Categories
Faith

What does it mean to believe?

FaithMany people misunderstand the nature of faith. If you’re a Protestant you’ve probably heard many times that salvation comes through faith, and not through works. In other words, the good or bad deeds which you do in life are irrelevant to the question of whether you get into heaven. The only way to get in is by believing in Jesus.

So a lot of people form the view that your knowledge is more important than your actions. They think that being a Christian is about believing the correct doctrines, rather than doing the correct activities. In other words, it’s all in your head. If you haven’t studied enough theology and absorbed enough teachings, then you might miss out.

In reality, faith isn’t just something you think. It’s something you experience. You only really get to trust in God when you rely on him to do something that he’s promised, something that couldn’t happen if he didn’t make it happen. If you never step out and take risks in doing God’s work, you never get to discover what God can do when you’re actively putting your faith in him.

Categories
Books

Integrity, by Henry Cloud

IntegrityI remember discussing integrity with a successful businessman. He thought that you either had integrity or you didn’t, and if you didn’t have it he wouldn’t hire you. The problem is that I’ve never met anyone who was completely trustworthy, and I’ve never met anyone who was completely untrustworthy. And there’s a lot more to integrity than trustworthiness.

Henry Cloud identifies six aspects of integrity in his book Integrity: establishing trust, orientation towards truth, getting results, embracing the negative, orientation towards increase, and orientation towards transcendence. While I’m not sure I would have picked exactly the same components of integrity, I found the book to be a very useful exploration of what needs to happen below the surface of honesty.

A person who has integrity isn’t just someone who tells the truth. It’s someone who also understands and communicates well with other people, who has a firm grip on reality, who tells it like it is, who has the persistence and fortitude to see things through to the end, who listens to criticism and is willing to endure confrontation and do the difficult jobs, who is always learning, and who understands that he or she is a small person in a very big world.

Categories
Poverty

Who is my neighbour?

NeighbourThey say that your expertise increases in proportion to your distance from home. When I’m visiting Africa, people often assume that I’m an expert on subjects of which I have only a passing knowledge. I think the reverse is true for responsibility, which decreases in proportion to your distance from home. So if you’re a long way from home, you can be an expert with no responsibility.

There aren’t many people in Australia who wouldn’t lend a hand to stop a next-door neighbour from starving to death as a result of poverty. Most people would help the neighbour find appropriate community services, and would even provide meals from time to time. However, when it’s people who live a long way away, people that you’ve never met, and there are large numbers of them, somehow it ceases to be your problem. Australians have enough problems to worry about. Africans can look after themselves.

Followers of Jesus aren’t free to take this attitude. When Jesus answered the question, Who is My Neighbour, with the story of the Good Samaritan, he implied that each of us is responsible for anyone who is in need. So you don’t have an option of ignoring poverty. You can’t be a follower of Jesus unless you’re doing something to address the world’s problems.

Categories
Future

What are our big goals for the future?

GoalThe Ugley Vicar blogs about the Millennium Development Goals and asks the question, Even assuming these goals could be met, what happens next?

If we define poverty as people with an income below $2 per day, we could eradicate poverty by giving everyone $3 per day. But have we really solved anything? In Australia the Henderson Poverty Line for a family with two adults (one working) and two children is $661.45 per week. People struggle to get by because of the high cost of living. The problem is that when incomes go up, the cost of living goes up, and poverty is not solved. Jesus said, You will always have the poor among you (John 12:8).

Poverty is a subject of vital importance to followers of Jesus. We are called to serve the poor, and I think we should be pursuing that with as much passion, diligence and effectiveness as we can. However, it seems to me that Make Poverty History is simply not an achievable goal, because poverty is a concept with moving goalposts.

Categories
Present

Who should you vote for?

VoteElection fever is soon to hit us in Australia again. Who should you vote for? The traditional Christian approach seems to be to vote for the party which most reflects Christian moral positions on such issues as abortion. But is this the right approach?

A problem with politics is that when you vote you’re not just voting for one issue. You’re voting for a political party which has particular stances on a large range of different issues. You have to look at them all if you’re going to make a sensible decision. It’s almost an impossible task, because how do you weigh up completely different factors and trade them off against each other?

You can take the football team approach. You can pick one party and decide that it’s your team, and you can vote for it and stay loyal to it regardless of policies, competence, performance, or trustworthiness. In some countries this results in institutionalised bad government. People keep voting for Policitian X, because he happens to belong to their tribe. They refuse to consider the obvious facts that Politician X is corrupt, selfish, and incompetent.

Categories
Past

Why do people follow Jesus?

JesusAlan Hirsch poses the question, How did the number of Christians in the world grow from as few as 25,000 one hundred years after Christ’s death to up to 20 million in AD 310? A footnote in Alan’s book The Forgotten Ways refers to Rodney Stark as the authority on these issues, so I bought and read his book The Rise of Christianity. But I found that disappointing, because his research was based on the Moonies cult, and the implication seemed to be that any new cult spreads the same way – slowly, from family member to family member, increasing at a rate of around 40% per decade.

But why do people really choose to follow Jesus? There is something compelling about who Jesus was and what he taught. His lifestyle was significantly different from that of other religious leaders. He never used power to accumulate wealth or for political or personal ends. His message was about love, serving, humility, forgiveness and repentance. If you want to get wealthy you must give everything away. If you want to live, you must die. If you want to lead you must be a servant of others.

What Jesus said and did was, and still is, significantly different from the accepted practice. But somehow it resonates with the human condition. The contrarian lifestyle proclaimed by Jesus is bold and risky, but it offers compelling answers to the questions of life’s purpose and meaning.

Categories
Future

Welcome to choosethecross.com

Carrying a crossThanks for stopping by. The purpose of this website is to explore what it means to be a fully committed follower of Jesus today. Often following Jesus is presented as an event, rather than a process. Once you have decided to follow Jesus (the event), what are you supposed to do after that (the process)?

I selected choosethecross.com as the domain name because following Jesus is rarely about taking the easy options, pleasing yourself, and being the most popular person in town. As Jesus said, If you want to come after me you will have to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. If you want to save your life you will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake you will find it. (Matt 16:24-25)

Starting July 2007, I am intending to make posts on the following topics:

Mondays: Past — Lessons from history

Tuesdays: Present — Things in the news

Wednesdays: Future — Where are we headed?

Thursdays: Poverty — Helping those who are most in need

Fridays: Publications — Books worth reading

Saturdays: Faith — What it really means to believe

I will soon be putting up a link to the website for my forthcoming book, The Global Christian Adventure. In the meantime, please feel free to comment on any of my posts. Please note that I will be reviewing comments before accepting them. The rules for acceptable comments are set out on my Policy page.