Belief, Evangelism, Faith Community

Earlier this week, at 11 pm (well past my bedtime) I was awakened out of a sound sleep with a text message. Usually at that late hour it’s about one of my patients at the hospital, some resident or nurse calling with a question or because something’s gone wrong or to give me an update. But this message said: “I pray to Allah that you will take Shahada. If you could just say, ‘I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammad is His Messenger.’ Please, please say this. You are made for it.” And then below the message was this: “The Shahada, which means ‘testimony’ is the name of the Islamic profession of faith. It is the most important of the five pillars. Its recitation in Arabic is required for a non-Muslim to become a Muslim.” And then below that were the words in Arabic.

My friend is worried about my salvation. He doesn’t want me to burn in hell. I deeply appreciate his concern. If only I would say these words, and in Arabic—not in Spanish, French, English, Italian, Portuguese, Swahili, Zulu, Urdu, Hindi, Mandarin, Tagalog, nor Cantonese. God apparently only communicates in Arabic. Just say these words, and say them in Arabic.

We’ve been discussing the fact that each and every faith community sees itself as the preferred, if not the only, way to God and therefore to salvation. This is the number one reason that faith communities exist. But a secondary reason for the existence of faith community is related to the first: If you believe that you have the one and only way to God, then you must share it with others. The argument goes that if you knew a calamity was coming, you’d be obligated to warn others; so too, then, if yours is the exclusive way to God and without it calamity ensues, you should share it with others.

But what should you share? What is the gospel? After all, what must I do to be saved? Must I simply say the words or must I also believe the words? Do I even need to understand the words—in Arabic—or just utter them somehow in a broken language? Must I, in addition to understanding and saying something, do something as well? Paul and Silas were arrested for doing the very thing which we’re talking about: Sharing the gospel. While they were in jail…:

  … suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s chains were unfastened. When the jailer awoke and saw the prison doors opened, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, thinking that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul called out with a loud voice, saying, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!” And the jailer asked for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas; and after he brought them out, he said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”(Acts 16:26-31)

What must I do to be saved? Believe? Is that it? Just believe? And if that’s it, then what must I believe? What must I believe in? What must I believe about? Who must I believe in?

A parallel passage in Scripture reads:

… “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”  How then are they to call on Him in whom they have not believed? How are they to believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? But how are they to preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!”  However, they did not all heed the good news; for Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our report?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.  But I say, surely they have never heard, have they? On the contrary: “Their voice has gone out into all the earth, And their words to the ends of the world.” (Romans 10:13-18)

There is the call for a gospel commission: Whosoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. The beautiful feet of those who bring good tidings. This is the action of sharing the gospel. And here is the Great Commission itself:

 Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)

The Great Commission elaborates on what the faith community should do: They should go, they should make disciples, they should be widely inclusive. They should baptize and teach and they should partner in community with God. But it doesn’t say what the recipients of the message should do. Should they just believe, or must they do something else?

But what does it mean to believe anyway? And more importantly, how does what I believe intersect with God’s grace? Isn’t it after all irresponsible of God to have left so many people believing so many different things? It seems like it’s God’s obligation to let people know what to believe. Put it on the Internet! Text it to people’s phones! Put it on billboards! Put it somewhere where it will be clear and unambiguous, instead of having everyone claiming that only they understand what should be believed.

Close behind one’s belief are one’s action, effort, piety, baptism, vows, Bible reading, alms-giving, prayers, fasting, and standing in the faith community. What about them? And what about the day I do all these things on? And how often do I do them? What special days do I observe? What do I eat or don’t eat? What do I drink or don’t drink? What about the language of my worship? Should it be Latin? Should it be Arabic? What should I think about when the earth was formed? And what about the role of women in my faith community? You see how easily and quickly I become the center of my religion, instead of God.

What does it mean to believe? And the central question of the day: What must I do to be saved? And what role does my faith community have in my salvation? What is the relationship between belief (which is something I seem to have to do) and grace (which is something God does)? To believe that Jesus is the way is to believe in grace, since the way of Jesus is the way of grace and grace is free and available to all.

What does it mean to say “I believe” and specifically what does it mean when I say I believe in God, or I believe in Jesus, or I believe in Allah, or I believe in Muhammad, or I believe in Krishna, or I believe in Ganesha? When we say we believe, what is it that we really are saying? Does it mean that you should believe in me—a person, a being? Or does it mean to believe in what I teach?

Jesus seems to clarify the answer where he says:

 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. (Matthew 7:21)

“Lord, Lord” seems to be a statement of belief, but this—Jesus seems to imply—is inadequate and insufficient. After all, James says, even the demons believe, and they tremble:

You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. (James 2:19)

Belief, like faith, is apparently an action word. Jesus says:

 How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye. (Luke 6:42)

So belief is apparently not simply the veneration of a person, nor even the veneration of Jesus, but it is to try to live a life of belief, to adhere to the teachings, to be part of the faith community called the kingdom of heaven. This is a faith community where you turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give without limits, go to the back of the line, forgive without constraints, and live by the golden rule.

But—and this is critical—to live a life in the community of faith and to live a life of belief is not the condition for salvation. It is after all, impossible to live that life thoroughly and consistently. The condition of your salvation is God’s grace and his alone. It is an invitation, however, to the kingdom of heaven faith community where you accept, by faith, to live by the golden rule and try your best to fulfill that, mindful all that while of your own weakness and your own need of grace.

(In our next passage to be discussed, which we’ll probably be moving on to fairly soon, we’re talking about another woe to the Pharisees, where they clean the outside of the cup but leave the inside dirty. We will have much more to say about the role of works and obedience and the relationship of works and obedience to salvation.)

To believe is to recognize that I am a sinner in need of God’s grace. To believe is to recognize that true religion is centered—and should be centered—on God and not on myself. To believe is to accept God’s grace by trying to be an honorable citizen in the kingdom of heaven faith community—with all that implies. To believe is to wish to share with others the grace I’ve been given, not hoarding the grace, just as I would share any good gift, sharing it without force, without pressure, without stridence, and without tension; but with simple graciousness. To believe is to recognize that just as God has reached out and revealed himself to me, so too God is reaching out to his children regardless of who or where they are, at all times.

Scripture tells us everyone is hardwired to God, that there is a God spot that keeps God close to all of his sheep who know the voice of the shepherd.

 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:18-21)

The truth is that God doesn’t need our help with proselytizing. But God sends us out on the Great Commission because he knows that a faith community is built upon real people who attract other real people to the kingdom of heaven through their effort. God can save anybody he wants, with or without our permission and with or without our proselytizing. People believe what they believe, and what they believe in is not for me to judge, that is up to God. True belief for everyone is whatever God says it is, not what we claim it is or what we claim is correct. We have an obligation to share and to teach and to encourage but we have no license to judge.

Some may see things your way and some may not. But correct belief is what God says it is and not what we claim it to be. When we share our beliefs, when we teach our understandings, when we encourage each other, we not only invite them with humility and graciousness but also we get tremendous benefit ourselves. We have not, I believe, seen the Great Commission for what it is: As great a benefit to ourselves as it is to others. We seem to think that our sharing of the Great Commission is something which is only good for others, and are not appreciating what it is for ourselves. Ezekiel tells us:

 However, if you have warned the righteous person that the righteous is not to sin, and he does not sin, he shall certainly live because he took warning; and you have saved yourself. (Ezekiel 3:21)

We set ourselves out on the Great Commission with the determination to correct others. But often, we do that with hubris and arrogance like modern day Crusaders extorting and extracting confessions of faith. We think we are, after all, saving lives from hell, thus we place ourselves at the center of the salvation of others. But God knows that he is the center of salvation—not just of others but of ourselves as well. He is the center of our salvation as he is the salvation of others. The life we save on the evangelistic trail may not simply be the life of the heretic or the sinner—it may be our own. James 5 talks about the humble sharing of faith with others and the importance of that faith covering a multitude of sins. Our faith is strengthened as we humbly share our faith with others.

So how good do you have to be to be saved? What must you do to be saved? Must you believe? What must you believe in? And what does it mean, after all, to believe? Is evangelism an attempt to save ourselves as much as it is a tool in God’s hands to save others? What are your thoughts about belief and the evangelistic thrust of the faith community?

Donald: When I was young we were told what and how to believe. We accepted it as our family faith and we accepted the idea of proselytizing others with what we believe, which is very focused on us/me. But why one common belief? Why is it necessary for us to all have the same method for describing very specifically what the journey is in order to obtain salvation? Why should it be the way I think? Why not recognize there are many ways to go? Does the Commission to proselytize the gospel say to do it my way or does it say just to ensure that people recognize God and what he can provide?

Carolyn: It has always struck me that the thief on the cross simply recognized, through the life of Jesus, what he needed, and Jesus gave it to him. We can proselytize all we like, but that thief found what he needed directly, through Jesus.

David: In the Great Commission, Jesus commanded his followers to make disciples of all nations. A disciple is simply somebody who follows what Jesus commanded. What did Jesus command? He boiled it down for us as simply to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. The Great Commission is that simple, but Christianity, Islam, and some of the other religions have added lots of things to it.

The Nicene Creed of the Catholic Church begins well enough with “I believe in God” but then it goes on and on, listing a lot of nitty gritty things you are also expected to believe in—none of which were part of the Great Commission. The Great Commission teaches that to be a disciple you simply have to follow Jesus, and that’s what the thief on the cross realized. He recognized that Jesus was a good man, worthy of love and being loved both as God and as a man.

Donald: But Islam does not accept the trinity. This is where it breaks down. I see Jesus as the way to God but a Muslim does not.

Don: What does it actually mean to believe?

Adaure: Last week when we were talking about faith communities I thought of the “crusades” organized by the Adventist Youth group at the Adventist Mission School I attended in Africa. A crusade usually lasted from Thursday through Sunday. The Adventist Youth teams would go out, with a pastor, to the surrounding villages to give an intensive “crash” course with the goal of having a petition and baptizing a few people. They baptized perhaps 34 people in total.

I remember wondering what happened to those people in their village after they’d given their lives to Jesus. Pastors were assigned to these areas but they tended to be remote and hard to reach, so pastor visits were rare. So a faith community had been created but I wondered: Who’s leading them? And how do they continue on their journey?

In my experience, choosing a new faith is almost like completely restarting your life and reforming what you believe and having to rethink everything you do based on the new faith you’ve accepted. What do we do with these communities? What do they believe after the proselytizer has gone? What ties them to the faith?

Kiran: When I became a Christian, I believed I had found the exclusive way. It helped me a lot so I wanted everybody I knew to have this exclusive way also. I would get right in their faces, telling them how important it was for them to be on this way, otherwise they would be lost.

Thinking back on it now I know that my actions were based on the fear that if I lose this way I would be lost. To be saved, I must stick to this path very carefully and make sure everybody else does too. And that caused a lot of anxiety. There was a lot of pain and depression. To overcome all that, true understanding of grace is essential.

Grace is not what I do, it is what God does. He comes down to find me and he will take care of my life no matter what I do or don’t do. He will take care of my family’s salvation and my friends’ salvation. He will take care of everybody. That understanding took away my fear and made me realize that there is very little I can do to change anything, so why worry? Now I can engage in conversations with people of different faiths, and even without talking about faith I can tell that they recognize their weakness and seek help from above. That’s the common factor between people who believe in grace and people who don’t believe in grace.

Reinhard: New converts to Christianity tend to be very enthusiastic and even overwhelmed. But there is a process: Acceptance of Christ is just the start. There follows a long period of dynamic adjustment to the new faith community and its rules, which can influence or even determine the eventual faith of the convert. In the parable of the sower, the seed that fell on good soil flourished. The environment is critical. So too for the environment of the convert, who needs proper nourishment if the seed of faith planted in her or him is to flourish. It is also an ongoing and dynamic relationship between the convert and God, influenced by the environment. On top of that, the attitude of the convert and his or her response to the teaching is also a major factor. So conversion is a complex process.

Pastor Giddi: I agree. Sanctification is an ongoing process, whereas justification is momentous. You are justified the moment you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, but sanctification is an ongoing process. The experience of salvation involves justification in the past, sanctification in the present, and eventual glorification. So the moment of salvation is just the beginning of an ongoing process. Once saved is not always saved.

Jesus Christ invites and includes everybody. But he also excludes, by implication: “Whosoever believes in the son will have eternal life.” He did not say that everybody will have eternal life. So the gospel is given to everyone, but salvation is to whosoever believes it.

Don: But the question is, what does it mean to believe? Simply saying, “I believe”?

Pastor Giddi: From my personal perspective and experience, it is not enough simply to say: “I believe.” It is also necessary to act. My brother Kiran and I were Hindus: We needed to act, we needed to remove the idols, we needed to stop thinking those idols were Gods. We needed to do a lot of things. To believe is to act.

Donald: One definition of “believe” is “accept as true.” A strong belief becomes a fact, but much belief is actually a bit soft. Would you respond differently to somebody who says to you that they know the way to Jesus Christ, they know the process, versus knowing a way, a process? Does belief have an element of tentativeness to it, a little uncertainty? There’s a difference between saying “I know” versus “I believe.”

Reinhard: First we believe in Christ Jesus, in his birth, his resurrection, and his ascension. That’s part of the doctrine of Christianity. We accept Him as our Savior, that through him we might have eternal life, if we follow his commandments and obey him. I think that’s the key. Believers believe in the God that we know can save us, can protect us, day and night. We believe he has superpower, he is the supreme being. For all the good things God can do for us, his creation, we have to follow his commandments.

When the Israelites disobeyed him, there were consequences. He shows that he is what he is: Yahweh. We must believe in God and do his will, like the people in Hebrews 11, who believed in something they could not see.

Adaure: It’s true that we believe in his goodness, we believe in his power, but we’ve spent weeks discussing how, despite his goodness, his power, and his grace, there’s so much that we cannot do. We can’t invoke it. Grace falls when it wants to and not when it’s not in his will or in his plan. But we still believe he is all good and true and powerful. We still believe that he protects us from ourselves and from sin and from disease and so on, but I struggle with part of our beliefs. We say it’s true. Is that faith—when we say whether it happens to me or not, whether I’m protected or not, he’s still good and he’s still powerful?

Kiran: I attended an Episcopalian church Bible study called Alpha for about three months. The first week it was difficult to be with them because they believe in saints and so on, but over the ensuing months I realized there was no difference between them and Seventh Day Adventists. They are devoted to Jesus. They know the grace of God. They love God and other people just as we do. In fact, I felt they were better Christians than I was. It was a blow to my arrogance.

I also attended a Catholic church that worships in Latin, for a few weeks. They wouldn’t give me the eucharist, saying I needed to be baptized. They were trying to evangelize me, but at breakfasts following mass, I discovered these Catholics too were people just like us.

So every Christian denomination believes that Jesus Christ came and died for us. So we are no different from them. Our denomination has no more exclusivity to Christ than any other Christian. In fact, Pentecostal people have no doctrine except the Holy Spirit coming and doing something, otherwise they are no different from us. Exclusivity has to do with the fear that we have. We think we have to do something otherwise we will not be saved. It’s a works-based religion. Jesus himself boiled the whole Bible down to: Love God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbor. If God made it that simple, why do we complicate it?

Carolyn: Amen.

Donald: We seem to be getting down to the fundamentals. Last week we ended with the question: What is the gospel? Now we’re asking: What is believing? These are at the core of our faith journey. We have made it pretty clear amongst ourselves that we tend to make religion about “me” rather than about God. But in our conversation we often refer to the importance of believing that belief is for salvation. That’s about me! So am I believing in God for the purpose of my salvation? Or am I believing in God because of who God is, and believing that salvation may follow from that?

Don: A similar, if not quite the same, question is: If I’m saved by grace, then what do I have to believe in? Just that I’m saved by grace? Somehow that doesn’t seem to be enough. It seems like there has to be something more. I’ve got to do something, say something, be something.

David: Perhaps we worry too much about belief. I’ve argued often that fundamentally we all believe in God. We have the inner spirit. It is in every human being. It’s there. We all fundamentally know, we all fundamentally believe. We often deny it to ourselves, but it’s there.

I wasn’t raised in China, I’m not Chinese, but observing their society for nearly a decade it seemed to me that belief in their gods is not an issue. Belief is a given. It’s just there. They don’t go around teaching their children to “believe” in their gods or to “believe” in Confucianism. The belief is already there. The principles of their religions and quasi religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism) may be studied but there is no focus on the belief itself. The belief is irrelevant, taken as given. But the Abrahamic religions make a huge deal out of believing.

Kiran: Hinduism is just like China in that respect. No one actually teaches you belief or doctrine. You just follow what your parents do, what society does. You just follow the crowd. That’s how it is.

Pastor Giddi: That’s right. Nobody teaches us anything. We just follow what our parents do, and our parents follow what their parents did. But it is different in Christianity. We are being taught. Jesus himself said to go and preach to them and baptize them and teach them to observe all things that he commanded. There’s nothing like this in Hinduism. But if somebody is interested, they may learn through self-study.

Kiran: There is no proselytizing in traditional Hinduism, which has so many contradictions yet you can hold them together in your brain. If you don’t like one god, or someone recommends a better one, you can shift to another god. You can shop around for the best god. But the religion is based primarily on fear. Karma means if you do something wrong it will rebound on you in your next life. When I became a Christian I was liberated from that fear. It was such a joy to know that there is someone who loves me. There is no concept of divine love in Hinduism. Love is mentioned here and there but the focus is on appeasing angry gods otherwise your life is basically nothing.

Pastor Giddi: It’s easier to preach Jesus Christ to a Hindu than to a member of any other religion, because any Hindu will accept Jesus Christ as a god. In India, it is common to see pictures of Jesus on sale in Hindu temple shops. But it’s very hard for Hindus to accept Jesus as the only God. Someone once said it’s easy to proselytize the Hindus, it’s easy to preach to the Hindus, but it is very hard to get Hinduism out of the Hindu!

David: Christians went to China not only claiming to represent the only God but also demanding that the Chinese gods be thrown out. They would not just accept having Jesus alongside the Chinese gods as an alternative. They wanted the other gods destroyed.

Think about this: Between India and China you’ve got about half the world’s population. In global terms, Christianity may be the biggest religion, but in terms of population of the earth is by no means a majority. I think it behooves us to think about that.

Don: I think that’s a critical point, one to which we’ve we’ve alluded from time to time in noting there was a time—not long ago, a century ago or less—when what you believed in your faith community was just what was right around you. But now everything is open. What a Hindu thinks and what a Hindu believes, what a Muslim thinks and believes is not something that you never come in contact with, which is what would have been the case 100 years ago. Do you think that our Adventist pioneers were worried about the Muslims? They barely knew that Islam or Hinduism existed, except in some supposedly dark, distant mission corner of the world filled with idol-worshipping pagans. The concept of other substantial religions was almost foreign to their thinking and foreign to their worldview.

Nowadays, the Muslim lives next door, and that provides a completely different way of looking at the world and calls for a careful reconsideration of how you see God and how you see his relationship to everyone else.

Donald: When we were young we had a pamphlet called the mission scrolls through which we learned about the “other.” And it was prescribed. It was a document the church provided to us.

Don: Moreover, where I went to church as a child, everyone was white and everyone was American. There was nobody like Kiran in my church, or Reinhard, or even David with his funny accent ;). Everyone spoke just like me and looked just like me. As far as I was concerned, that’s what the world looked like, except for some strange stories of faraway distant lands and the weird gods that they observed. Now, Kiran lives next door to me. He works in the cubicle next to me. He sits in the pew right behind me in church.

The world has changed and it brings to mind the question of the future of faith.

Kiran: You noted that sharing with others the grace we have received from God is the best form of evangelism. Who would not be attracted to such love? The gratitude I feel for God is amazing. Why would I not want to give to others the kindness, the love, and the grace God gave me? If I try to give even just 1% of it to somebody else, that’s life changing.

The friend who shared his grace with me is ever in my mind. How difficult my life would have been otherwise. So I think the proper way of evangelism is loving others without any conditions and just letting them be who they are. If they want to, they’ll figure it out. Instead, we do PowerPoints and complicated math and everything. That’s like you’re ignoring the pain in their heart and appealing to their intellect. I think Christianity is much more to do with the heart and the pain that we all have in our hearts.

Reinhard: As Christians our focus lies between Genesis and Revelation, and the Bible mostly talks about the chosen people, the Israelites. Christianity and maybe Islam share some of the Old Testament. Grace was a major issue in Paul’s epistles to the various peoples—the Romans, Corinthians, and so on—in order to counter the teaching of the Jews that salvation required obedience and works. The concept of grace was utterly foreign to the Jewish communities.

Don: Next week, let’s give thought to a global view of faith.

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