Paul used the example of Abraham to illustrate how we are saved by faith rather than deeds.

Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness (Romans 4:3)

Notice what Paul doesn’t say. He doesn’t claim that Abraham understood it all. He never claims that Abraham understood how God was going to give him and his wife children as such an advanced age. The how was a mystery to Abraham; yet he believed God anyway.

In the same way, the Christian doesn’t have to understand how Christ’s act on the cross allows access to God … rather, the Christian need only to respond in faith. On my day of conversion I understood little about God, the Bible, or the debates within theological circles. I knew only one thing … Christ was beautiful and died for me. I understood that my acknowledgement of Christ’s sacrifice somehow allowed me to approach a God whom I had never believed in and ask for forgiveness. More than anything, I felt the overwhelming affirmation that God loved me and expressed that love through Jesus Christ.

As Christians, we often ruin the Gospel.

We make the Gospel message about so much more than the mystery of Christ. We add rules and superfluous beliefs to the mix. Here’s a top ten list of things we Christians love to add to the gospel of Christ:

1. You must be a republican.
2. You must be a democrat.
3. You must be against abortion.
4. Marriage is between one man and one woman. Homosexuals need not apply.
5. The Bible is infallible in every sense of the word.
6. All drinking, swearing, smoking, and any other visible sins must cease immediately.
7. Divorced people are one step above sewer scum.
8. Hell is a real tangible place and you’re in danger of being sent there every waking minute of your life.
9. Let’s not even mention evolution.
10. Prayer belongs in schools!

Make no mistake, Christ will shape how a person views every item on that list, but that’s not the point … here’s the point – it’s often not enough for Christians that an unbeliever would come to Christ … sure, we want them to come to Christ, but more than anything we want them to come to Christ while agreeing with us on every single issue. Isn’t it overwhelming enough for a nonbeliever to entertain the thought of Christ as Savior without being forced to make up their minds on every facet of life?

The Bible just tells the unbeliever to come to Christ in faith.

Without a doubt, salvation will eventually shape the way a believer sees everything in his or her life. My views on nearly every subject have done a 180 since Christ entered the equation; however, none of it happened on day one. Christ has slowly worked me. My views have slowly changed and I have become more graceful in my daily walk. I thank Christ for changing me and pray that He will continue to chip away at my person until I look more like Him.

I pray for those I love to have that same experience.

Just come to Christ in faith.

Beautiful.

2 Kings 7:3-5  3 Now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. They said to each other, “Why stay here until we die? 4If we say, ‘We’ll go into the city’—the famine is there, and we will die. And if we stay here, we will die. So let’s go over to the camp of the Arameans and surrender. If they spare us, we live; if they kill us, then we die.” (NIV)

Imagine how desperate these four men were. Because of their condition, the Law of Moses mandated that they live outside the city walls or risk spreading their disease to the general population. They relied on friends and loved ones to deliver them food outside the gates, but because of the siege laid on Samaria they were starving … everyone in their city was starving. These men were in a no win situation.

Things became so desperate that they collectively decided to go to the enemy for help; the same enemy (the Arameans) that had laid siege to their city.

When they arrived at the enemy camp, however, no one could be found …

⁶for the Lord had caused the Arameans to hear the sound of chariots and horses and a great army, so that they said to one another, “Look, the king of Israel has hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings to attack us!” 7 So they got up and fled in the dusk and abandoned their tents and their horses and donkeys. They left the camp as it was and ran for their lives. (NIV)

These Hebrew men were so desperate that they sought help from their enemies only to be provided for in the end by the God of Abraham. When these four lepers found the abandoned treasure and provisions of the Arameans they celebrated briefly and then decided to share the news with the rest of the city. They became unlikely heroes.

Is it such a stretch to extend their plight to the plight of sinful man today? Unclean because of their sin – separated from God because of the fall and desperate for help; sinful man is aware that they need something – even if they’re not sure what it is they need. God is waiting to provide for them just as he did for the four lepers. He has preserved and positioned the church to deliver his message – the gospel of Jesus Christ; a treasure of incomparable value.

Far too often, however, the church is unwilling to extend the grace of Christ to those who need it the most. We pick and choose which sins are worthy of forgiveness and restoration. We forget that in the presence of a Perfectly Holy God our own sin is just as detestable. We forget that the church isn’t a country club – it’s a hospital.  

Then we shake our heads when sinful man goes elsewhere for help. Sinful man seeks out alternative religions in an attempt to find some kind of help, but his quest is foolish for only Christ has what he desperately needs. Because the church has failed him, sinful man replaces a restored relationship with the Living God with some form of religion plus works.

It is such a waste because these sinners are exactly what the church needs. The one who has been forgiven the most is also the one that strives the hardest to share the news with others. It was true in the case of the four lepers. They went from nothing to riches … and were then compelled to share it with others.  

How many unlikely Christian heroes are Wiccans, Buddhists, or New-Agers because the church failed to meet them in the middle of their sin and share Christ?

How many heroes has the church ostracized?

Scholars call this new worldview Postmodernism. It is a worldview that has relegated Christianity to the past. Faith in Christ has become a relic of a past age when mankind had yet evolved to the point of recognizing that all spiritual paths are valid. The only spirituality that is valued by the skeptic is that of the “spiritual seeker.” The man or woman who is open to a generic spirituality, believes that all roads are equally valid, and values tolerance over truth fits in well within postmodernism. Why?  Perhaps it is because this generic faith is one that refuses to identify anything as absolute. A man or woman who is astute enough to know there must be a god out there somewhere chooses this kind of seeker mentality over the claims of the Christian because it is just generic and vague enough to escape the challenges of the skeptic who respond to all claims of the fantastic with “that’s nice, prove it” (www.skeptic.com).

However, there is a problem with this skeptical worldview – it is a lie. Skepticism works well in the scientific community because it drives our scientists to perform better and to get results; however, it fails miserably when extended to the realm of the humanities; art, literature, love, and yes … even theology. These pursuits are just as valid as any scientific field yet they are more difficult to define and observe. Who would suggest that love doesn’t exist simply because it is hard to observe empirically. It reminds of a quote from the Dead Poet Society:

“We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

While it may be hard to illustrate what love looks like, we know it exists because we can recognize the how it affects the world around us. Science would say the same about an invisible force as gravity. It can’t be seen, but we recognize it as truth because of its affects on the world around us.

The same can be said of God.

You haven’t seen Him. But you can certainly recognize how He affects the world around us. You know He is real because you have bought into generic spirituality in an attempt to define Him in a way that isn’t objectionable. The problem is that if He is real, He isn’t generic. He is a specific being that exists in a specific way. It is up to you to learn about Him … on His terms … not on the terms of the skeptic. You see, the skeptic challenges God to prove He is real. The Bible teaches that He already has in the person of Jesus Christ … it is up to you to embrace Him.

Skepticism says the Bible isn’t true … yet it describes, defines, and reveals communications from God that fit into the world we observe around us better than any other “generic” faith. Christianity takes the “generic” god that you know is out there somewhere and makes Him a very specific God who reveals absolute truth to the people He created.

Praise the God of absolute truths!

I would suggest that the tension between faith and reason is not designed in a way that limits a person to having only one or the other; rather, a person may display a great deal of faith, a great deal of reason, both, or neither. While faith and reason are attributes that aren’t necessarily dependent upon each other, they do have the natural tendency to influence one another. In fact, they are so closely related that they are almost intertwined. Let’s take a moment to explore this concept.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines faith as “something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs.”  A person who displays a strong conviction in their religious beliefs inevitably base their faith in reason. Their reasoning may be illogical, faulty, or surprisingly concrete; however, it is reasoning just the same. For instance, if you ask me why I believe in God and my response is that I read about Him on the back of a cereal box, you may think that I’m displaying faulty reasoning skills – but it is reasoning just the same.  When asked the same question, a person with no reasoning skills would only be able to answer, “I don’t know why I believe in God … I just do.” While this person may be displaying a great deal of faith, they are displaying a lack of reasoning.

Anyone who is able to articulate a reason for their faith, regardless of what that reason is, is displaying reason and faith at the same time; thus, discrediting Hitchens’ point. What Hitchens is really saying is that anyone who engages their reasoning and comes to a conclusion other than the one he has reached is a buffoon.

This brings me to my next thought. It is quite possible for two intelligent people to engage their faith and reason with tremendously different results. In my case, faith told me that God was real and reason helped me deduce that Jesus Christ was the means by which He intended to offer me salvation. Another person may deduce that God is real and that living the middle way of the Buddhist is what He prefers us all to do. There is no doubt that one person is right and the other wrong, but only arrogance would suggest that one or the other was incapable of using logic. Both individuals may be bright and faithful people; they just reached different conclusions. This is where the virtues of debate, investigation, reason, and gut instincts interact with our faith. Thankfully, it is never too late to change one’s mind.

Coming to a belief in Christ can almost be considered a two-step process. In the first step, a person engages their faith to understand there is something bigger than themselves in the universe. Perhaps it is Buddha, pantheism, Wicca, Islam, or Christ. Whatever it is – it is there. Then there is the second step where a person engages their logical reasoning skills and determines that Christ is their Savior. Unlike Hitchens, I believe that most people who confess a belief in Christ have engaged both faith and reason.

When we fail to engage both attributes we get ourselves out of whack. Faith that is devoid of reason can be used to justify anything. When you display reason without faith you begin to believe that skepticism is a virtue and the end result is a Hitchens-like arrogance that serves to benefit no one.

My God wants me to engage the world and make disciples of Jesus Christ – I can’t do that if I have written everyone who disagrees with me off as being stupid. Thankfully, most people are capable of displaying both faith and reason is some measure. They may disagree with me, but I thank God that He is giving us all the chance to change our minds!

Book Review: A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren
Publisher: HarperOne, 2010

In past reviews of Brian McLaren’s books I have always attempted to hold my criticism back a little. This is due in large part to not wanting to harshly judge a fellow Christian in a public forum. After reading A New Kind Christianity I am no longer concerned with holding back. I suppose this is because McLaren is also no longer concerned with holding back. In the past, McLaren has always been hard to pin down.  His opinions are vague because he will never make a claim of truth in what he writes. He has said that what he writes is merely a contribution to the ongoing “conversation” we humans are invited to engage in about God and seems to think that the moment someone claims an actual truth regarding God the conversation is muffled. The problem is that McLaren seems to apply his relativist outlook to the rock solid truths of the Bible leaving us all swimming around in a sea of uncertainty.

In A New Kind of Christianity McLaren comes as close as he ever has to showing his cards. In this book he denies hell, the fall of man, human depravity, and seems to think the greatest Christian minds throughout history have all been reading the Bible in the wrong way. McLaren submits that for millennia Christians have been reading the Bible through a faulty Greco-Roman world view. He claims that this worldview has led us all to come to fundamentally wrong conclusions concerning Jesus’ role in our lives. Thank goodness McLaren has come along to save us from the false teachings of the greatest minds the world has ever known. While McLaren doesn’t explicitly state it, if he is correct concerning the things he writes, than the likes of the apostle Paul, Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and C.S. Lewis have all been wrong. McLaren’s claims reek of arrogance.

Rather than reading the Bible through our faulty Greco-Roman reading glasses (according to the author, these glasses lead us to read the Bible as a constitution that reveals too much truth), McLaren suggest we should read it as an ongoing conversation. The most attracting aspect of this “conversation” is no doubt that it will never lead us to a certain or definite conclusion. What McClaren has done is invent a new way to read Scripture due to his inability to juxtapose the God of the Old Testament with the Savior of the New Testament. McLaren submits that the Bible is evidence of the evolution of mankind’s thought processes. In the Old Testament, when man’s thoughts were the most primitive, God was painted as a violent and cruel God that no savvy Christian such as McLaren could ever worship. After a few thousand years, Jesus was portrayed in a much different light because thought had evolved to the point that mankind could imagine a God that was closer to the truth. McLaren takes this theory far enough to imagine a future where Christians will imagine a God that is even more perfect than Christ. In his future, Christians (and God) are vegetarian, earth worshiping pacifists who throw up in their mouth a little when they remember those barbaric Christians who laid the foundation of the church. It seemed to me that McLaren’s God of the future is very much like McLaren himself. McLaren’s book is one of the grossest forms of idolatry I have ever witnessed another Christian commit. Because he is unable (or unwilling) to accept God as He is revealed to us in Scripture, McLaren resorts to recreating Him in his own image. It is the ultimate form of humanism and arrogance.

Personally, I’ll join the early church fathers and fundamental Christians over the last two millennia who wished to understand the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as revealed by God Himself in the Holy Scriptures. McLaren’s teaching in this book are so far removed from traditional fundamental Christianity that it is virtually indistinguishable from atheism.

Christ taught that the world would hate us because of Him. This was evidenced in the church fathers who gave their lives to promote the Gospel. It is witnessed to today in various parts of the world where Christians are persecuted and killed for their beliefs.

In this book, McLaren spits on the memories and sacrifices of those Christians and sides with the world. He disregards the revelation of God Almighty and creates a disgusting idol.