Session #1: Worldview & Scripture | Recounting Our Core Testimony

Seeing Reality Through Faith

Every person lives by faith.

Whether we recognize it or not, we all carry assumptions about where we came from, why we exist, what gives life meaning, and where history is headed. These assumptions become the lenses through which we understand reality.

Christianity begins with the conviction that the world was created by God, that humanity matters deeply to God, and that Scripture tells the story of God's ongoing mission to redeem and restore creation.

This session invites us to become more aware of the faith we already live by and to consider how Scripture shapes a distinctly Christian understanding of reality.

Transcript

Method And The Need For Story

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's good to be together once again. There's a deliberate method that I have with regard to these three different sessions. As a Christian, growing up in a Christian home, I often was taught that we have to know the right things. And it was often systematic theology. We have to know who Jesus is, and we have to know what the process of salvation is, and we have to know some of the key theological terms, and we have to know certain things about ecclesiology and the church and the sacraments. And I'm not disputing any of that. What I have found along the way is that sometimes we have concepts in our minds that already stabilized and are sort of to us the absolute norms of our faith, and we don't often know how we got there or how the church got there or how we can communicate that to others. Sometimes it seems like we speak a different language than someone else. And when we try to define terms, they don't even know what the terms are all about. And that's why I process these sessions in the way that I did. I really believe that we need to know the biblical story first. We need to understand what it is that God has tried to do and what it is that the Bible understands about the nature of our human identity, our communities, our needs, our fallenness, our sinfulness, but also the hopes and dreams we have that Jesus comes to bring alive and to point us in a direction of salvation. And I also think it's important for us to think about the fact that the teachings of the church were not developed in sort of isolation from the rest of the world. And that's why we went through church history too. The key doctrines we talk about as essential Christian doctrines were all shaped and articulated in a way that came right out of the experiences of the church going through history, some of the struggles and some of the different ideas that were there. So now we come to a point where we can summarize these things, I think, in some more focused and specific ways. Now we can go through systematic theology and we can argue different points and different definitions of terms and different approaches to things like Arminiism and Calvinism. We can talk about the different views about the sacraments, and I will touch on all of these things. But what I've tried to distill for these next weeks, these next sessions, is the key ideas that are really fundamental that can't be ignored any place throughout the history of Christianity or within the Christian community in all places and all cultures. And I'm going to go over them in this manner.

The Six Sessions Roadmap

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Today, something that we talk about in systematic theology is prologomona. That is to say, how do we even know about these things? What is the nature of revelation? Can we all hear God speaking? Does God speak? And if God speaks, how do we know God is speaking? And what's the relationship between that and the Bible? How is the Bible a unique vehicle by which we come to understand these things? Does the Bible have unique authority? How is that unique authority determined? So that's the first session on these issues of how do we think about God and how does that connect with what we read in the Bible? The second session, we're going to talk more specifically about who God is as God has revealed God's own self to us through history. And that's kind of an interesting and complicated thing because it's quite simple in the Old Testament to understand God as creator, but something radically changes when Jesus shows up on planet Earth and suddenly we have to think about one God, but here's someone who is also God, but it's not the Father. So we'll talk about those things. The third session will talk more about who Jesus is and what it was that Jesus did in terms of salvation. So that's the third session. And the fourth session, we're going to take a look at the Holy Spirit coming at Pentecost and then the nature of the Christian church as it begins to be formed and shaped by the Holy Spirit, what it means to be the church of Jesus, the body of Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit and functioning as a witnessing community in this world. And that brings us to the fifth session, and there we're going to talk about witness and mission, two major concepts that are always attached to the church. What does it mean to be witnesses? And what does it mean to engage in the mission of God? And that will bring us finally to session six. In session six, what I hope to have in front of us is what we call eschatology. Where is this all going? What's the point? What's the focus? What's the outcome that we anticipate? What is it that our faith points us to as a living hope toward a future in which things will change or be renewed? What does it mean for Jesus to come again and what will it be like in the world to come? So those are the six sessions that I'm thinking about. Now we

The Ham Tradition And Doctrine

SPEAKER_00 5:29

start today with the idea of revelation and the Bible. We've covered a lot of that before in terms of reading the Bible again for the first time. What I'd like to do now is more specifically say what's the significance of that? I remember a story of a young woman who was recently married, and for generations their family had gotten together at American Thanksgiving time. They always had a roasted ham on or a cooked ham on Thanksgiving. They weren't the people who had turkeys, they had a ham. And every year she had gone either to her grandmother's place or to her mother's home at Thanksgiving. And her grandmother many times prepared the ham for the great meal for all the family to come together. And then her mother prepared it. And now that she was married, they had a home together, her and her husband, she said to her mother and her grandmother, I would like to host Thanksgiving meal this year. So they said, Okay, okay, you can do it. Do you need any help? And well, they all offered things that they were going to bring, but she was going to cook the ham. How do you do that? Well, she had learned from her grandmother and her mother. And so she prepared the meal, and as she was preparing the ham, she did what she had always seen, and she cut the end off each of the ends of the ham. It was a big ham before she placed it in the pan. And as she was doing this, when the rest of the family gathered, she said to her mother, Mom, why was it that you always cut the ends off the ham before you cooked it? Is that a special technique? Does the meat come out better than? And her mom said, I don't really know, but that's the way my mom, your grandmother, taught me to do it. So when grandma was there, she said, mother said, Mom, why did you always cut the ends off the ham before you heated it up? And her mother, the young woman's grandmother, said, I don't know, but that's the way my mom told me. And later on, they had the opportunity to visit a retirement home where the great-grandmother was, where she was in her elderly years, and they had a chance to sit together and tell about the meal that they had together, and then ask her, great-grandma or grandma or mom, why did you always cut the ends off the ham before you cooked it at Thanksgiving time? Oh, said the old woman. She said, That's easy. When we were young, we had very few kitchen utensils, and the pan I always had to cook the ham in wasn't big enough for the large ham that we needed for the family. So I had to cut the ends off the ham before I heated it up. That was the reason why the ends got cut off the ham. It had nothing to do with the recipe itself. It did not change the taste of the meat. But it was a tradition that was passed on from generation to generation without much thinking, even though the next generation and the next generation and the next generation all had bigger pans to roast their ham in, they still cut the ends off the ham because that's what the former generation did.

Renewing Belief Without Blind Repetition

SPEAKER_00 8:56

And I think of that story sometimes when I think about Christian doctrines. Sometimes we hand down doctrines as if they are unchangeable, as if they have been delivered by God from Mount Sinai through Moses, and that some of these things we do not because we understand them, or necessarily that they even have meaning any longer. They may have spoken to one shape of the Christian community or the community of faith in the Bible at one time, but they haven't necessarily carried along the weight of meaning that they were intended to have. And so it's important for us every generation to renew and review once again what the key teachings of the Bible are, what the key teachings of Christianity are, not because we have just been handed these things from those who went before us, but we could because we understand why these things are essential. And that's what I hope to do in these sessions, these six sessions on the core testimonies of the church. And it has to start with the idea of revelation. How do we know there is a God? And we can't prove it. I cannot prove there is a God. I can say I have faith, I believe God exists, I can say all of those kinds of things, but it isn't something I can prove in a laboratory. It isn't something I can run an experiment on. Most of the people in the world today, as has always been true in the history of humanity, believe there is a God. Most of the people believe that there is a higher power. Most people believe that we are not orphans in the universe. But none of us can prove that. Now, here's where we have to be very careful about something. We cannot, as Christians, go and demand that someone else believe in God, nor believe that the God of the Bible is the true God. We cannot demand that. We hold to that, we believe that, but we do so by faith. Faith is an interesting thing. Already, way back prior to the time of Jesus, Pythagoras. Maybe you've heard of Pythagoras in some of your studies along the way. Pythagoras is the one who figured out that that the square of the hypotenuses doubled, you know, was, or the square of the right angles on a triangle was equal to the uh the addition of those was equal to the uh the square of the hypotenuse, the the other side of the triangle on a right triangle. Anyway, that that that mathematical theorem we call the per Pythagorean theorem. Pythagoras, way back in ancient Greece, he talked about uncertainty. Even though he was focused on mathematical certainty,

Faith Beyond Laboratory Proof

SPEAKER_00 12:34

he said, in terms of where we get that from or why it is that way, we just do not know. Marcus Aurelius, one of the great emperors of Rome, his meditations have been read and reread over the years. He did not believe in the God of the Bible, but he believed in gods. But he also said it was an uncertain thing. It was not a matter of proof, but a matter of trust. And we have that throughout history, even Christian history. We have Blaise Pascal talking about the great wager. He says to people, you know, you can believe there's a God or you can believe there's not a God. But if you're a betting person, wouldn't you bet on something that has the greater possibility of a better outcome? Look, if there isn't a God and if we die and we're just gone, then you lose nothing. But what if there is a God and there is a future life, then wouldn't it be better to wager on that side of the coin? And that's what he said in terms of how people ought to at least uh embrace Christian faith. Or we have Kierkegaard, the Danish uh theologian then and philosopher, who talked about the leap of faith. He said there's only so much we can know, but then there comes the point where we need to take a leap because to live authentically means we have to go beyond just what we perceive that we know into a world of belief and understanding and perspective. And that's a little bit of what I was trying to do at the beginning of reading the Bible again for the first time, to say that there's no such thing as faith or religion and non-religion. There's no such thing as non-religious people. We often divide our communities up into people of faith and then ordinary people, or people who live by science and those who live by faith as if they're separate things. The reality is that all of us, whether we are people who have grown up within the Christian faith or the Muslim faith, or the Buddhist faith, or the Hindu expressions of life, we are all people of faith because none of us can answer the key questions that stand behind and before all of the things that we experience or the plans that we make for life. There are a number of major questions that we all need to face, and these have no scientific, provable answers: origin, unity, purpose, and destiny. We cannot answer any of those by provable scientific methods. We do not know where we come from. We do know that we're born to parents. We do know that our parents were born to parents. We do know that things go back in time, but we cannot step beyond that first existence of life itself. We cannot go back into the origins. We have no capacity to do that. Even those who say there is no God cannot go

Origin Unity Purpose Destiny

SPEAKER_00 15:53

back to a time before these worlds existed as we know them today. We make assumptions about them, but we cannot go back and say, well, at one point the thing just exploded. Well, we can say that, but it is an act of faith. It is not a scientifically provable thing. It seems as if the universe is expanding. We can measure that, which means that it was likely that the world began from a point where there was some kind of generating explosion. We call it the Big Bang. Is that creation? Is that a never-ending cycle of explosion and implosion? There are different theories about we cannot know. Every rigid scientist is a person of faith. And so we have to understand, even with origins or with unity, what holds things together or with the meaning, the fact that I exist does not give me meaning. Just the fact that I exist as a person does not make my existence meaningful. What isn't that makes my existence meaningful? That is a question of faith. Whether one is an atheist or one is an agnostic, whether one is a Sikh, whether one is a Tao Taoist, no matter what faith we have, it is the faith that we use to determine our purpose in life. And then, of course, destiny. What happens? If I am significant, if I am significant in some meaningful way, why can't I be significant in this meaningful way forever? Why do I have to get old and decrepit and die? Why do I disappear? And what happens to me then? And what's the purpose of the very fact that I existed? Origin, unity, purpose, and destiny. Those are the four big questions of life, none of which can be answered by scientifically provable methods. In other words, we are all people of faith. And so here's one of the grounding things I think we need to think about as Christians, but also in our conversations with others. There's no such thing as religious people and non-religious people. To be human is to be religious, to have faith. And that faith may be that there is a God and that the world was created by God, or a faith that says there is no God, and all of this just happened. We don't understand how or why. That also is a belief. It is a choice of faith. Now, having said that, I think we can come together at the table, Christians, non-Christians, people of different expressions of faith, people who believe they are not religious people. We can all come to the table together and then begin to talk about why do we have this faith? Why do we think this is the reality that exists? Why do we measure ourselves and the world around us from this point of view? What is it that drives us? And here's where we get to the major options that are available to us. And I've said before that there are three major, major, major options. I keep trying to find others. I keep trying to look through the history of religious faiths, different expressions of theology, different philosophies. They all seem to come down to one of three dominant overarching perspectives. One possibility is that there is no life or meaning outside of the existing universe. That the existing universe, there are limits to it, that scientists can probe and say it's an expanding universe, but there are no gods outside

Three Worldviews That Compete

SPEAKER_00 19:59

of it, and there are no powers within the system that are god-like. What we have is what we have. There is no God. The system self-created and self-generates and self-sustains itself. It exists. We don't know why, but it exists, and that's all we have. A second possibility is that like our bodily systems and like the creatures we know around us in this world, the universe is actually one gigantic living organism. And we, in some way, have become part of this living organism, probably a whole lot like bacteria or germs or viruses are in and with and on our own bodies. We have this concept of ourself, and there are things that live in us and on us that we don't pay much attention to. They can enhance our livelihood and our ability to survive, or they can cause us diseases and detriments and cut back on our livelihood. And in much the same way, there is this giant entity of a living being, the universe. It has self-consciousness, it has life, it has the ability to travel through time and detravel along with it. Or there is the third major worldview, and that's the worldview that says that this world, this universe, was brought into being by a creator who is outside the system. Not distant from the system, but a creator who is outside of the system, who, for divine reasons, for godly reasons, intended that this world would exist. Now, those three worldviews are incompatible with one another. You can't say that there is a God and there is no God in the same breath. You can't say that the universe is itself the living entity, but there's also a God outside the system, or there is no God for the system. These are each different glasses or perspectives that determine how then we will interpret life within the system. And those large worldviews give rise to the many religions and philosophies that drive human life throughout history. That perspective that says there is no God is a perspective that says everything is happenstance. It is a matter of Chemical reactions and physical properties. It is a matter of natural laws that were self-written by the process of evolution. There is no rhyme or reason to it, but it's a self-sustaining, never-ending chain of reactions. And the fact that I exist doesn't really matter in the big picture of things. The reality that I exist means I have to make up some meaning for my life. And so I will assert certain things about myself. I'm strong, I'm brilliant, I'm handsome, I'm beautiful, I'm powerful, I'm better than you are, or I'm under you, or something like that. We will assert different values, but only on the basis of attempting to make our person worth existing. There is no fundamental reason for me to exist, but the fact that I exist, I will be someone who pushes my way through society and I will declare that I have meaning. I can't tie it to anything that is scientifically verifiable, but don't you tell me I'm not worth anything. It is self-declared. Within the system of a living entity, this largely is the process or perspective of the great Eastern as they have come to be known through us in the Western world. So bear with me on this. I know that we all stand in our different traditions, but I'm talking here about the systems that have grown up largely in Asia, in China and Japan and the surrounding countries as we know them today. We're talking here in India, we're talking about Hinduism and Buddhism, we're talking about Taoism, Confucianism. The idea is that the world itself is a living entity. There are no gods outside the system, but the system itself is alive with gods and divinities. Some talk about more divinities, some talk about no divinities, but the power of the system. But these are ways in which we perceive that the system itself is alive. And the fact that we exist happens because we have been brought into being by the system. There is life that we experience that we are conscious of, but that life does not exist apart from its attachment to the system. And so in Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, the idea is that we are sharing life, or we are animated by life, and that life does not end or cease, but that this expression that shares that participation in life will end. This is malleable, this is material. Life is immaterial and life goes on and on and on, but this entity does not. And whatever is the spark or the motivating power within my system, that will not die, but it will move on to another expression or another form for a time. And this is where we get the transmigration of the soul. Where life goes on, but I do not. Where life does not end, but this expression of it is only temporary. And so some people then try to bring that into other ideas of knowing previous lives and all of that. Well, that's one way of looking at it. Can you prove it? No, you can't prove it. Can you disprove it? No, you can't disprove it. It is a way of looking at life, it is an understanding of reality. And even those systems which talk about being atheist within those religions or philosophies that emerged out of India and China and Japan, there is a sense that the oneness of all being is the great thing. There's no clear sense of what that means, but insofar as we can participate into it and be merged into the oneness of all being, that is the goal or the final stage in our development. But then oneness of all being means we lose our individual identity. That I don't matter, but life matters. Or thirdly, and this is the other great organizer of religious faiths, there is a God. This is the third set of glasses or worldview. And this set of glasses or worldview perceives that life must mean something because it was inherently created to mean something. There is a master plan behind the system. There is a God outside of the system who brought the system into being. I can't prove it, I can't disprove it, but that's the foundational fundamental thing. And that's exactly where the Bible begins, even if we start in Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens of the earth. The idea is not one that we can prove. We can't take it into a laboratory and assess it or measure it. We can't do an experiment on it. It is by faith. And this is where the Bible's focus on faith is so powerful. By faith. By faith, we understand that the world came into being by the handiwork of God. By faith, we go to a city whose builder and foundations is God, not the cities we have left behind. By faith, Abraham lived this way. By faith, Moses did this. By faith, the great saints of the Old Testament did this. This is where I tie a lot of this to the book of Hebrews in the New Testament. By faith, by faith, we believe that God spoke through the prophets. By faith, we believe that Jesus is who Jesus said he was. Now, within this large category, three different worldviews. The worldview of the world is self-generating and self-preserving and self-uh sustaining. There is no God. In that world, it is received by faith. Or the world is an entity, a living, rational entity. Largely the way in which that works itself out is are through Buddhism and Hinduism. They're the most prevalent and predominant, but Confucianism also, where society itself is an expression of the living entity, whatever that may be, or Taoism, that whatever the great life force is that lives in being causes me or urges me to walk an independent path. They're all linked to the same basic perspective that the universe, there's no God outside of the universe, but that the universe itself is a living entity. And insofar as I participate in the life force of the system, I have purpose and meaning. Once this doesn't have power anymore, the power of life continues, but this entity ceases to exist. Or the third set, the worldview, that there is a God, a creator. And there are three major world religions that hold to this. They are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are the monotheistic religions that say we believe there is a God outside the system. Now, interestingly, of course, all three of these religions are deeply intertwined and interlinked. But they start out with the same premise, with the belief, with the faith that the world did not self-generate, that it was an active creation of a God who understood the implications of creating this world and who still guides this world in ways that have meaning and sense, and that to live apart from that plan,

Judaism Christianity Islam On God

SPEAKER_00 30:58

that operator's manual, causes us great harm and irreparable damage. And that's where we start tying this to. If in fact we hold by faith to the fact that there is or to the belief that there is a creator God and that the world exists, origin, unity, purpose, and destiny for specific reasons, then it is the Bible that gives us an understanding of how that worldview makes sense. And notice Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all believe that the Bible is the foundational expression of that faith and its implications. They do so in different ways. What will happen along the way is that Judaism will say, yeah, God brought us into being and had a special relationship with the family of Abraham. And here we are. It's been a long and struggling journey, and we've been beat down and we've been rejected, and we've been a force for good, but we've been trampled on in the history of the world. Oive, life is tough, but we are the reflection of God on earth. In fact, those statements from Isaiah, the suffering servant songs, are often applied within Judaism to the people of the Jewish faith, that we are the suffering servant. We continue to speak about God in a world that doesn't want to hear this. Christianity, of course, believes that Jesus came as a full expression of who God is and what God wants for all of us. And then Islam takes that at a later stage and says, well, you got some things right, you got some things wrong, but let's clarify these kinds of things and let's put it in this framework because the final great prophet Muhammad, he saw things more clearly than anybody else. But all three of these monotheistic religions are built on the same premise. And that premise is that there is a God who existed before these worlds existed, and there is a God who shapes and governs all of these things, and that the Bible is part of the story of what of who God is and what life is about. Differently interpreted, of course, but that's where we begin. And so it is by faith that we receive these things. Not only our worldview, these glasses of belief that we wear, there is no such thing as a religious and a non-religious person. We are all religious. We all wear glasses of faith. These glasses of faith, regardless of what our big picture worldview is, they help us give meaning to the day-to-day activities of life we have. There is no such thing as a truly non-religious person. The question is not, are you religious or not religious? The question is, what is the set of glasses, religious faith glasses that you wear through which you interpret reality and by which you create a sense of connectedness and belonging and understanding. We can't know everything. It is by faith we begin to see these things. And that brings us to the Bible. So for Judaism, it's read in a particular way, and for Christians, it's read in another way, and by Muslims, it's read in still a third way. If we're to put it kind of simplistically, this is an oversimplification. Basically, the Jewish perspective is that there is a creator God, and that creator made the human race, and that very quickly evil entered into the human condition. And now we're struggling with that. And God said, This is not good. And so God tapped Abraham on the shoulder and said, Hey, buddy, you and I, we've got to do something about this. And so the family of Abraham has been taken as God's special partner in trying to bring some healing back to the world. One day, someday in the far-off future or in the very immediate future, God is going to break in and resolve everything. That's the day of the Lord, and then everything's going to be put right. But in the meantime, we exist. We can't prove God's existence, but we feel God's presence in our lives. And so we're going to live as if God matters, and it's going to be a process by which we're going to be suffering and we're going to be repudiated. Our task is not to understand it all. Our task is to be faithful and to bring what healing we can to the world that's so badly in need of healing. That's the basic Jewish understanding among those who believe that there is a God. The Christian understanding is a little bit different than that. It begins in the same place, but then it says that God has seen how this thing is not working very well, this partnership with Abraham. God doesn't reject this partnership with Abraham's family, but along the way, he realizes that this relationship with Abraham's family is not going to be the thing that brightens the transformation necessary. Maybe God knew that all along, which is part of what Christian faith uh implies, that God knew that that was not going to work, but it was a measure that God chose to use for a time. And when the time was right, then God inserted God's own self into the picture, and that's Jesus. And what we understand by that is that God still is intimately invested, involved, and that God chooses to even share the brokenness of this world in the person of Jesus, who is himself a person who gets broken in the injustices of this life. And that Jesus, being both fully human and fully divine, comes back to life to bring a sense of what God is still planning. And Jesus splits that prophetic day of the Lord at two, so that there is a time in which we who have been made aware of these things can take the hand of others and bring them also to faith. But one day everything will be resolved, and what God intended at the beginning will become the resolution, and we will participate in that. Islam sees it slightly differently. And Islam says you can't talk about three gods. You can only talk about one God. And that God is absolutely in control. That God is absolutely powerful. And that God demands, God made this world in a certain way. It's gotten bad. There's reason that the thing has not worked out the way it should. We call it evil, we call it sin. There are all ways in which we can try to explain this. It doesn't make sense, but that's the way it is. But we need to go with that. And what we need to do is try to be the best people we can be. And we do that by following the word of the prophets. And the prophets are those who have been able to see things more clearly than most of us can. So the prophets keep reminding us that there's something beyond ourselves. The prophets keep trying to put back on our glasses so we can see things from God's perspective. And we have to try, we have to do the right things, and we have to build the right form of behaviors in order to do that. Most of us can't do that, but we're trying to do that. And Moses saw it clearly, Jesus saw it even more clearly, but none saw it as clearly as Muhammad. And now we have to follow the teachings of Muhammad because God actually spoke through him. And if we follow his teachings of obedience, and unfortunately, too many people in this world don't, and because of that, they've lost perhaps their dignity or their identity or even their right to exist. But there is coming a reconciliation of all of this, in which the judgment of God's going to be poured out. And those of us who understand God, we better live right so that we get caught up into whatever God still plans for the future. So there are three major ways in which even this third set of glasses is perceived of and shapes our conception of reality. Now, within that Christian perception, which is where I come from, which is where I live, the Bible shapes my perspective. The Bible shapes my glasses, shapes my identity. And here's what I think we need to continue always to teach the next generations and ourselves about the meaning of the Bible. We are prone to see one of two ways in which this might be, and each of these is somewhat reflective of either the Jewish perspective or the Muslim perspective. The Jewish perspective is sort of a fatalism that says, yeah, there's a God. Don't see much evidence of it, but there has to be a God,

Covenant Mission And The Bible’s Shape

SPEAKER_00 40:48

and we better live in a way that that aligns with God's intentions, and we are God's special people. And now that we know this, it's going to be a suffering experience, uh, but we just have to kind of stick with it. We are the suffering servant, oive, that's life. Or the Islamic expression, and that's the idea that there's a hierarchy of powers, and those hierarchy of powers, each one needs to be obeyed. And so it comes to God and then to the prophets. Highest among them is Muhammad and then Jesus and then Moses and then the rest. And then it comes down to males, and then it comes down to females, and then it comes down to children, and then it comes down to everybody else. And the reality is that the system is one in which you have to continue to live within your framework, and you have to do the best you can, and you have to listen to the demands that come from the uh power that is above you. And so you have this sense of hierarchical behaviors, and the purpose of the biblical religion is to obey. In fact, Islam itself, the very word means to submit, that is, to come under the direction or the power that is above you. So there's a very clear way in which that's understood. Now, the Christian understanding of this is really something very different than either of those. They are part of what we can deduce from the Bible, but it's very important for us to understand that the Bible starts not in Genesis, as I try to say in the reading the Bible again for the first time, but in as a written document with the covenant at Mount Sinai. And why is that significant? Because Israel, even the family of Abraham, does not know God, has lost its ability to respond to God. They may be the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, they may be the descendants of Isaac and Rebekah, they may be the descendants of Jacob and his wives and sons, but they no longer know God. And that's why even Moses, great Moses, has to be re-engaged with God. And God says, I am who I am. Yahweh is the name. And God says, Tell Pharaoh, let my people go. And Israel does not battle the Egyptians for its identity, but God battles the Pharaoh for the ownership of these people. And the Bible is the story of a covenant made with Abraham's family, not to say you're better than anybody else, not to say you know things nobody else knows, but to say this is the God-human relationship that was always intended. It's not perfect, these the side of the fall, but it is there, and together we're going to remind the rest of God's children who they are and whose they are. And so through Israel, put in this unique promised land, which was on the border between Africa, Asia, and Europe, where all of the migrations in those days were going. This is the people who are the city on the hill. So they're shaped by the covenant, which is sort of the owner's manual in which God reclaims identity with humanity in the way that it was supposed to be, without the coercion of turning us into robots or automatons that can't think for ourselves, but simply are sort of the troops of the Force. No, we remain and retain our human identity, but we're fashioned into a community in which we begin to live in a way that reflects there must be a God, there must be a right way to live, and there must be a path through history that leads towards some glorious resolution. So the Old Testament is shaped with the mission of God and the partnership with Abraham's family as a witness toward all peoples. The unfortunate part of that is that that community doesn't seem to be able to sustain its participation, its uh partnership in that uh mission. And so we go through the history of Israel and see how the thing begins to unravel. And then we go through the prophets, who are the last of the great managers of that vision and that community, and they grow increasingly uh uncertain that this thing's going to last. They become increasingly disappointed in the outcome. So they are increasingly without any sense of direction to this. And they say, God's going to have to break in and do it. And then it starts all over again. And with Jesus, it's the idea that God breaks in and does the resolution, God's own self, creates a witnessing community. That's the church. And then that church is being disseminated. It's no longer tied to a particular place, that promised land, but it's now distributed among the nations of the earth as a witnessing community to call people back to faith in God. They can't prove there's a God. They say we're wearing these glasses. This is what we believe to be the case. It matches with our understanding of reality, but God loves you and God is concerned about you. And here's the way to re-engage God, to come back as children of God, children of the Heavenly Father. I think of that in my own life, and I think about the journey that I've been through along the way: a journey of doubt, a journey of faith, a journey even of trying at times to find truth in other religions, or pretending that there is no God. I have done all of those things. My journey has not been a straight line. But increasingly, there's been a sense in my life that these things received by faith best shape and form an understanding of reality that makes sense and that best processes all of it. And I'm not saying that I'm the arbiter of my faith or I'm the one who determines my religion, but I am saying that gently, like a good parent, God continues

Hymns That Put Faith In Words

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to bring me back. That's my perception, that's my belief. I truly believe there is a God who created all things. I truly believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that He is God Himself who comes to provide the salvation we have. I truly believe that we are now empowered by the Holy Spirit of God in order to understand and appreciate these things and live as if these things matter. So all of that is a reality in my life. But I think of some specific ways in which that comes to fruition. Why should it be any better to be a Christian than a Muslim? Why should it be any better to be a Christian than a Jew? Why should it be any better to be a Christian rather than a Buddhist or Sikh or a Jainist or a Taoist or an atheist, as it's sometimes perceived? Why is this better? And here I think about some songs. There's always music going on in my heart and my head. And I think of the way that Moses Lister put it in his song they wrote back in 1955. He says, Once I stood in the night with my head bowed low and the darkness as black as could be, and my heart felt alone, and I cried, Oh Lord, don't hide your face from me. He sang, like a king, I may live in a palace so tall with great riches to call my own, that there's not a thing in this whole wide world that's worse than being alone. And then he gets on to that chorus. Hold my hand all the way, every hour, every day, from here to the great unknown. And that's part of the journey that I've had back constantly to Christian faith. My life, as I get older, seems smaller and smaller and less significant. Could it be that God did intend for this life to exist and that God still wants to hold my hand and lead me to a place where no one stands alone? And I think of another song, this one written in 1932. Thomas Dorsey had grown up in the church and then left the church, and he was big into music. And then he came back to Christian faith and he got married, and his wife was pregnant, and they were looking forward to having a child in their home. He was part of a musical organization. They were holding some concerts and some rallies down in St. Louis, Missouri. He lived in Chicago. He was down there. His wife was in the last month of her pregnancy, but they thought he should take this opportunity. It would earn him some money, and they needed the money. And he was down there. And while he was on stage at this event, as an evangelistic uh event was taking place, someone came up to him and whispered in his ear and handed him a piece of paper. And it said that his wife had gone into labor in Chicago and that she had died in labor, and that their son, their newborn son, was struggling. Thomas Dorsey immediately left the platform, immediately got into a car, drove all the way straight through up to Chicago. He came in time to find out that his newborn son had just died as well. And so it was a very difficult time, absolutely horrible time for him. He lost the love of his life, his wife. He lost his heir, his newborn child. And they were buried, the infant's body on top of his wife's body in a single casket. And he went into a deep slide, a deep depression. And friends who had a cottage along Lake Michigan gave him the use of that cottage. It was winter time. Really wasn't a place to be, but he was alone and they had a piano. And for a while he just ranted and raved at God or sat in stupefied silence because he could not understand how this could happen. He was trying to do the right thing in life. He was trying to be the man that he should have been. He was trying to love as Christ had loved the church and ear it all disappeared to nothing. And he sat at the keyboard finally because music was sort of like breathing to him. And he began to play things, and a melody came out, and words came into his head, and they became a song, a hymn that we have cherished since then. The song goes like this: Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand. I am weak, I am tired, I am worn. Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light. Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home. When my way grows drear, precious Lord, linger near. When the night is past and gone. Hear my cry, hear my call, take hold my hand lest I fall. Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home. When the day grows drear and my life is spent and gone, when my life has reached its end, at the river I stand, guide my feet, hold my hand, take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home. I have sung that song so many times. I have thought about those kinds of words, and I come back to the ideas of Christian faith. What is there about Christian faith that resonates when all other faiths are good but give out? And here's the one thing that's true of Christian faith that cannot be said for any other belief system in this world. And remember, we are all religious people. Whether we believe there's a God or we don't believe there's a God, we are all choosing that out of faith. But what is there unique about the Christian faith? It has to do with the idea

Emmanuel And Why Jesus Matters

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of God choosing to become one among us. We can say there's no God, and we can create meaning out of our lives, and then we die. And maybe somebody remembers us and then we're gone. Or we can say there is a God and the world exists by the hand of God, and we can say it's a long and arduous journey, but let's make meaning out of our lives. Or we can say the world is a living system, and the demons and the angels are part of that system, and the powers that exist are part of that system, and let's go with the flow rather than against it. Let's not try to kill the system, but let's try to be part of the system, and and maybe the life force within us will go on and on and on. But only in Christianity do we have historical evidence that a man called Jesus actually existed. But his claim and the faith to which he calls us is this there is a God. This God made all things. Things have gone badly in this world, but God still loves the creation, and most of all, God loves those who are made in the image of God, who are the daughters and sons of God. You matter, and God will not destroy you, and God will not turn you into automatons to simply robots who do the right thing once again because God snapped the finger. But God is working with you like a loving parent works with children, and God proved God's own love by becoming one among us. Emmanuel, God with us. And Jesus lives our life and dies our death and experiences our heartbreak. And Jesus shares that life. When God enters into our world, God does not just enter into our world like a voice through Muhammad saying, Here are the rules, but God enters into our world as a person with an identity, a human identity, a visually definable human identity, an identity with a name, Jesus of Nazareth. And when Jesus dies and comes back to life, he returns to glory, to heaven, whatever and wherever that is, but as also a human person with a human identity and a human name. And he says to you, he says to me, You matter, you matter so much that the great God who created all things knows you by name, brought you into being, into living, into existence, and gave you a name that will not perish, that beyond the expressions of this life and this place, like I have done in Jesus, I will ensure that you will live forever and to the fullest extent, to the fullest possibility of the life that I intended for you. Only in Christianity is that the testimony and the witness. It's not about following the rules. Certainly, there are rules to follow. Any good parent creates rules of behavior for kids, for children, but not because the rules are an end in themselves, but because I love you and because you matter to me and you matter to yourself. It is not a matter simply of oppression and living out the sufferings of life. It is not a matter of trying to make your way in an alien universe and establishing whatever power you can drum up or enforce over others. Christianity is fundamentally about this thing, this belief. God intended for this world, this universe to exist, God intended for me to exist. The fact that this world does not conform to the goodness it was originally created for is not God's fault, but God provides a way in which it can be redeemed and restored, and you matter to God. So much so that God came to be one among us and to share this with us and to rise from the dead and point to our future in which we share with God all the things that God intended for us. And that's why I'm a Christian. And we'll talk more about it next time.