The Pastor’s Pen (The Very Rev. Dr. Curtis Crenshaw, Th.D.) What Does It Mean to Believe? I remember a Gomer Pyle show I saw some years ago where the sergeant was being his usually harsh self against Pyle. Pyle came out smelling like a rose, and the sergeant said to Pyle, “I just guess you have faith.” To which Pyle said, “Yes, I do.” But the audience was left wondering what that meant. Faith in what or whom, faith for what reason, and what was the content of the faith? On another occasion I made a disparaging comment about someone, and a man who was an atheist said to me: “I thought you had faith.” My response was, “I have faith in God, not in people.” He had never thought of the difference. Christians are noted for their faith, but what does it mean to believe? Let us consider several aspects to biblical faith. First, there is an object of our faith, which is the Triune God. The Son of God is most often noted as the personal object in whom we believe. It is one thing to say we believe someone, which usually means we believe them for that occasion. But if we say that we believe in someone, that means that we trust the personally implicitly, we trust everything about the person. Likewise, with Christ we believe in Him, which emphasizes that we are committed to Him personally. Remember that John 3:16 states that “everyone who believes in Him should not perish.” Second, faith must have content. One cannot just believe in any Jesus, but in Him as the divine Son of God who came to earth through the Virgin to die on the cross for our sins and who raised Himself from the dead. The Apostle Paul charged the Corinthians with improper belief when they received “another Jesus” that he did not present to them (2 Corinthians 11:4). Another Jesus really meant another gospel, which in turn meant a false gospel. To put this another way, one’s faith is only as good as the object of his faith, and the object only as good as the truth about that object. In other words, we are not just to believe in Jesus, but in the right Jesus, and the right Jesus is presented to us in the Gospels. We are to believe “that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:31). The word “that” introduces us to content, the propositions about Him that we must embrace, which are here described as “Son of God.” And by ‘Son of God,” John means the Second Person of the Holy Trinity (John 1:1-3), equal with the Father (John 5:18). Many other propositions are given throughout the New Testament. Third, there is a reason for faith in Christ. One can have the first two points right but then not have genuine faith because he/she does not believe in Jesus for the correct reason. Today in our culture, Christianity is being sold and marketed with the idea that we believe in Jesus to have a happy life, to have money and health, to have a happy marriage, and so on. But these ideas present Jesus as the sugar daddy who grants wishes, not the divine Son of God who came with a mission, which was to “give His life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). The idea in “ransom” is that we trust in Him for forgiveness of sins—that is the reason. Fourth, faith involves a commitment. Sometimes this is referred to as personal trust in Christ, and it surely is at least that. But by commitment I mean that it is not a Sunday only faith, or not a Christmas and Easter only faith, but one that is lived daily. James put it this way: “faith without works is dead” (James 2:20, 26). Our works do not merit God’s grace, and they are not added to faith so that it takes an equal amount of faith and works to go to heaven, but genuine faith produces obedience. As John stated: 3 Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. 4 He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. (1 John 2:3-4) Biblical faith, therefore, means that we have an object, which is the Lord Jesus Christ. It further means that we can content to that faith, which is that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity came to the earth through the Virgin to die on the cross for our sins and raised Himself from the dead. And the reason we exercise that faith is to have our sins forgiven, not primarily to receive material things now. And finally, this faith is a holy commitment to Him, living for Him every day. Amen.
