Faith as story

Have you ever heard someone say that so and so was a faithful member of the church? What did they mean? In my experience they meant that this person was at the building every time a service was scheduled.

Other times I have had people called faithful because they held the same point of view as the person making the statement. Ones pet idea was the measuring stick of faith, but is that what faith is, the facts in my head?

How many times are we subconsciously controlled by these ideas of faith?

The idea of faith present in the Bible is one of trust. Hebrews 11 is probably the best place to go to understand this idea. Throughout this chapter we get a clear picture of faith as trust. To really see this idea simply replace faith with trust in God and see what you get. Because Abel trusted God he offered Him a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain…And because of his trust in God, though he died, he still speaks.

That is faith as story, our story. When faith is boiled down to attendance or pet doctrines it allows the person to live for whatever they want as long as they go at the right times and believe the right facts.

Am I the only one who sees that as bland and tasteless? It allows me to ignore whatever teaching I want as long as it’s not one of my pet doctrines, as long as it doesn’t impact my attendance.

No wonder so many lives don’t reflect Christ, they don’t understand that is the point, they attend church, what else matters?

What a sad caricature of faith. Faith as story means life with God invades and absorbs every aspect of our life. Each moment could be a moment to show God’s glory. Every instant whether I am at a grocery store or a worship service becomes a moment that requires faith. Requires that I trust God has a plan and is moving in His creation. The possibilities are endless because faith is a story and each day adds another page.

Try to imagine Abraham’s story, you know the Father of our faith, if faith is facts or attendance. What service do we read of him scheduling? How do we explain Hagar if it was all about knowing the facts? No, faith is trust and it always has been trust. At some point the word was hijacked but we shouldn’t be afraid today to return it to its proper place as story.

Orthodoxy

What is orthodox? Is there really such a thing? People often fight for something because they believe it is the way it should be but does that make it true?

It seems to me that people often times fight for things that are orthodox to their own experience.

I can’t help but think of those early Jewish Christ-followers as they insisted that Gentile converts be circumcised. Yes they believed that Jesus was truly the Messiah, but they also believed Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. It doesn’t seem hard to understand how they would still find it necessary for a Gentile to convert to Judaism; I mean Jesus was their Messiah.

Weren’t they simply fighting for orthodoxy? Their orthodox understanding of what Jesus was Jewish Messiah, and what that would mean?

Paul was given the task of showing the early church that their orthodoxy was not His orthodoxy. What a tall task. His challenge was to show the Jews that the Law of Moses, what gave Jews their identity, was never intended to be the focus. Throughout the New Testament pages we find a discussion about what is orthodox.

Paul writes to the church in Rome to explain that there is no difference between Gentile and Jew, everyone sins and falls short, and the Messiah is the answer for all. Paul moves Jesus beyond his Jewishness and the Jewish understanding to show that God had always planned to open the kingdom to a larger group. Paul works to explain that God used the Jews to usher in this age of Christ.

In the end Paul shows that all of us, even Abraham, were Gentiles at some point in need of access to God. Paul works to show the early church orthodoxy.

I simply say this to say we must be very careful in how we defend orthodoxy. We must watch how we view success and what gives us pride. It is too easy to defend what we expect and believe to be orthodox expectations when the early church never measured or believed the same.

We should allow the pages of the New Testament to remind us that moving from what you know as orthodox to what is truly orthodox can be difficult. It is a task filled with paradigm shifts but it is a task each must be willing to take.