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Content type: Sermon Poem / Prayer Service / Tribute Incomplete Biography
Body: Prayer In CS Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity, Lewis spells out the fact that when the Bible mentions faith it talks about it on two levels. BELIEF What faith means in the first sense is what most people who are not Christians or who are investigating Christianity think of when they hear the word faith. That is: FAITH means BELIEF. Simple, right? Faith means believing, as true, the teachings of Christianity. Most of these you may be familiar with. - God exists and created the universe out of nothing. - People have been created in the image of God, but are fallen and separated from God because of sin. - Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine, the Son of God. - He lived a perfect life and was crucified as a peace offering for human sin and rose from the dead to authenticate his claims. - Forgiveness and hope for heaven are now offered in his name. All Christians in the world have faith in these statements. MEANING, we believe these things to be true. Now, a person may accept or reject this or that statement – not because he wants to or doesn’t want to, but because the evidence for it is either good or it’s bad. If the evidence is good, one believes, if it is bad, he disbelieves. If I misjudge the evidence and happen to believe that men have NOT yet actually landed on the moon. Or on the other hand, if I know the evidence for an idea is just not there, like that the moon is made of cheese, and then I try to force myself to believe it anyway. If we look at faith in this way, this assumes that our human minds are always ruled by our logic and reason. But that’s not always the case, is it? For example. My logical mind may be perfectly convinced based on good evidence that anesthesia works. I believe that properly trained doctors will not cut me open before they numb me up or put me under. But just because my mind has this belief doesn’t mean that when they clamp that either mask over my face that I don’t have a rush of panic come over me. I start to think I’m going to choke, I’m going to die, they’re going to cut me before I’m under. In other words, I lose my faith in anesthetics. Now was it logic and reason that convinced me to give up my belief in anesthetics? No. It was - my circumstances, and - my emotions and - my imagination and - my irrational fears. Reason and faith work TOGETHER. I come to conclusions based in reason and I hang on to them based in faith. Logic and faith work together. It’s the person who seperates faith from reason who winds up looking like the obsessive compulsive character played by Jack Nicholson in the movie “As Good as It Gets.” He obsessively cleans and obsessively locks his doors, why? Because once his mind has reasoned something out, he has no faith to hang on to that truth. There’s lots of different examples of how this works. For example, a young woman knows, based on long established evidence that a handsome young man she knows is a philanderer, irresponsible and untrustworthy. But then, she finds herself with him and he whispers words of love and she starts thinking: “I bet my love is changing him!” Then in a few months or years, she’s saying, “I just don’t know what happened to him.” The truth is nothing happened to him. What happened was she did not hang on to her faith in what she really knew to be true about him. JOHN THE BAPTIST There’s a man in the New Testament who had faith in Jesus Christ. John the Baptist. He believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the one God had promised to send to permanently deal with the sin problem of the whole world. Now, he held this belief not despite his reason, but because of his reason. You see, John had evidence. - First, his father and mother told him of the events surrounding his own birth which was God’s way of saying that he, John, was to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. - Then he heard of the events surrounding Jesus birth that indicated he was in fact the Messiah. So, John lives his life with this belief, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that he John, is sent to prepare people for Jesus. He does this by asking people everywhere to examine the state of their lives and turn from everything that God finds offensive – and he baptized them. Then one day, Jesus shows up to be baptized, and John is in awe. Here he is all grown up, the one he believed in from childhood, ready to go public. And after John baptized Jesus, another amazing event happens that only confirms what his reason has told him. As Jesus emerges from the water, a voice from heaven says, “this is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased.” From that time on John says, “Jesus must move to center stage while I slip off to the sidelines.” Shortly after John got thrown into prison. Now in prison John is down, he’s depressed. Sure, he’s seen God do amazing things, but he’s human like you and me and he wonders maybe it’s not true after all. So, John sends word to a few of his friends to go to Jesus and just ask him straight up: Are you the Son of God, sent into the world, the one I was to prepare the way for? Or should I expect someone else? Now this is what circumstances and emotions can do to faith. They test it, they push it, they tempt us to abandon it, to doubt. It’s not our reason telling us to give up on our faith, it’s everything else. There will come a time for us, like John, where: - there is bad news, or - there is trouble, or - we are around people who do not have faith, - and all at once our emotions will rise and we may question our belief. So, having faith is to do what John did. He didn’t brood, he didn’t turn tail and run, he didn’t just fold like a house of cards. He asked the questions, pursued answers, to reaffirm the thing his best reason told him was true. That’s faith! Now listen to what Jesus tells John’s friends when they deliver John’s questions: Go back to John and tell him about what you have heard and seen – the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the lowly are learning that God is on their side! In other words, John, I’m so glad you’re hanging on to what God showed you in the light, even though right now, you’re in the dark. So, once again, here’s the evidence, use your own senses to measure it. The evidence justifies your faith in me! Check the evidence, use your own senses and reason to measure it, then when you uncover the truth, hang on by faith. Faith is believing what your reason has accepted as true based on sound evidence, even when your moods change, or feelings change or circumstances change. Look at our culture. In separating faith from reason, we’ve come to this place where people’s moods totally dominate what they believe about God or marriage or love or anything. Friends, this is why we can’t be a sound Christian or even a sound atheist without faith – without it, we become a culture of muddy thinkers. Faith is a virtue because it’s the art hanging on to things you know to be TRUE despite mood changes. CS Lewis said, “I do have moods in which Christianity looks very improbable, but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.” To GROW in Faith then, is one of the things you’ll hear about a lot as a Christian. Faith grows by holding Truth in front of our minds regularly. That’s why Christians pray and read the Bible and go to worship and attend small study groups. They are reaffirming truth, because belief must be fed. If you were to interview a 100 people who lost their faith in Christianity, how many of them would you say they reasoned their way out of it by HONEST argument? Or for most of them, was it more a mood, or a circumstance and a lack of feeding truth and they just sort of drifted away? John’s faith says to each of us, when I get confused or frustrated, I go back to the truth. I seek it hard, I don’t let my emotions or moods overwhelm me, I see reason and faith as partners. TRUST The second sense of FAITH means TRUST. CONCLUSION That moment of despair could have been his true moment of hope. Because it’s only in seeing the bankruptcy of our own moral performance and coming to the end of our self sufficiency that we will eagerly have faith in Jesus (IE. TRUST HIM) to come in to our hearts and share his perfection with us. The question is, will you let go? There was once a woman who was hanging out a third floor window of a burning building. Her plan had been to climb down, but she was losing her grip. Just then, firemen arrived with a rescue ladder truck. They wanted her to reach back with her hand, grab the fireman on the top rung and be pulled to safety. But she hesitated, afraid to let go of the ledge. Her mind told her the ladder was her only hope, but still she would not let go. It’s at this moment friends, that the two kinds of faith intersect. She believed that the ladder would hold her, but the real question was would she trust it and live? Or would she trust herself and perish? If she lets go, she lives, if she tries harder, she dies. Men and women, some of you believe the beliefs but you have not entrusted your whole life to Jesus Christ alone. Therefore you do not yet REALLY have faith in him. But… - Maybe today God has pointed out to you the hopelessness of trying harder. And…
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