Summary of the Christian Faith
Eric and I are planning the 2018 preaching. Each October and November we prayerfully discern what God wants to say to Highland in the upcoming year. One of the things we’re concerned about is the biblical illiteracy in our culture. Many just don’t know the basic story of the Bible or why that story matters. We thus want to take several Sundays next year to survey the story of the Bible.
That’s a pretty tall order because the Bible’s a pretty big book. Thankfully, we found a Bible professor who proposes that you can get the gist of the Bible if you focus on just 16 verses.[1] He’s summarized the Bible’s more than 31,000 verses in just 16 verses.
Paul, one of the authors of the Bible, takes it a step further. Paul boils the Bible and Christian spirituality down to just 3 words. Paul believes you can summarize Scripture and spirituality in just 3 words: faith, hope and love.
Faith, Hope and Love
Paul writes about these three words in a famous text that is often used at weddings–we’ll just listen to a small portion of it:
8 …As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away…13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13:1-13 ESV)
Paul is writing to Christians for whom Christianity has become a competition. It’s all about who is the most spiritually talented. Paul points to a few of the most prized abilities like the ability to speak in tongues, having prophetic powers or having deep spiritual knowledge. The Christians Paul is writing to feel that possessing abilities like these are what it means to be a great Christian.
Paul, however, says, Christianity is ultimately about three other things: faith, hope and love. They can be possessed by any person who follows Jesus. And they, Paul writes, abide. They will long outlast what so captures the attention of the Christians in Corinth.
Let’s take a brief look at each word.
Faith
Faith is simply this: our confidence in the character of God. Just consider–what does someone mean when they say, “I lost my faith”? Usually they mean they lost confidence in God. Faith is our willingness to trust God.
In spirituality, faith plays a key role in at least three ways:
First, faith is how we enter into a relationship with God. We place our confidence in who God is, despite who we think we are because of our sin or our past. We place our faith in what God accomplished through Jesus despite what we have or have not accomplished.
Second, faith is how we make it through difficult times. By faith we trust that God is still present and still good even though tough times present evidence that may lead us to think otherwise.
Third, faith is a daily discipleship issue in Christian spirituality. Too often our faith is placed in our jobs or our education or our heritage or our churches or our nation. Putting our faith in God above those things is a central part of spirituality.
Elisha Otis had trouble selling his elevators at first.[2] Then in 1854 he concocted a creative sales pitch at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in Manhattan. Every hour at the exposition, Otis stepped into his elevator and took it to it’s top floor. He gave the order to an assistant who cut the cable which had raised the elevator. The crowd held its breath as the elevator plummeted toward the ground. Then the elevator’s emergency brake kicked in, the elevator stopped and Otis stepped out unharmed. He announced: “All safe.”
Faith is stepping into the elevator of God every day, believing he will hold your weight. Believing that it may be scary, but it will, in the end, be all safe.
Love
Love is this: our commitment to God and the creation of God. The word “love” or “agape” so often used by Paul is the highest form of love. It refers to an unconditional commitment. It’s a self-less and sacrificial giving of ourselves to God and all he’s made.
Jesus sums up the Bible in two commands: love God and love neighbor. The Christian faith is not simply about learning doctrines or attending church or jumping through religious hoops. It’s about love.
This is the one element in the triad that lasts into eternity, because, as eternal beings, we have the capacity to love for all eternity. That’s why Paul calls it greatest in this triad.
Highland member Debbie Blaylock recently lost her father Rob to an illness. I had the privilege of spending time with him nearly twenty years ago when he assisted me with my doctoral research. We spent hours in conversation about Jesus and Christianity. At that time, Rob was the most skeptical person I’d ever met. He had doubts about Scripture and Jesus.
A few days before his recent death, he asked Debbie if she’d get in touch with me. He wanted to have a conversation with me. And when we got together, I was so happy to hear how God had been at work in his heart. He basically told me, “I’ve decided to have faith in God and Jesus.”
Rob shared with me some tough times he endured when he was much younger when some difficult things happened to him in a church. One of the last things Rob said to me was this:
“If people who claim to follow Jesus don’t love, it doesn’t matter what else they do. They’re not Christians.”
Final words from a man wrestling with what Christianity really means. I think he got it. Christianity, in a word, is love.
Hope
Finally, Christianity is hope. And hope is simply this: our conviction in the course of God. Hope is the belief that life isn’t falling apart or spinning out of control. It’s the conviction that God is guiding the course of our lives and our world along a divine trajectory toward a satisfying end.
- T. Wright argues that Christian hope is rooted in the resurrection of Jesus.[3] Our hope is not just that God is going to raise us from the dead and send us to heaven. Rather, our hope is that also God is going to do for the whole cosmos what he did for Jesus in the resurrection. The resurrection was God restoring and renewing Jesus. In the same way, God’s cosmic plan is one of restoration and renewal. He has set our lives and our cosmos on a course of restoration and renewal, so that all things will eventually be as they were intended to be. All things broken will be mended. All things wounded will be healed. This is our hope.
Achill island sits off the coast of Ireland.[4] In 1984 a series of Atlantic storms swept over the island. They literally washed away every grain of sand from the island’s main beach, leaving jagged rocks where there was once pristine beach. Thirty three years later another storm hit. But when that storm dissipated, it was as if a miracle had occurred. The beach reappeared! This storm had deposited tons of sand back onto the beach. Nature itself had restored the beach.
This is the course God is charting for every human and all of creation. Our hope is that, in spite of all the violence and all the evil, there is a God who is working toward the restoration of all things so that life and creation are as they were intended to be.
HopeWorks
Highland is blessed to partner with a non-profit organization that excels in helping people experience hope, and faith and love. It’s called HopeWorks. In a nutshell, HopeWorks helps people take their first steps in gaining conviction about the course of God for their own lives. It helps them learn and participate in the ways God intends to renew and restore their lives.
Specifically, HopeWorks enables individuals to experience the hope of God and godly people helping them find a new course when it comes to employment and a career, often overcoming brokenness such as gaps in education or even criminal records.
HopeWorks has recently relocated to a new building on the edge of Highland Heights and Binghampton. Let’s watch this video and then hear from Executive Director Ron Wade about the opportunities this new building and new location bring to HopeWorks.
Ron Wade
[talking here about the new location and new building]
Outreach Contribution
Today’s outreach contribution helps support the work of HopeWorks. It supports about 30 outreach ministries which Highland partners with. By funding HopeWorks and these 30 outreach ministries, you are living out these three critical pieces of the Christian faith–faith, hope and love.
Today we ask you to give $240,000. That’s 6 times what we give on an average Sunday. But it’ll help us move toward our total commitment this fiscal year of $460,000. And it’ll enable many around the world to experience some of that faith, hope and love so unique to the Christian faith.
Prayer
Let’s say this prayer out loud together:
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for,
and so in faith and with assurance, Father, we give our money this morning.
We hope in a generous God who meets our needs.
We hope in a creative God who multiplies our gifts.
We hope in a mysterious God who invites us to kingdom living.
God of grace, accept these gifts and us in your service.
In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
Contribution
[1] The Whole Story of the Bible in 16 Verses (Crossway, 2015) by Chris Bruno
[2] Adapted from Mark Batterson, The Grave Robber (Baker Books, 2014), page 191.
[3] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 93.
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/10/i-had-50-tourists-drive-here-born-again-irish-beach-dooagh-captures-worlds-attention
