Monthly Archives: June 2017

"We walk by faith, not by sight." 2 Corinthians 5:7

Faith. It's a mysterious, wonderful, puzzling word. A stumbling block for some, a laughingstock for others, a lifeline for many. What is faith?

Let's start with an analogy. We have five senses, or faculties. You're using the sense of sight right now to read this, as I am to type it. My air conditioner is running, and I hear the blower. That is the sense of hearing. I can't smell anything in particular right now, but a few minutes ago my Schnauzer came in to see me and her breath smelled like dead fish. The sense smell, unfortunately. I'm using the sense of touch to feel the keyboard beneath my fingertips and the cool air of the fan on my bare arms. I'm sipping a Diet Mt. Dew as I tap out this GraceWaves because it appeals to my sense of taste. Five senses. I use them to gather information about the physical world around me.

Very simply, faith is the sense I use to gather information about the spiritual world that surrounds and weaves its way through me.

Here, we are at the very heart of the belief vs. unbelief challenge. We are born into a physical world that is very obvious, can be both very comforting and very harmful. We are accustomed to using our physical senses from our first moments of consciousness to survive and to learn. Not surprisingly, the physical senses come very naturally to us.

By contrast the spiritual world is whispery and subtle. It's no less real. In fact, it is the ultimate and final reality. Everything we know about the physical world tells us that entropy wins eventually in one form or another and all comes to nothing. The spiritual world we "sense" through faith is the real reality. This is Plato's point when he taught that the physical world is a temporary and flawed reflection, or shadow, of the true spiritual reality.

The point is we can be lulled into a habit of being dependent wholly on the physical senses and become convinced that the physical world is all there is. This is why a spiritual experience is so often referred to in terms of awakening, seeing, or becoming aware. It's religion's version of The Matrix. Just take the red pill, and you see real things you might have sensed were true. That's faith.

Like the physical senses, the sense of faith can atrophy from lack of use. That's why for a deeply convinced atheist, the notion of faith seems incomprehensible and incompatible with intellect. I say this without superiority or condescension, but they do not have faith because they have not used it. They have chosen to rely exclusively on information they gather from the five physical senses. So really they start with a very closed presupposition that they won't believe in spiritual matters until the empirical evidence is clear to them.

The Bible tells us that faith is a gift from God, and that He has put within all of us the sense of eternity. When we use faith we awaken and become aware. That is why to a person of faith the idea of living by the physical senses alone is incomprehensible and incompatible with intellect.

Both sides do well to resist being smug. I choose to enthusiastically, humbly, and gratefully embrace faith…without being angry at anyone else who differs. Use it or lose it, seems to apply to faith (at least temporarily).

Staying with the Bible now, we find several important nuances of faith. First, whenever in the New Testament you see the word "believe" or "belief" that is a translation of the Greek word for faith. So the most basic meaning of faith is to believe.

Now here is an often overlooked point: you choose to believe. Belief/faith is not forced on us. We are presented with a good deal of evidence, empirical actually, but then we have to make a choice. I think many people believe that faith just sort of appears, that it happens when the scales of evidence tip far enough. I think real faith is matter of choice. Each one of us makes a decision about where to plant our flag.

When faced squarely, this is an uncomfortable truth for believers and unbelievers alike. I could, in fact, make a good intellectual case for unbelief. Atheists are not dumb. I understand their arguments and actually find them persuasive to a point.

On the other hand, I can obviously make a good, intellectual case for belief. Christians are not dumb either! Smart people can believe in God and do so by the millions. That's surely significant.

So what ultimately makes the difference? Choice. God does impress upon us This is very good news for any struggling or would-be believer. You can choose to keep or start believing. It's not always easy, in fact it's often not at all easy, but a part of faith is the choice to believe.

The challenge of faith is why trust and perseverance are additional and important nuances. I don't know of any saint that doesn't struggle with doubt. The dark night of the soul is a common experience and really shouldn't be feared. It's simply a period of time that will pass.

One of my favorite faith illustrations comes from Isak Dinesan who wrote a story about a man who became a rich author early in life. Like most people to whom wealth and fame happen unexpectedly, the young man developed significant adjustment problems. He had written out of poverty about poverty, but now he was rich and felt isolated from the conditions and the people who had given him his first book. He was estranged from his wife, from God, and even from himself. He wandered all night in the streets of Amsterdam, trying to sort things out. He decided that he would never write again and gave away the manuscript of a new book he was writing.

About at the end of his rope, he was considering suicide when suddenly, he felt overcome with the presence of God. God seemed to speak to him directly that he should write again, "'not for the public this time, or for the critics, but for me.' 'Can I be certain of that?' he asked. 'Not always' said the Lord. 'You will not be certain of it all the time. But I tell you now that it is so. You will have to hold on to that.'"

Ultimately faith is something you have to hold on to. Someone wrote "it's a subtle chain that binds us to the eternal." Just reach out, take hold, and hang on.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

June 25, 2017

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Matthew 5:8

Seeing God sounds like a fantasy of the first order, yet I believe everyone, if offered the opportunity, would deeply want to see God.

The Bible records a few scenes where people actually saw God. In the Garden, God communed with Adam and Eve in such a familiar way that we might imagine they actually saw God. Of course, the most memorable passage about seeing God is when Moses asked to see Him and God replied that this was impossible, for to do so would result in Moses' death. God did allow Moses to see Him after He passed by. Earlier in the same chapter we read that Moses met with God "face to face," but this obviously is not literal.

The Great Visit was a time when we did see God face to face. Jesus said "if you've seen Me, you've seen the Father." All of God that you can fit in a human being was in Jesus. Taking on the limitations of a man, God became visible. It absolutely applies today that if you want to see God, look at Jesus.

But let's not quibble here. I know what people mean when they say they want to see God. They mean now and physically. They want incontrovertible proof that God is real. Or believers want incontrovertible reassurance during times of doubt. I get it.

I read recently an article about why people aren't going to church as much as they once did. These articles haven't changed much in the 30+ years I've been reading them, by the way. One person, of a scientific bent, said "when I see credible scientific evidence I'll believe in God." She wants to see God.

You know what? I understand. I really do. I don't see her as being shallow or spiritually inept, or too demanding. I really do understand the impulse to want to see more than she has seen.

People want proof that God exists, and what could be better than seeing God? I do take exception to the "lack of proof" argument which I think is the equivalent of someone standing in the middle of a sanctuary and demanding proof that there is a church. But I'm not going to label anyone as spiritually blind or in any way demean them. I understand.

The 6th Beatitude makes an astounding promise that speaks directly to the agnostic and to the theist who longs for greater certainty or simply the blessing of seeing more of God. The promise is direct: we "will see God." The condition is that we "are pure in heart." So we can see God! The question is what does it mean to be pure in heart?

To reduce purity to performance is to miss the point entirely. We get don't get purer from the outside in. No amount of checklist religion is going to bring us closer to God. The lesson is loud and repeated in the Bible that right external actions can actually become a hindrance to seeing God.

I seldom miss the opportunity to quote C. S. Lewis on this matter "The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures in the world are purely spiritual; the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred…A cold self-righteous prig who regularly goes to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it's better to be neither."

In others words, you can be the cold self-righteous prig who is in the right place, doing the right thing and still be far from the kingdom of heaven. The heart must be purified from the inside, not the other way around.

So how do we have pure hearts? The key is the negation of ego. Self-will is the fundamental problem. It is the implicit trust in self rather than God. Its expressions are endless, and Lewis highlighted a few of them. I would add to his list fear, anger, resentment, and self-pity. Also the damnable tendency to compare ourselves with others and to become the critic. I suppose you can sense the autobiographical tone of this paragraph, but I doubt I'm alone here.

The great truth about Jesus is that He lived here on earth in a state of complete dependence on the Father and Spirit. He did not trust in His own strength. He was not a maverick, separated from the other two persons of the Trinity. He accomplished what He did, miracles and all, not through His own power but by being an open channel for the power of the Father and Spirit.

Now here is the challenge: we become pure in heart through the very same action. My deepest struggles correspond to the times when I trusted more in the gifts than in the One who gave the gifts. I prayed for the knowledge of God's will, and then ran off to do it as if I'd received an assignment I can accomplish on my own. The way forward for me has always been to consistently acknowledge in prayer the deceptive power of my ego and my utter dependence on God. I pray much more earnestly today for God's will in my life and for Him to give me the power to carry it out. That keeps me from the conceit that if I only knew the direction I would be able to walk it.

For me, this is a battle that simply doesn't stay won. My morning prayers revolve around dependence on God, and throughout the day I try to reestablish that focus and surrender. The heart/mind is the battle ground of the ego and the Spirit. The pull and tug is constant. Only by daily prayer and meditation that consists of focus on God will we be on the winning side of that battle. The pure heart has God alone enthroned. And at that point you see Him.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis
June 3, 2017

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