Friday July 21, 2017

 

Everything has a beginning or a starting point. Every person, concept, idea, endeavor, and journey begins somewhere. Who you are, what you do, what you believe… everything about you started somewhere. The same is true concerning the Christian faith, it has a beginning, a starting point. For many of us, our Christian faith began in our early childhood, likely around the same time when we learned about Santa Claus and the Fairy Godmother. As we matured however, we discovered that there is no Santa Claus or Fairy Godmother. To a lesser degree, the same thing happened to our faith, because everything we were told about God was not entirely true. When we were children, we were taught that God was good and He rewarded good people. We were told that God answers prayers and we were told that He speaks to us. As we grew up to become teenagers and young adults however, we realized that bad things happen to good people, God does not answer all of our prayers, and when we asked God to speak to us all we heard was silence. Often times our childlike faith is insufficient to carry us through life’s challenges.

 

Our faith may have begun in our childhood, but then we grew up and matured yet our faith did not, it remained childlike and immature. The problem is that God never intended for His goodness, answered prayers, or anything else about Him to be the starting point of our faith. When we study our Bible, what we discover is that God intended for Jesus to be the starting point of our faith.

 

In the first century, the faith of the Jewish people was based on the laws of God and this posed a huge problem. This was the big elephant in the room that most Hebrews dared not to address. The problem was that they did not have the capacity to keep the laws of God upon which their faith was based. As a result, they made up new laws and even developed loopholes to justify their inability to execute their faith. However, when Jesus showed up on the scene and died and then resurrected, for the first time in their history, the Hebrew people had a change in the starting point of their faith. The starting point for the Hebrew people’s faith shifted from the laws of God to the person of Jesus.

 

Approximately sixty years following the resurrection of Jesus, some of the Hebrew people’s childlike faith could not sustain them through the challenges of adult life, and could not sustain them through the challenges of this evil world. In response, Paul who most scholars credit with authoring the book of Hebrews, wrote the following words to them:

 

Hebrews 12:2 NIRV

 

Let us keep looking to Jesus. He is the one who started this journey of faith. And he is the one who completes the journey of faith.

 

 

The starting point for an adult and mature faith is simply discovering the answer to the following question: Who is Jesus?