I have failed to love the Lord my God with every aspect of my being, including my mind. But we err in the opposing direction to suppose that we can anticipate the Lord's actions or intentions in a particular situation simply by virtue of our own mental acrobatics. We focus our energies on ascertaining some reason why what the Lord has laid on our hearts to accomplish is a plausible expectation.
In other words, although I am all for thinking critically about one's faith and exploring the regions which are dimly lit and fraught with inconsistency, when we attempt to understand why we find ourselves in a particular situation or why the Lord has commanded us to follow a certain course of action, we are in danger of wandering a little past our paygrade.
Although the Lord may bless us with wisdom to understand "the reason why" He asks us to do something, there is simply no promise in Scripture which guarantees this in every instance. It is when we sense the void of our own understanding that we must return on our knees to the throne of our Father, from whom and through whom and to whom are all things, both now and forever. And this is the essence of faith: not a conscious forfeiture of one's responsibility to address intellectual problems faced by ourselves or other believers, but a ready submission to the Person of Jesus Christ, who rightfully expects our unquestioning obedience to His instructions.
My instinct, when faced with a decision which requires faith, is to question whether I have truly heard the voice of the Lord. Was it merely an intuition? Was it my own habits of thought, or an internal voice which suggested this course of action? Or was it genuinely a prompting which originated with the Holy Spirit?
I won't pretend to have the answers to those questions, but one thing I do know, the more time I spend in a person's presence, the more I can begin to discern the motions in the spirit of that person. I begin to feel their heart beat, and to know the things for which they ache. Such is my relationship with Christ. Through time spent in His word, I can grow in my ability to know the voice of the Lord from the counterfeits. God grant us the wisdom to know His voice ever more clearly, and to follow it unquestioningly, knowing that He alone is truly sovereign and good, and will not lead us into harm. God grant us faith.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Plans
I've recently been giving some attention to the question of what really matters in this life. Now, I'm not just trying to add a few more lines to the already extensive work composed on how no one could ever truly find a profound and lasting sense of happiness in material and temporal things like wealth, romance, substances, a successful career, or the like. Of course, all of those subjects are, at the very least, a proper subset of what I'm trying to address. But it's not often that people commit a sin of this nature in such a typical and obvious form; it's more commonly (I think) an issue which is of the heart, and not simply defined by our corresponding actions. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'm still relatively young, which means that I still have a number of decisions in my future, some which my culture considers to be of utmost significance, e.g., whom to marry, where to work, etc.. As I'm contemplating these decisions, it's hard to know where to begin. Do I finish my graduate degree in physics? After that, do I try to apply for a postdoctoral position somewhere? Do I find a school to teach at, or a place to get that degree in philosophy I've been coveting for awhile? Do I get an M.Div and become a pastor? Or something wholly unrelated to the academic field entirely? Should I drop everything and become a missionary? Should I consider raising a family? Getting married, settling down and leading a "normal life" (whatever that is)?
As a man, these questions are closely linked to my sense of identity. They are, moreover, all expressions of one fundamental question: when I stand before Christ at the end of my life, what will He say? Will He look at me, with a sparkle in His eyes, "Well done, good and faithful slave You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master" (Matthew 25:21, NASB)? Or will He look at me with a compassionate disappointment that acknowledges my successes in His name, and quietly forgives my consistent failure to seek His leading for my life?
From the way I've organized my thoughts, it's probably clear how I want to address that question. Whether or not I ever have this hypothetical conversation with my Lord, I know that the essence of His response would be a direct measure of the extent to which He was in control of my life. That is to say, I cannot hope to attain genuine fulfillment by finding the right combination of romance, economic success and power; I also can't hope to attain it by giving of myself to every conceivable charitable cause and well-intentioned ministry. I can't afford to face the manifold decisions that afflict young people like myself today as though I could hope to make the right choice in every instance, or as if the outcome of those choices could in any way offer validity to the steps that I took to making them.
What I'm trying to say is this: success cannot be defined in terms of what I do, but only in terms of what I allow the Lord to do through me. It's here that we find the correct understanding of one's identity, for only here can what makes life worth living be unconditionally identified as the One who gave me the life to live in the first place. Whether it means a life spent hunched over a desk, pushing pencil against paper to explore the implications of theoretical physics in some specific application, or one which is used to bring countless souls to Christ, it can hardly be judged a success or a failure apart from the answer to the question, did I put Jesus Christ first in every area of my life?
Maybe you're twiddling your thumbs right now. You're trying to decide if you should go to college, or if you should become an artist, writer, scientist, teacher...should you get married? Maybe you've been out of college for a while, but don't feel that your life is headed in any one, particularly dramatic direction. Maybe you feel as though you're just spinning your wheels.
And that's okay. Jesus never promised drama or the limelight. He never said that yours would become a household name, like that of Mother Theresa or Billy Graham. But He did promise, "to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and N)">immortality, eternal life" (Romans 2:7, NASB). Don't feel as though you've got to measure the worth of your life in terms of how much you've accomplished for the kingdom of God; every day which is lived for the love of the Father, in the strength of Christ and by the leading of the Holy Spirit is all that you can (or should) think of as success.
Success is not simply avoiding the vices and idols of this present age, but it is also not placing virtue and charity above all else. Success exists always and only in the life of one who is fully surrendered to Christ. Are you surrendered? If you are, congratulations, for great is your reward in heaven. Press on, fight the good fight, and be faithful where the Lord has placed you. That's what really matters.
I'm still relatively young, which means that I still have a number of decisions in my future, some which my culture considers to be of utmost significance, e.g., whom to marry, where to work, etc.. As I'm contemplating these decisions, it's hard to know where to begin. Do I finish my graduate degree in physics? After that, do I try to apply for a postdoctoral position somewhere? Do I find a school to teach at, or a place to get that degree in philosophy I've been coveting for awhile? Do I get an M.Div and become a pastor? Or something wholly unrelated to the academic field entirely? Should I drop everything and become a missionary? Should I consider raising a family? Getting married, settling down and leading a "normal life" (whatever that is)?
As a man, these questions are closely linked to my sense of identity. They are, moreover, all expressions of one fundamental question: when I stand before Christ at the end of my life, what will He say? Will He look at me, with a sparkle in His eyes, "Well done, good and faithful slave You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master" (Matthew 25:21, NASB)? Or will He look at me with a compassionate disappointment that acknowledges my successes in His name, and quietly forgives my consistent failure to seek His leading for my life?
From the way I've organized my thoughts, it's probably clear how I want to address that question. Whether or not I ever have this hypothetical conversation with my Lord, I know that the essence of His response would be a direct measure of the extent to which He was in control of my life. That is to say, I cannot hope to attain genuine fulfillment by finding the right combination of romance, economic success and power; I also can't hope to attain it by giving of myself to every conceivable charitable cause and well-intentioned ministry. I can't afford to face the manifold decisions that afflict young people like myself today as though I could hope to make the right choice in every instance, or as if the outcome of those choices could in any way offer validity to the steps that I took to making them.
What I'm trying to say is this: success cannot be defined in terms of what I do, but only in terms of what I allow the Lord to do through me. It's here that we find the correct understanding of one's identity, for only here can what makes life worth living be unconditionally identified as the One who gave me the life to live in the first place. Whether it means a life spent hunched over a desk, pushing pencil against paper to explore the implications of theoretical physics in some specific application, or one which is used to bring countless souls to Christ, it can hardly be judged a success or a failure apart from the answer to the question, did I put Jesus Christ first in every area of my life?
Maybe you're twiddling your thumbs right now. You're trying to decide if you should go to college, or if you should become an artist, writer, scientist, teacher...should you get married? Maybe you've been out of college for a while, but don't feel that your life is headed in any one, particularly dramatic direction. Maybe you feel as though you're just spinning your wheels.
And that's okay. Jesus never promised drama or the limelight. He never said that yours would become a household name, like that of Mother Theresa or Billy Graham. But He did promise, "to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and N)">immortality, eternal life" (Romans 2:7, NASB). Don't feel as though you've got to measure the worth of your life in terms of how much you've accomplished for the kingdom of God; every day which is lived for the love of the Father, in the strength of Christ and by the leading of the Holy Spirit is all that you can (or should) think of as success.
Success is not simply avoiding the vices and idols of this present age, but it is also not placing virtue and charity above all else. Success exists always and only in the life of one who is fully surrendered to Christ. Are you surrendered? If you are, congratulations, for great is your reward in heaven. Press on, fight the good fight, and be faithful where the Lord has placed you. That's what really matters.
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