My use of the word faith in this essay is strictly in the sense of faith in God and not in the wider sense that I have used it in other essays on this site. 

Faith - A Beginning

I once lived without faith.  Alone in the world without knowledge of God I walked according to the course of this world, confident in the authority of my own reason.  But I stumbled.

I was given the opportunity to gain faith through the things that I suffered.  When my confident assertion that my reason was supreme was challenged, when I had to acknowledge that through the use of my reason I had steered my life into a dead end, and when I knew with certainty that my on my own I could not extricate myself from the entangled consequences of my own actions, I was, at last, prepared to cry out for help.  But where?

Faith, when it eventually arrived, came like a thunderbolt.  I did not find faith on the street corner, although I had looked.  I had heard a myriad of voices all proclaiming that they had found the answer to the riddle of their lives, but nothing that they spoke touched the centre of my being, so I walked on.  I had heard the timbrel bells of saffron-robed devotees as they chanted hopefully for ecstasy and enlightenment: I had heard the peal of church bells heralding from their lofty spires the sounds of centuries of confusion: I had walked the lonely streets and looked in nooks and crannies, but all my searching and inquiring brought me lower still, for all seemed vanity and hopelessness.  So faith when it came was an unexpected surprise.

Faith did not come as a flash of illumination to intuitively reveal the meaning of life.  Nor did it come from listening to the professionally pious preaching sonorous sermons proclaiming the theological platitudes that steered their lives.  Neither did it come from my wishing to emulate the politically savvy, socially compassionate new breed of clergy the media focuses on.  No, when faith came, it came from the most unexpected quarter imaginable – God Himself.  By one word of His mouth all of my years of doubt, unbelief, scorn and derision were swept away.  Every tenet that I had based my life upon was blown away like chaff before the power of His breath, and I was revealed as naked, powerless and blind before His glorious life.  My old life ended when I met Him who is life.

It had been a long cold road that had led me to that moment when God revealed Himself to me.  I began life as a captive, an unwilling conscript in the Church Universal.  From an early age I had been instructed in the doctrinal orthodoxy that was the cornerstone of one particular faction of the Christian empire.  I was press-ganged and indoctrinated that I would be fully equipped to answer every question to defend my “unquestioning faith”, without ever knowing what real faith was.  It was something of a shattering blow to discover that there were other so-called Christians who believed in totally different things, regarding faith, to those that I had been taught were true.

My “faith”, piece by piece, was thus eroded.  No one with love and wisdom stood before me to arrest its inevitable decline.  I remember, as a youth, scanning the Christian landscape in search of some voice, some rock-like figure of love, some beacon of truth who could fan the dying embers of my feeble light.  But the Church seemed more looked Babel, a confusion of tongues, than a source of light.

Disappointed and forlorn, embittered by the arrogant, loveless, authoritarian monolith that masqueraded as the keeper of truth and wisdom, I, like most of my generation, turned my back on Christianity and the Church.

Armed with the barest of hope, like a penlight in a sea of darkness, I went in search of truth.  I joined what seemed like a throng investigating other religions, looking for God in such things as Cosmic consciousness, I-Ching and Tarot walking the streets of the inner cities with our noses to the ground and our ears to the wind.

There was a camaraderie amongst this movement of dreamers.  New hopes, new horizons, the “Age of Aquarius”, peace, love and understanding was the message that filled our hearts and put stardust into our eyes.  The “times were a-changing”; it was a new generation, a new perspective, a new beginning.

But, like my Christianity before, this new hope slowly died.  The euphoria of youthful hope gave way to despair as my dreams collided with an unchanging world.  The reality of the uncaring face of the world, the chains of debt and mortgage commitments that shackled me to my career, relationships that had not weathered the initial blush of youth, and the ephemeral nature of the new age cults, left my heart burdened under the weight.

Truth seemed like some elusive El Dorado.  The only thing that seemed certain was the search – and that could end at any moment, for who could say when death would overtake me?

Slowly but surely, due to the grind, the length of the road, the unanswered questions, the madness of my life that mirrored the madness of the world (with its insane rush for material power and who knows what else), I failed.  I failed to keep hoping in my ability to make sense out of life, and I faltered.  I floundered in the flood that constantly sweeps the world along the path of who knows where we are headed.  And I longed desperately for an end to all my striving to nowhere.

I lost heart I lost hope!  A lifetime of living amongst men had taught me that no one really cared for his fellow man.  I, literally, could no longer stand the pain of my spiritual emptiness.  I had grown numb in the emotional void I found myself in.  Life became robotic; I went through the motions but less and less could I connect to the flow of life all around me.

Finally, when I could see no way of escape, when I was parched to the centre of my being in my need for love and truth, I heard God speak.  On my way home from work, meditating, as I drove along, on the words of a poem I had just written which began,

            “Am I these things

            These senseless things

            These things I think I am,

                                                          a voice shattered my reverie and said, “I am the word of God”. Nothing more was spoken, but in the speaking I had the feeling that He would speak again. 

The impact that this event had upon me was so profound I can barely begin to describe it; the very ground that I stood on, the foundation of my entire understanding of life, was undermined by His voice.  In His speaking I knew that I had built my life upon a lie.  Everything that I had thought about life, assumed about existence, believed as truth, collapsed and I was left in a void, unable to continue my life as I was, but also not knowing what to make of my life from this point on.  I was literally left in fear and trembling, agonising over what to do next.  Whereas before I was at the end of my tether, now even that fragile state was shattered, such was the magnitude of His effect upon me.

It was not until some time later, several weeks, that I really cried out with all of my strength saying, “Lord, I do not know what You want me to do with my life, but all I do know is that, whatever it is, that is all that I wish to do”.  When I had done this, and meant every word of it, He began to lead me and I began to hear his voice again.  Perhaps not in the same dramatic way as when He first spoke when I was driving in the car but in a thousand other ways and instances He has shown me His love and care and guidance and He has truly become God to me.  The more I have trusted Him the more I have learnt of His faithfulness and the immensity of His love.

Since the dramatic beginning of my faith, over twenty years ago, I have come to know the risen Christ in a way I had once thought impossible.  I have also come to understand that the church, the source of all my disillusionment, remains unchanged, holding to a form of religion that denies the need to actually meet with God and come to know what is the reality of the awesome power of His presence and the fullness of His love.  This lack within the church remains my deepest sorrow.

And he looked. He searched the world that presented itself to him for an answer to the riddle and an end to the ache that plagued his life. But he saw no one, no one who he could believe or trust. The wisest were fools, as foolish as himself. He read books, all manner of the thoughts of men. Sometimes he agreed, sometimes he didn’t, but all the time, no matter whom he saw or what he read, whether he agreed or not, he felt alone. He may have felt that he was not alone in his aloneness, that there was a comradeship, if you like, in being alone together, but nothing took away the ache, and nothing answered the riddle that filled his soul.

It wasn’t that that he didn’t have fun, or didn’t in any way enjoy life, for he did, but rather that he knew that nothing really freed him from his deepest need. So inspite of all the wonderful things in the world, the sights and sounds, the beauty, the awe, the friends, at heart he was sad. In this sadness, which he could not share with anyone, he wrote. He wrote the song of his life, his aches, his sadness, the passing of things, the end of beauty, the darkness of this world so desperately in need of light. And he groaned like a moon struck dove in search of land, and he flew alone.

He shared his songs and poems with family and friends, but he knew in his heart he had nothing to bring, nothing to say that was either helpful or hadn’t been said somewhere before, and he thought “I need to live longer, then perhaps I might bring something of beauty or wisdom or truth that others might sing by”. But the longer he lived the more he knew that it was hopeless; and the reason it was hopeless was that he still ached in the loneliness of his deepest being. In fact the more he lived, the more he ached with the futility of all that he lived; and when he looked around him he ached with the futility in which all men lived. So the longer he lived the more he ached with the nothingness of what to say or sing. And he ached alone.

Finally when he had reached the end of his tether, when at last he knew he did not know how to resolve the riddle that plagued his life, when finally he knew more than anything else, more than life itself, that he had to know why his heart ached – a voice spoke, a light illumined his darkness, a mystery was revealed. This unexpected intrusion into his life was overwhelming. All that had passed before toppled like a house of cards. His years of darkness, his anguish, his pain, his entire life shattered and the jagged pieces lay all around. He was like a mute, like a man in a trance, he was stunned, he walked as if in a dream. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, where to begin or who to turn to, until he fell like a dead man into the everlasting arms.

He couldn’t begin to explain his hurt or confusion. He couldn’t begin to tell the depths of his shame, or the overwhelming joy at his change of fortune. He had begun a journey, a path of discovery to a new life. It was the beginning of a slow and often painful journey, a resurrection of his life from nothingness and dust. It was an ending of his life of loneliness, for he had come face to face with God.

He began to change. He cried tears, he felt his hope restored, his life renewed. Piece by piece he felt the veil removed that had blinded and hidden him from truth. He began to sing again, and, bit by bit, his life became more joyfully radiant than he had ever hoped or sought. He felt an overflowing joy that could not be expressed and he began to write again. He wrote with a new purpose, no longer did he feel constrained with feelings that he had nothing to say. Now he felt that he had to speak, for he could not contain his joy or his desire that all men might share with him this mystery he had found.

He went to his family and friends and they listened politely to him. They couldn’t help but notice the changes that had been wrought in him, but they could not grasp the significance of the event he was describing. He tried every way he knew how to explain both the import and the reality of his experience and what it meant for them all, but they were unmoved. Finally he knew he could do no more, so he walked on, alone, sad, but no longer alone in his aloneness.

He looked around and wondered if there was anyone else whom he could share his joy with. He looked and noticed that there were groups of people sitting in numerous buildings saying that they too had met with God. So he went amongst them. The first group he went to would not even let him finish his story, they rudely dismissed him saying, “God doesn’t speak like that to people today, be off with you!” The next group of people listened and said to him, “That’s all very interesting but are you a premillennialist or not?” So he went from group to group, growing sadder and more confused. One group said, “Get yourself baptised!” another group said, “Do you speak in tongues!” someone else handed me a bible: another said, “You must believe in this confession!” still another said, “Ah yes, but are you saved!” Bewildered, all he wanted to do was shout, “I was sick but now I’m healed, I was blind but now I see, I was lost but now I’m found!” But they were all so busy believing, whatever it was that their particular group was believing, that they were unable to hear the depth of the wonder of what he was saying, to really share his joy with him. Nobody really wanted to meet the Friend he had found.

So he wandered on his own, a wiser man, with his words like goads looking for a heart to steer, a soul to cheer, and he shook his head with wonder that whether he was empty or filled to overflowing, he seemed destined to walk alone.

Oh what shame, what pain You washed away
What wonder and what Joy You bring today
The body of Your love shows no decay
For in power You have risen today.

And where, oh where are we in 1983
Watching an image of Your life on colour T.V.
Are we so lost, so blind, we just can’t see
Preferring darkness to the light that sets us free.

Oh Jesus how much longer will we celebrate
When will you in your wrath say “It’s too late”
To my brothers at the foot of Mount Sinai
Still worshiping the Golden Calf.

Move our souls, our bodies through Your Spirit Lord
Open our mouths that we might preach Your word
Full with the love that flows from You
To lead lost souls to Calvary

Your eyes beheld me and filled with heartfelt pity
You drew me to Yourself in love's deep song
Delighting me with signs and wonders
Loosening my tongue to praise Your name.

I sing with eyes filled to overflowing
Of the glory of Your love poured out each day
To sing with heart felt wonder
That You love and keep me in Your way.

I am nothing, but Your love creates in me all praise
As You reveal in me the fire of Your everlasting passion
The life of joy You live forever with the Father
You open up and share it all with me.

I cannot fully take in all the depths of such beauty
Or adequately proclaim in words this heartfelt song
My stammering tongue is truly silenced
In the dazzling presence of Yourself

Now I know
A thousand voices in shrill chorus
will erupt
In defense of human history
And the wealth of human thought.
And yes I know the very language
with which I labour to express
is honed upon experience
The fruits of conquests and distress.
And I can hear the arguments
That one can't help but be exposed
To the transmutating powers
of the fruits of modern life.
But think!

For one quiet hour
when all the world's asleep.
Alone with only silence
As your friend.
Today a fading memory
Tomorrow yet to run
Here I am alone
An empty room
This hour, For all I know
My last
What good has human wisdom brought?
Its influence is a memory
It brings no shred of warmth
Its logic doesn't fill the void
Its triumphs do not talk.
Here towards this mystery
With no one else I walk.

I stand alone!
Even though an orchestra
Of advice be in my thoughts
No one else can stand for me.
Not the wisdom of the ages
The past advice of sages
None of it can have much bearing
On the moment I am sharing
When life meets death
What wisdom thus expressed
Can stand in for me
To face this test?

The absorption of the Church in the writings that have been labelled Scripture, and defined as being a closed book, has resulted in a Church rich in theology, argument and schism, but poor in spiritual authority and, more importantly, the love of God. Paul writing to the Corinthians had this to say, “Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some, letters of commendation to you or from you? You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of hearts of flesh”

What Paul is knowing is that it is not knowledge of the recorded word that gives life but rather it is the real, life-giving knowledge of the living God. Paul is seeing in the lives of those gathering in the fledgling Church a fulfilment of God’s words to Ezekiel, “And I shall give them one heart and shall put a new spirit within them. And I shall take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh”. And God doesn’t stop there for He goes on to say, “that they may walk in My statutes and keep My ordinances, and do them. Then they will be My people and I shall be their God.”

In other words it is not the scripture that should be held up as a record of God’s works and His dealings with men, but rather it should be the Church itself bearing witness to the working of God within it. The Church in its claim that the perfect has come, in the guise of Scripture, sidesteps the truth that the perfect, if it has come, should be seen being made manifest in them. For it is not the Book they hold on to that gives them glory but whether or not God is being revealed in their midst. For if God was really with them then the Church would be a ‘living book’ of the works and deeds of God, a ‘living testament’ to the power of His glory and His saving acts of grace. As it is the Church argues over doctrine, is divided over issues of biblical interpretation, and declares salvation based on an understanding of Scripture rather than a life saving knowledge of God.

The Church’s teaching that Scripture is now closed is wrong. When the 3^rd Century Church met and decided which of their inherited writings were to be declared canonical and final, on what authority did they make this stand? Has God Himself declared it so? By making this claim the Church has pre-empted God and declared it impossible that He might raise up for Himself a prophet to speak words of admonishment to the Church, a prophet whose words carried all of the authority that the Church has decided can only reside in the books which they have declared Canonical.

The tradition of the Church that there are no further words that God will speak to it is a curious one indeed. This notion not only effectively silences God, if indeed He can ever be silenced, but also gives rise to the legitimisation of the persecution of His spokesmen. For if a man sent by God arrived to speak God’s words to the Church, the Church would feel justified in declaring the man a fraud and an impostor.

It was never the habit of the Jews to declare that their scripture was sealed. If God raised up a prophet, even if the prophet’s words were ignored, the Jews eventually incorporated the words that the prophet had written or spoken into their sacred writings. For they recognized, even belatedly, that the prophet was from God and his words were important and true and worthy of respect. Unfortunately the words were honoured but the message was lost and this too is a deep problem in the Christian community.

Not only do Christians hold in great honour the words they deem to be Scripture, but they do not live by these words and no longer understand what the words themselves mean. This should not surprise us for the Jews did not understand the words which Jesus spoke. In fact He spoke to them in parables “lest they see with their eyes, understand with their heart and return and be saved”. His words are often enigmatic and can only be understood by those “to whom it has been given”. It is this “to whom it has been given” which I wish now to investigate.

After His resurrection Jesus explained to the travellers He met on the road to Emmaus all that the Scriptures revealed concerning the Christ. Even while their hearts burned within them, marvelling at the mystery which Jesus was revealing to them, they did not recognize who He was. It was only when Jesus gave them Communion, blessing the bread and giving it to them, that their eyes were opened.

This surely has a deep message for Christians who believe that Scripture alone gives them all the insight they need to have faith, to be guided in their lives and to know all the things pertaining to salvation. The apostle Paul knew a thing or two concerning faith and said to the Corinthians, “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstrations of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of man, but on the power of God”. This leads me to say that Scripture is always secondary to the Spirit concerning our ability to have faith in God.

From the church's understanding of scripture Paul is a tragic figure stumbling in all of his ways (just as they the church do), a hypocrite not living what he preached; but this is not what Paul is revealing in this chapter. As is so often the case, people take a text out of context to justify their own crooked walk. To get to the heart of what Paul is talking about we have to go back to the previous chapter. In Chapter 6 Paul says, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? May it never be! How shall we who died still live in it?” Then he explains how we have been baptized into Christ's death that “we too might walk in newness of life.” For “our old man was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be destroyed, that we should no longer be slaves of sin” Paul continues by saying, “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts,”… “for sin shall not be master over you for you are not under law but under grace.” From such a beginning it seems inconceivable that Paul is now saying, in the very next chapter, “but hey don't worry about it, none of us are perfect!” But this is exactly what the church believes that he is saying!

Why the confusion? Basically because the church believes theologically rather than spiritually. By this I mean the church's understanding of scripture is based upon a reading of scripture from an unregenerated mind. Now Paul says in Chapter 8, “The mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God: for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so”, and as the church admits that they themselves are unable to subject themselves to the law of God, so as to walk as those alive from the dead, but rather, that they must continue in sin until the day that they die, then in what sense, are they really Christian. To make matters worse they comfort themselves, in their disobedience, by claiming that Paul is admitting the same failing in himself.

Paul's argument in Chapter7 begins by comparing the freedom a wife has to remarry on the death of her husband, with our being freed from the Law through our death in Christ which leaves us free to be joined to another, namely the one who raised Christ from the dead. Now if it is impossible for a Christian to be free from sin, as the church teaches, then it is equally clear that they haven't really died with Christ to sin, and if they haven't died then they are not free from the Law and he who is bound to the Law is judged by the Law as scripture also teaches. That Paul says that a Christian does not sin is clear in verses 5&6 of Chapter7, “For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.”

The dilemma for the church has always been how do we square off the fact that we believe ourselves to be Christians and hence dead to sin, with the fact that apparently we cannot stop ourselves from sinning. That is where theology comes to their rescue. Theology is the cheats way into heaven, a door other than the cross, and the way through that door is to search the scriptures for intellectual loopholes to make you feel comfortable about your spiritual state by enabling yourself to believe that you are what you are not. Fortunately for them Paul's seeming admission that “the good that I would do, I do not do”, is just what they need to sit in their mediocrity. Unfortunately they stop others from entering the real door, the door to life, the cross of Christ.

When Paul says, “For that which I am doing, I don't understand for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing that I hate”, he cannot be speaking as a Christian. This is obvious for in the preceding verse he says, “but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin”, and this is a statement which cannot be uttered by a Christian who is no longer a slave to sin. So he is merely speaking this way as a literary device for the spelling out of an argument to those to whom in chapter 6 he has already said, “I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh.”

Paul is seeking to help weak Christians come to terms with the power of indwelling sin, that they might take hold of the full freedom that is offered them as followers of Christ. So when Paul spells out how, if you are ashamed of your acts of sin, there must be at work within you two Laws, the Law of the sin in your members, and the Law of your mind which knows in its depths what is right, he is urging them to take to heart the reality of their spiritual state that they might accept the way out of their chains. So when he cries out in dramatic conclusion, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Christ Jesus my Lord!” He certainly is not confessing a pitiful hopelessness that he must be left for the rest of his mortal life in this shameless impasse. No he is rejoicing that he no longer has to live under Law, with its animal sacrifices that could not free him from the power of sin, but now he was receiving a deeper cleansing from dead works through his baptism into Christ's death.

To get a deeper appreciation of the hopelessness Paul must have felt under Law we should look at his life prior to and including his conversion. Paul tells us that he was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, zealous beyond all of his friends. So determined was he to serve God and please Him that he pursued Christians with such a zeal that his name was feared among the early church. So the good that Paul wanted to do, above all else, was to keep the Law, and yet, in spite of a zeal that would put today's Christians to shame, he failed. “The good that I would do, I do not do; but I commit the very evil I do not wish”. This must have been what he felt to the wretched core of his being after the Lord shattered him on the road to Damascus. For in his heart he concurred that the Law was good, but in his members he served the law of sin, dragging off Christians in chains. “Who can save me from the body of this death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”