Absolute Essentials – VII

Won’t people lose their faith if they ask too many questions? If they start examining what people who think differently have come up with?

How fragile, I ask, do we think our Christian faith is? That it cannot stand to be examined? That it can’t face the challenge of exposure and confrontation?

Are we afraid of the answers we might find? Or are we afraid that we won’t be able to find our way back to our uncomplicated childlike faith that made it all seem so simple?

The New Testament writers talked about this. They were concerned that the believers in their day would settle for the uncomplicated “milk of the Word” as they called it, that these infantile believers would want to remain small in their understanding of God. So these giants of the Faith challenged this small-mindedness and urged their readers to exercise their faith to its limits.

My father-in-law worked for Boeing for many years, building airplanes. When my kids were younger, they would check out the type of plane they were flying on for they knew Grandpa would ask them what kind of plane it was. Chances were it was a plane he had had a part in building.

He told them how they tested those planes. How they put them through the most rigorous of ordeals. If the plane could stand up to the most intense winds engineers could produce, it would survive anything in the natural it would face in its lifetime of flying. My kids never feared to fly, trusting the plane builder they knew.

Recently one of my sons was learning how to drive. He asked why the speedometer went up to 140 miles an hour if you weren’t supposed to drive any faster than half that. Out of my only slightly deeper understanding of such things, I told him that if the car was going to do 70 well, then it would need to have a limit far beyond 70.

Such is the nature of our faith. This faith, which is in the One who can contain all the known and unknown universes in the palm of His anthropomorphically pictured hand, should be able to be put to the most stringent of tests. What kind of a god would be afraid of any questions posed by the most advanced of (mere) mortal minds?

Since coming back to America, I’ve been surprised at how some American Believers often hang on to the puniest of faiths. They are afraid of the challenges that might come to their children in public schools. They are afraid of the confusion that might come because they discover there are Believers who think slightly different from them. They are afraid. For them, faith is so fragile, it must be sheltered at all costs.

This is not the robust faith of the 1st Century. Nor is it the robust faith I saw in the lives of friends in China. And to clarify the point, this is not the robust faith that is also very much alive and well in America, in spite of what sometimes appears to be the case.

That robust faith is evident in my son and daughter who joined in a Day of Silence at their public high school on their own initiative, not afraid of what others – Believers or not – might think. For them, the Day is not about affirming certain lifestyles, it is about saying that no one should be put down for any reason, not even homosexuality, and they were willing to remain silent the whole day as a testimony of their faith in Jesus Christ.

That robust faith is evident in my friends who risk joining causes deemed questionable because they are not causes sanctioned by their religious or political authorities even though these causes ring true in my friends’ understanding of the Scriptures. Since when is championing the cause of the poor or of peace or of justice or of equality evidence of a skewed faith?

That robust faith is evident whenever Believers sincerely question what they think they already know to make sure they are not missing something more of God. I think of the Apostle Peter. All the Believers were so sure that Moses had it right when he said "No!" to certain types of food. Looking back from modern Gentile Christian America, such ideas seem ludicrous, but they were no more silly to Peter and his fellow believers than our modern sensitivities are to us.

When that blanket with all the forbidden foods came down from heaven, it was God’s invitation to question everything they held true in order to pursue truth. This is the kind of faith I long for. It is the only kind worth calling faith.