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February 19, 2006
The Importance of Believing Right
Psalm 24 / II Kings 10: 18-27
II John 4-11
February 19th, 2006
This morning I want to talk about the importance of believing right.
I think you were all with me when I spoke to our children about Jesus’ statement, “You are the light of the world.” You liked it when I reminded them that Jesus said people should recognize our light by the good works by which we glorify our Father in heaven. You liked it, but maybe thought it a bit extravagant, when I gave them each a flashlight to remind them of this—and maybe have some fun with it too. But the light God gave to each of us is pretty extravagant.
You want our children to believe in Jesus and to know it is important to live right. Keep away from drugs, go to Sunday School, obey your parents, do your homework, tell others about Jesus too, and invite them to Faith Church.
But I can feel some people bristle when I say to the adults among us that it is important to believe right. Believing right means believing what is true, that is the Big Truth about God, about Jesus, about living in God’s way.
I may preach from this pulpit but who am I to talk about believing right? There are lots of opinions abut what is right to believe; it is arrogant to say I believe what is true, isn’t it?
I can feel other people bristle at the idea that the idea of “believing right” should be even discussed as ever in doubt. Give no quarter to any other views about what is true. Here at least we must say without caution, “I’ve got the truth; I believe right; here it is; believe it.”
There are hazards that accompany a pastor’s claim that it is important to believe right. You know why.
On the one hand we’ve all seen the tragic consequences that have been the result of some peoples’ ideas about having a lock on truth. Islamic extremists have not kept their views to the realm of argument. Suicide bombers in Israel and Iraq, 9/11 2001’s massacre of three thousand people in the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York, and a general atmosphere of terror have been these extremists’ bequests to the world community.
Muslim extremists must share their infamy with Christian extremists. Christian anti-abortionists who kill doctors who do abortions and those who protested at the funeral last month in Evansville of Army Pvt. Jonathan Pfender with placards that read, “God hates fags” share the infamy. In the land of my birth the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP is intent on driving out of India all that don’t share their unique take on Hinduism.
The result of some people’s thinking they “believe right” is disastrous.
On the other hand there are those who think it is pointless to think there is any such thing as believing right. Lesslie Newbigen described ours as a pluralist society, which means “a society in which there is no officially approved pattern of belief or conduct.” Doubt has become the hallmark of an honest person.
Then there’s the fear that religious dogma is enforced by coercion. We sometimes hear the term “religious brainwashing.” The memory lingers of the Spanish Inquisition and people being burned at the stake because they didn’t believe right. People have wearied of the scarlet letters religious people pinned on people whose lifestyles are outside the lines drawn by the Bible. Estimates differ abundantly today about the what the Bible teaches about various lifestyles.
Beside that, not everyone by any means takes the bible seriously. Muslims call the Koran their Bible. Jews don’t regard our New Testament as Scripture. Hindus read the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and other mysterious ancient texts. Atheists say it’s all bunkum. There is a website (adherents.com) that lists more than four thousand ‘religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, ultimate concerns, etc.’
When Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and atheists live next door to each other, talking over the fence while working in their gardens or mowing the lawn, maybe sharing a cup of sugar when the neighbor runs out in the middle of baking a cake, common courtesy says “Don’t say to your neighbor ‘I’m right’.” Be respectful of others easily translates into keep your beliefs to yourself, and eventually into courteously saying, there is no right belief—just your opinion and my opinion.
Today the extremes of fanaticism and pluralism have us off balance. When we read this morning the account in II Kings 10 about King Jehu’s massacre of people who worshipped Baal it seems that here is an example of the very intolerance we deplore in Muslim extremists. We could see them luring all the Christians into a church in Baghdad and torching the place, but surely any who worship the God of the Bible wouldn’t do this. What happened to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” an Old Testament command before Jesus spoke taught this?
Those were hard times. Jesus would not have told His followers to do anything like King Jehu did. But in the days when God was preparing the path for the ultimate cure for the sins of the world, it was important that Baal worship not win in Israel. The Ten Commandments began, “I am the Lord your God . . . You shall have no other gods before me.”
Extreme measures were needed to protect their identity because they were the vehicle through which God would bring salvation to the world. Maybe we would see that the extreme measures President Truman took to end the Second World War had a similar goal.
In the second passage of Scripture we read of the problem the early Christian community faced. John, the elderly apostle who still lived after the other apostles were either dead or had moved on to other parts of the world with the Gospel, wrote with concern to some congregation, perhaps in Asia Minor—Turkey as we would call it today. The truth of the Christian faith was threatened by a secret menace that crept into the Christian community. Using the same words, but with different meanings, the truth about Jesus Christ was being perverted unwittingly.
This challenge came from people who said they believed in Jesus, but said He only seemed to be a man. He hadn’t really been a man at all. About these John, who had lived with Jesus three years wrote, “Everyone who confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God.” The Gospels are very clear in letting us know Jesus was a physical human being. His hands could be penetrated by nails. His side bled when it was punctured by a spear as He hung dead on the cross. It was basically important to believe Jesus was a real man. More challenges to basic truth would come.
Another kind of challenge came from those who taught that love was not essential to being a Christian. You and I would say, “What?” Because we have no doubt that Jesus taught us to love one another. But John had in mind not just acting lovingly toward one another. In II John verse six John writes, “This is love that we follow his commandments.” Love was following Jesus’ commandments.
The Apostle John is pointing out that the truth is not just a matter of believing that Jesus Christ came in the flesh but also a matter of loving, that is, not just being nice, but obeying Jesus’ commandments. We tend to reduce loving to “being nice.”
He called attention to “many deceivers [who have] gone out into the world.” A deceiver is one who makes you believe that what is false is true. The risk of believing wrong is two-fold: first, in believing what is false about Jesus; second, in believing that following Jesus’ commands is optional.
A song we sang when I was a boy, “Give of your best to the Master,” included the line, “Throw your soul’s fresh, glowing ardor _into the battle for truth.”
This battle has taken on broader proportions as the Christian community fragmented and each fragment spelled out refined details about what to believe and defended them against others. Apologetics was once a defense of the Christian faith for the benefit of non-believers; it has become a defense of ones’ views against other Christians too. The battle for truth has lost focus, so that it can seem arrogant to claim to have the truth at all.
I intend no arrogance in saying I believe Jesus is the Way to the Father, the Truth and the Life. It is not my duty or yours to browbeat others into trusting that this is true. It is our task to live the Way not argue about it. Jesus said in effect, “I am the way, walk in it,” not “I am the way, argue about it.” There is something widely attractive about a person who patiently lives the Jesus-way.
John makes clear in this little letter that believing the truth includes trusting that the way Jesus commanded us to live is true. We have usually separated conduct from truth, but conduct and belief are the two ingredients of the Truth Jesus taught us to believe. And it has become commonplace for people to argue for their take on truth much as they will argue for their views on politics. No wonder that many polite people set religion and politics together as out-of-bounds for serious conversation.
But if the Bible is our guide, matters of faith ought not to enter the arena of debate in this way. There is agreement throughout our New Testament on this matter. Paul, the champion of justification by faith, divides his letters into two parts: one part about the great ideas of our faith; the other part about how Christians behave as a consequence. Right belief has to do with ideas and conduct.
James wrote sarcastically, “Show me your faith without your works and I’ll show you my faith by my works.” I wonder if in our emphasis on believing right ideas, and in our hesitation about normative kind of Christian behavior we are teaching what James calls “dead faith.” Dead faith is the topic of a lot of argument, but a faith that lives may make a person’s jaw drop to observe.
I think of these things in terms of the statement with which I began this morning: The Importance of Believing Right. If by believing right all we have in mind is believing what the Bible tells us about Jesus, about the effectiveness of His death on the cross and rising from the grave, we are believing only half the Gospel.
And if in the market place of religions Christianity appears defective, I wonder if the defect is seen not
so much just in the peculiarity of our beliefs, but in the unchallenged lack of inclination of Christians to follow Jesus’ commands.
I know of no other way for our belief to be right—and convincing--than to accept the hard-to-believe miraculous aspects of the Gospel message and the hard-to-do commands as well.
Jesus told His disciples, “You are the light of the world.” “If you continue in my word you are truly my disciples—and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” Light is recognizable in what it illumines. Light illumines a dark room or a dark path. Light keeps a person from stumbling; its benefit is practical. But if all people notice when they encounter Christians is the self-confident views in the noisy marketplace of religions, “so what?” they ask. Our “truths” can seem to be only like the strange and dogmatic views of any other religion.
If we believe “right,” that is, trust that what the Bible says about Jesus really happened, and that Jesus’ commands are to be obeyed, we are light in this world. People may not be drawn instinctively to the ideas we say we believe true, but how attractive are the ways of those who try to obey Jesus’ commands. Light has a way of finding all the available corners to which its rays reach. Light discovers hidden corners no one thinks about—and people too.
When the love of Christ inhabits your heart and mine there are no boundaries to which this love cannot extend. The world waits to see the effects of our right belief, if indeed it is right, as it extends to the needs of the world. While they may balk at believing the Virgin Birth, they will not balk if we lavish care on broken people. They will believe what they see.
It was Jesus’ plan that the second aspect of our belief would direct peoples’ attention to God—glorifying Him when they see our good works.
One further thing, when I see doubt arise in a Christian, I wonder which part of their belief is the cause. Sometimes our doubts are entirely over intellectual problems because there are things hard to understand. And when we hear convincing arguments from intelligent people who don’t accept ideas basic to our understanding it can be confusing.
But is it maybe the second part, the obeying Jesus’ commands part that has run aground so that it has affected the idea-part of their belief?
I think that doubt may reflect a failure of nerve in the face of the challenges of pluralism and fanaticism. These two hazards of our day cannot be overcome by argument alone. Proofs of the reliability of the Bible won’t do the trick. What is needed for belief to seem right is for its two parts to remain in tact: trusting that what the Bible says about Jesus, and that what Jesus commanded us to do is to be done—or at least attempted.
It is important to believe right.
Let us pray: O Lord, grant to us to trust and to obey, and thus to believe in your aright. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at February 19, 2006 09:30 AM