CHRIST WAS FILLED WITH HOPE & JOY IN THE MIDST OF A TOXIC CULTURE THAT REJECTED & DISCARDED HIM – HOW?
Faith.
But I think it had a different definition for Him than it does for us. Faith, to Jesus, would have been synonymous with absolute trust & certainty in His Father to the extent that it shaped everything else about Him and brought heaven to earth. He said crazy things like “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there’ and it will move” (Matthew 17:20)….and “Anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things…” (John 14:12). Verses like these have been pulled out of context and used to legitimize all kinds of crazy stuff ever since, but He did indeed say them…and impossible miracles have happened in His Name all throughout history and to this day. So what did He mean, and what exactly is faith?
“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.” (Hebrews 11:1-2)
“You were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. But you must continue in your faith and stand firmly in it. Don’t drift away from the assurance you received when you heard the Good News…This message was kept secret for centuries and generations past, but now it has been revealed to God’s people. For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for you Gentiles, too. And this is the secret: Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory.” (Colossians 1:21-27 excerpts)
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” (1 Peter 1:3-9)
Faith is complete & unreserved trust that God is 100% real, and that your temporary life on this broken planet is 100% His. This results in patterning your priorities, language, budget, relationships, associations, future, legacy, e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g after Christ’s example…because this world is not your home. THAT is what a Christian is…literally a “Little Christ.” Now, God certainly understands that we are imperfect, corrupted beings who make mistakes (aka “sin”)…that’s basically the whole reason Jesus came in the first place! But if your definition of what it means to be a Christian is anything less than this type of understanding & commitment to Christ, then I would guess that you may not be one. I believe that this is why the church-as-we-know-it is dying in America…because collectively we do not have faith. You may go to church every Sunday & give offerings & try to be a good person & even say you believe in the altruistic nature of Jesus’ teachings…but that’s just religion, and it doesn’t glue you to Jesus in faith. Belief, REAL belief, always produces compliance. Check your soul on this, friend.
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)
Yesterday I wrote about persevering through pain & persecution….today I want to talk about the prize. Not the one that waits for us later, in heaven…which in our timetable hasn’t started yet. I’m talking about the other one, the Kingdom of Heaven, which started with Jesus and has been rolling along ever since. The Prize is Him inside of us, like a stream of living water, changing us and the world around us according to His plan. The confusing, troubling thing about faith, and prize that it activates, is that they are ALWAYS shrouded by crisis…and that throws us off:
“Following God’s voice will always include the element of crisis…because He calls us to walk by faith. “How you respond to His invitation reveals what you truly believe about God, regardless of what you say. This major turning point is where many people miss out on experiencing God’s mighty power working through them. If they cannot understand exactly how everything is going to happen, they won’t proceed. They want to walk with God by sight, not faith…God does not want you merely to believe what He says. He wants you to obey what He commands…To get from where you are to where God is…requires significant adjustments in your life. To move from your way of thinking or acting to God’s way of thinking or acting will require fundamental adjustments. You can’t stay where you are and go with God at the same time.” (Henry Blackaby, in ‘Experiencing God’).
If we decide that walking-by-faith in this way is simply too difficult and let it go, we also release the prize of the Kingdom that’s available to us in this life. so don’t let go…or, rather, let go of other stuff so you can grasp onto The Lord in faith!
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has become a child of God. And everyone who loves the Father loves his children, too. We know we love God’s children if we love God and obey his commandments. Loving God means keeping his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome. For every child of God defeats this evil world, and we achieve this victory through our faith.” (1 John 5:1-4)
