What Do You Believe?

I can imagine this question sounding mildly offensive to you. I can imagine it sounding intrusive. I can imagine it sounding basic or easy or irrelevant. But I have a hard time imagining it sounding loving or engaging or compelling to many of us. However, this sort of question would have been right at home in the early church.

The earliest followers of Jesus poured out their lives because “What do you believe?” was so important.

Faith, what you believe, is the sole way we come into right relationship with the God of the universe who sent His uncreated, non-physical, always living, fully divine Son into the created world to become a part of it as a human. Faith in this God of action is what makes us Christians, converting us as we are baptized by the Holy Spirit into the church.

But faith is more than just how you become a Christian in the first place. Faith is also how we seek personal transformation as Christians—in the language of the New Testament, faith is the means by which we are sanctified, made holy. When Christians struggle with continued shortcomings, brokenness, and sin, we sometimes convince ourselves that we just need to redouble our efforts. Just try harder. But this is the opposite of what the New Testament teaches. Indeed, it does teach us that we should rightly give up our entire selves in love to God, but it also teaches that to work within our own self-derived power, our own flesh, is to oppose God. To truly change the way we act, we have to change what we believe. 

What we do and what we believe are intimately related. This is why in Paul’s letter to Titus, in the midst of all his focus on “sound doctrine” or right belief, one of his chief complaints is that the people who reject this true faith are “detestable, disobedient, and unfit for any good work” (Titus 1:16). Paul identifies these people as the ones who “deny [God] by their works,” which might seem indicate to us that the only problem was one of external action. But immediately before he uses this identifier for them, he also identifies them as “those who are defiled and unbelieving”—in other words, the people who were unfit for any good work, the same ones who were denying God by their works, were those people who were without faith.

Now, it is not the case that no one who has Christian faith ever does anything wrong—I see evil acts done by Christians quite often. However, it is the case that the path to overcoming such evil within ourselves is to believe well. God can change us by the Holy Spirit, but such change comes through faith and faith alone.

So what do you believe?

The answer matters, but perhaps we’re not quite sure how to answer the question. After all, the Bible has so much depth and richness and such a massive amount of content that if we have to perfectly believe all of it all the time, none of us has much hope. If we can’t remember it all, can we possibly hope to believe it all? We may have good intentions of believing it all—I promise that I will believe it when I hear it—but is an intention of belief, or potential belief, just as good as actual belief?

Now, if belief has to do with every detail of every matter of interpretation of every passage in the Bible, there will be no end to controversy, and none of us has much hope for this belief that saves. But this isn’t the belief that the early church had in mind when it gave itself up for the sake of true belief. Instead, Paul, in the same letter to Titus referenced above, sharply rebukes people who pursue controversy after controversy. He says that we must not allow ourselves to get wrapped up in inconsequential fights about nits.

Instead, Paul (and Jesus and all the rest of Jesus’ apostles) desperately wanted us to have the faith that was handed down to the apostles. As Jude, Jesus’ brother, puts it, we are to “contend for the faith that was once-for-all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). 

This pure, simple, Christ-centered, and Christ-exalting faith is incomparably important, but it’s also exceedingly beautiful. This is why Paul so effusively thanks God for the faith of people all around the world (see, for example, Ephesians 1:15-23), and this is why the early church wrote songs summarizing this faith and sang them to each other over and over. This faith was beautiful, worth capturing poetically, and worth remembering. One such song is quoted by Paul in Titus chapter 3:

When love appeared, and kindness too,

     From God, our Saving God,

They were not brought by righteous works,

     That we ourselves had done.

Instead in tune with mercy His,

     Salvation came to us,

Through washing that regenerates,

     Renewing Holy Ghost,

The One He richly poured on us

     By Savior Jesus Christ,

That righteous by His grace alone

     His heirs we would become

In hope, sure hope of endless life

     In ages yet to come.

(Titus 3:4-7; my translation here is an attempt to capture a bit of the feel of the poetry of the passage while also remaining fairly literal)

Let us believe like the early church did.

Let us believe like the apostles did. And let us be transformed into God-loving, people-loving, self-abandoning imitators of Jesus Christ.

This is our goal as a new church. Please pray for us, and consider helping us pursue it.