Faith in the Risen One gives us a degree of certainty, even in the face of the trials of those around us, in our core understanding of self and world, for this faith relies on a person.
The immediate family, and the entire congregation for that matter, are implicitly if not explicitly offering a way of life to their children which concretizes the message that is proclaimed. When proclamation and life drift apart for those in the congregation, they drift as well. The preacher plays a key role in this confrontation between reasons to place one’s life in Christ’s hands and reasons to find one or more substitutes for God and the plan of life He gives. The preacher serves as a key instrument in the Holy Spirit’s quiver for offering those who will listen a coherent and lively faith.
God gives us an object in which we can find a coherent view of reality. He speaks to us as Jesus of Nazareth, God come in human flesh to dwell among us. This person, Jesus, has made our Creator known, the One who brushed off Moses from the bush with: “I am just who I am, the One whom Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob trusted” (Exodus 3:14-15). Jesus has put a face on this God whom no one had seen (John 1:18). As the object of our ultimate trust, Jesus places our personal histories and the day we experience today into the framework of a history that gives account of how God has faithfully aided, delivered, and restored His people for centuries. Trusting in Him and placing our way of thinking about reality, our view of the world, into His way of thinking forms a coherent faith. This faith recognizes Jesus died to take care of our sins and was raised to restore our righteousness (Romans 4:25). He has plunged us into His tomb to deposit our sinfulness there so He could raise us up out of our baptismal water as a new creature who walks in His footsteps (Romans 6:1-11). Therefore, He has given us a new identity as renewed creatures, as children of God, as members of His family. Taking His story seriously draws us into thinking as He thinks. This mind of Christ, which Paul describes in Philippians 2, holds our experiences together even when the tensions of a world that has wandered far away from its Maker try to splinter our thinking and crack reality as He has created it.
Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, has come to claim as citizens of His own Kingdom all those who have fallen under Satan’s rule. He has come to offer a better deal than any idol can, a new covenant which He has written with His own blood, a new reign that binds the enemy and destroys his power. In the face of distress and dilemma, in the midst of prosperity and peace, He stands by us. When today seems flooded by insolvable problems or impenetrable puzzles, looking at it all with the mind of Christ and trusting in His presence and support gives us peace.
A coherent faith supplies a way of life that does more than “make sense” of what is often an incoherent world we encounter every day. A coherent faith sticks together in a cohesive whole even when tensions seem to set at odds certain elements of this faith and defy our sense-making. But in the end, such a faith contains the elements which aid us in making it through the toughest of days with a larger vision of life than what appears immediately on the horizon. Such a faith confronts those contrary visions that are being set in place by any number of people and forces at work, chewing on the edges of life or trying to plant bombs in its center.
A coherent faith in Christ is not without holes in it, for it does not answer every question that arises in our minds. Mysteries remain, some near the very center of daily experience. They reject mastery by our reason and will. Some rise out of personal dilemmas from which our Lord may show us a way. Some are stubborn, in our own lives and in the on-going history of the world around us. Assessing the world with Christ in mind shows the way to examine and categorize the questions and challenges the day poses. Faith in the Risen One gives us a degree of certainty, even in the face of the trials of those around us, in our core understanding of self and world, for this faith relies on a person. It casts life into the hands of one who still bears the imprint of the nails even though He sits at the right hand of the Father.
[Our faith] casts life into the hands of one who still bears the imprint of the nails even though He sits at the right hand of the Father.Coherent is the faith which rests in the Messiah, Jesus, as it embraces the larger framework of what God has told us about Himself. It affirms He is the Creator of all and holds all in His hands. His creative and re-creative Word directs the course of human history and all the natural phenomena that surround us, hard as it can be to believe in the midst of miseries like war, weather, violence, fire, or flood. Job’s tour of the inner depths and outer stretches of creation benefited from the tour guide who had fashioned it all. The Creator left Job with a sense of awe and wonder which flowed into the confidence that led him back to daily life as it had before the Accuser disrupted it.
This coherent faith in Christ permits us to be honest about the distance we have placed between ourselves and our Creator, forthright about our not being pleased with what God wants us to be doing on any given day. That kind of honesty drives us to the foot of Christ’s cross, for a whole faith centers on the burial of our sinfulness and alienation from our Lord, a burial which takes place because Jesus took our defiance of God and doubt of His Word into Himself and laid it in His tomb. Honesty about how far from true life we have strayed drives us to cling to Jesus’s coattails as He leaves the grave behind. Confessing our sin opens the floodgates of the refreshing waters of life that flow from His empty tomb as He draws the heavenly dew onto our daily lives, even as dusty, dirty, and sweaty as they can become.
This coherent faith rests in the conversation the Holy Spirit conducts with His people as He chats with them from the pages of Scripture and draws their prayerful and praise-filled response out of their stuttering, stammering lips. The Holy Spirit uses us to deliver the forgiveness of sins that restores us to new life in Christ through the sharing of our faith with those within earshot. He gathers us into the community of people who are looking ahead to the common life which begins in baptism, celebrates together as the Lord gives us His body and blood, and will not end. He reminds us daily that the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting place the events of each day in a larger framework than the gloom and darkness of our experience allow us to sense. The Holy Spirit lets us clearly know that the gloom and darkness are bound to vanish.
This coherent and lively faith moves from the experiences recorded by the biblical writers on the pages of Scripture into our world, which is decidedly different and hauntingly similar in comparison to theirs. The food has changed, clothing styles have shifted, the systems of governance and habits of social interaction have been altered, the emotional modes of mood and manners are different, but God has not changed, and His plans for human life remain in place. Human beings take on diverse ways of expressing their manners of living which turn them in on themselves, but similar problems arise that provoke one crisis (the experience of judgment) after another. In different periods of history, the population has categorized their reactions to deeper crises as guilt, while others felt the oppression as shame, and at other times dealt with what threatens their integrity with fears of one kind or another. Into each of these frameworks of thinking and reacting comes the One who frees us from every kind of devilish oppression.
Our proclamation of this faith that rests in Jesus Christ provides a framework for riding the waves of life with a certain degree of serenity and confidence in the presence, power, and promise of Jesus who keeps us from falling, though perhaps not always steady, as breakers bellow about us. When such faith shapes our conversation and our conduct, God is using us to advertise and then actualize living by faith in the crucified and risen Lord of all.
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