Living Stones – Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Words matter
John 8:30
As He spoke these words, many believed in Him.
Many people today have faith, but their faith is in faith, their faith is in the idea of faith. For these persons, having faith seems to be a very good thing because it means that they have overcome self-reliance and have placed their trust in something or someone outside of themselves.
These persons are incapable of articulating what they believe and why they believe it. They just have this notion that if I have faith then everything would go well. Little do they know that truth be told, sometimes having faith could make some things go very badly. Jesus warned of this when He said,” they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons. You will be brought before kings and rulers for My name’s sake.: Luke 21:12. But we digress.
We are living now in an age where anyone could instantly publish anything that could appear anywhere to be read by anyone. So much gets published on Facebook and other social media that has no real basis or foundation but that sounds good in the moment. The better it sounds in the moment the more likely it goes viral.
But the age is also an age that is “post-fact” and post-truth” where facts don’t seem to matter, and truth is often inconvenient. In these conditions, people have no real interest in the deeper implications of the words or their original basis, once they sound good in the moment. The issue here is that much ‘faith’ is built on this ‘new-age’ post-fact, post-truth premise.
The Christian community must resist this tendency to reduce all of our faith to ten words on a photo background that everyone sends to everyone to give them a basis for faith today.
Regardless of how modern and tech-savvy we become, life’s challenges and pain are real and remain. When people suffer or encounter difficulty what they need is something deeper with roots and a foundation to which they could hold on.
Jesus was always clear that His words were the foundation of the faith that we should have in Him. The Pharisees, who were his arch-enemies, sought to trap Him through words, “Then they sent to Him some of the Pharisees and the Herodians, to catch Him in His words.” Mark 12:13. But Jesus said after that, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.” Mark 13:31.
The Judeo-Christian tradition that we follow is based on words, many many words, words that form and shape our faith and then provide the basis for faith. We have a faith, that is the content, that provides the basis for our faith, that is our actions.
The Hebrews took this faith, the content of our belief system, very seriously. It started with God who Himself wrote the Ten Commandments, twice as we know. He didn’t just quit after Moses flew in a rage and destroyed the first pair of tablets. The words were so important that He went to the trouble of writing them again (on today’s tablets, the file would be stored in the cloud and He would not have to download it again).
That which God started was continued in their daily practice, “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Deuteronomy 6:6-9.
Many of us recite the Psalmist in Psalm 119:11, “Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You.” And we use this to encourage young and new believers to memorise scripture. That is a very good and important part of being a child of God. But we must remember that we are not just to know individual verses, we are to have a knowledge and understanding of the doctrines of the faith into which those memorised verses fit.
The Hebrews did this pretty well for a while but, as we got to the Christian era, things started to change. This matter of reducing the faith to a few posted words to try and generate faith may have reached its zenith with today’s technology and social media that sits on it, but the process started a long time ago. Paul predicted it when he wrote to his young protégé, “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. 2 Timothy 4:3-4.
Jesus alone has “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68) on which we place our faith. But we need to know those words if they are going to matter.
Think on these things:
- Can you name any of the doctrines of the faith?
- What do we Christians mean when we speak about redemption?
- Could you explain to an enquirer, with Biblical evidence, what it is that we believe about who Jesus is and what He came to do?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would Learn the doctrines of the faith that our faith might be grounded in them.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex
