Category: Faith

One of the problems of contemporary Christianity is that people who claim to be Christians tend to talk and act just like everyone else, so that it is hard to spot the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. In the early days of the church, the followers of Jesus really stood out because of the shining example they set to others, serving the poor, caring for the prisoners, and standing up against evil. The first chapter of the letter of James says:

Become obeyers of the message, and not just hearers who delude themselves. Someone who hears the message but does not obey it is like a man who looks at the face he was born with in a mirror — he sees himself, but as soon as he goes away he forgets what he looks like. But someone who looks into the perfect law of freedom, and perseveres — someone who does the work and does not just hear and forget — will be blessed in that work.

Somehow Christianity has become so institutionalised and ritualised that its power has been blunted. People go to church on Sundays to hear the message, but the rest of the week they fail to obey the message. As James says, we are deluding ourselves, looking in the mirror on Sunday mornings to see what we are supposed to look like, but immediately afterwards forgetting and failing to be faithful.

Although prison and prisoners are not the subject of much polite thought in most developed countries, they get mentioned quite a bit in the New Testament, and a part of Jesus’s mission was “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners”. We tend to interpret this as referring to people who are imprisoned by sin or in some other spiritual sense, but the 13th chapter of the letter to the Hebrews seems to exhort us to show care for prisoners in a more literal sense:

Continue to show brotherly love. Do not forget to be hospitable to strangers. By doing this some people have unknowingly shown hospitality to angels. Remember people who are in prison, as if you were in prison with them, and remember people who are being persecuted, as if it was happening to you.

Somehow or other, Christianity has become a “respectable” faith, and it is no longer seemly for us to spend time visiting prisoners. Rather than empathising with them, as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews clearly instructs us to, many Christians are vocal in demanding longer sentences and harsher conditions for prisoners. The US, the most “Christian” developed country, has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

If being a Christian is all about grace, all about accepting the free gift of eternal life which we can do nothing to earn or deserve, then it seems contradictory when we are told that we need to undergo training and hard work to grow as disciples. The effort and pain is not to earn our salvation – which has already been paid for in full by the death of Jesus on the cross – but to make us more effective agents in God’s plan for the world. The 12th chapter of the letter to the Hebrews says:

Enduring hardships is a type of training. God is treating you as his children; what child is there that is not trained by a parent? If you do not go through the training which everyone gets to take part in, then are you not legitimate children. Furthermore, we have all had human parents to train us, and we respected them for it. Should we not more willingly submit to our spiritual Father, and really live?… At the time, training seems to bring misery rather than happiness, but afterwards it produces the results of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained.

The gift of eternal life might be free, but that does not mean that you are instantly and at no cost transformed into a highly effective disciple. Discipleship is a process that lasts for the rest of your life as your relationship with Jesus grows and you gradually learn to love the things which God loves and see the world and other people through God’s eyes.

Faith is a curious thing. For some people, faith is believing in something even though all the evidence suggests that it is untrue. For others, faith is believing in something that the evidence suggests is true. Or rather, faith typically involves believing in someone, rather than something. Faith is required when the truth cannot immediately be conclusively demonstrated. Chapter 11 of the letter to the Hebrews has the following to say about faith:

Faith is the essence of things that are hoped for, the inner conviction about things which are not seen. This is what earned our ancestors God’s approval. By faith, we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that things which can be seen were made out of things which are invisible.

The writer goes on to describe a long list of heroes who had faith in God, and were rewarded by God accordingly. Some say that faith in God is an act of refusal to believe what science has proved; however, in reality the faith exhibited by the heroes of the faith sprang from the evidence provided both by nature and through a lifelong relationship with God in which God time and time again demonstrated himself to be faithful.

The people who hold their faith dearest are often the ones who have paid the highest price for it. The New testament records how Paul and other apostles were flogged, imprisoned, beaten, stoned, whipped, and shipwrecked, enduring enmity and false accusations and hunger and thirst, and going without sleep for the sake of the gospel. In chapter 10 of the letter to the Hebrews, the readers are exhorted to remember the hardships of the early days:

Remember the early days when you were first enlightened, and you survived through a tremendous battle with hardships, sometimes being exposed to insults and persecution, and sometimes supporting people who were being treated like that. You suffered together with people who were imprisoned, and were happy to let your property be seized, knowing that you possessed something better and more lasting. So do not throw away your boldness, which will be greatly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God you will receive the promise.

All followers of Jesus need somehow to capture the boldness and courage of those who were prepared to pay any price for the sake of the gospel. In most developed countries Christians currently have freedom to express their faith without significant persecution, but that freedom may not last forever. Now is the time for strengthening of faith and conviction because the future is certain to require great boldness.

If God is perfect, and humans far from perfect, then life would seem to be a constant and unachievable struggle to attain the level of perfection demanded by a holy God. In Old Testament times, human imperfections, sins, were paid for by death, the death of a valuable animal in substitution for the human who had committed the sins. Jesus brought a new way of paying for sins, as chapter 9 of the letter to the Hebrews reveals:

He did not have to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters into the holy place every year with blood that is not his own; otherwise he would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. He came once, at the end of the ages, to cancel sin by the sacrifice of himself. Humans are destined to die once, and then face judgment. Likewise Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many, and will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to bring salvation to people who are waiting for him.

The old way of making up for sins always left a balance of sins that were unpaid for, and new sacrifices continually had to be offered to pay for new sins. Under the new way brought by Jesus, the sacrifice of himself was sufficient to pay for all sins, whether they had been committed before or after his sacrifice. That is why it is only through trusting in Jesus and his sacrifice that humans can be put right with God.

Most people are fairly conservative, and it takes a lot of effort to get them to change their ingrained habits. The Old Testament contains repeated patterns of the people of Israel renewing their covenant with God, then failing to change their habits and going astray. Jesus came to offer a new covenant which did not require frequent sacrifices to atone for frequent sins. Chapter 8 of the Letter to the Hebrews says:

High priests are appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices… What they do is a copy and shadow of the heavenly things… But now Jesus has received a superior ministry, and he is the mediator of a superior covenant, which has been established on superior promises. If there had been no problems with that first covenant, there would have been no reason to look for a second.

The problem is that most people are no more inclined to agree to the new covenant than they were to abide by the old. Given the choice between wallowing in sin and experiencing a restored relationship with the God of the Universe, most people prefer the tried and familiar path of wallowing in sin, either choosing to disregard God entirely or hoping to get into heaven on their own merits without ever having had to renounce the fleeting pleasures of sin.

Sin used to be a daily problem, like personal hygiene. You could be clean one day, but you were sure to be dirty the next. No matter how much effort you put into making sacrifices to get you right with God, there was always sure to be one more sin that created a barrier, a chasm between you and God that could never be bridged. All of that changed with Jesus, according to the seventh chapter of the letter to the Hebrews:

He is able to save forever people who approach God through him, because he lives forever to speak to God for them. He is the kind of high priest we need: holy, guiltless, pure, separated from sinners, and honoured above the heavens. He does not need to offer up daily sacrifices, like the old high priests, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He did this once for all time, when he offered up himself. The law appoints men who have weaknesses as high priests, but the oath which came after the law appoints the Son who has been made perfect forever.

God’s standard is perfection. If we want to be acceptable to God, we have to meet that standard. But under the old rules-based way of getting there, perfection can only be achieved by fully obeying all of those rules all of the time. Nobody does manage to obey all of the rules all of the time, and as a consequence, under the old system, nobody ever attains the necessary level of perfection to satisfy God’s holiness. That is why the old rule had to be set aside in favour of a better hope through which we can approach God – Jesus.

All people cultivate something in the way they live their lives and make their choices. Some people cultivate love, friendship, respect and kindness. Others, as a result of neglect or unresolved issues, cultivate loneliness, disconnection, isolation and sometimes even hatred. In our relationship with God we can choose to cultivate good things or to let bad things grow. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews says this in the sixth chapter:

Land which drinks up the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to the people for whom it is being cultivated, receives a blessing from God, but if it produces thorns and thistles, it is worthless and nearly cursed, and in the end will be burned.

A garden filled with flowers or vegetables or other desirable crops is normally the result of someone’s careful cultivation. It requires continuing effort over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, a garden filled with weeds, or with “thorns and thistles” is something that just grows by itself as a result of neglect on the part of the landowner. This is a great encouragement for followers of Jesus to keep a careful eye on the relationships they are cultivating with other people and with God.

There are times in life when you discover that the strongest player on your team, or your best talent, or your sharpest debating point, has absolutely no chance of prevailing against your opponent. No matter what you do or how hard you try, your team is nowhere near good enough to win. According to the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews in chapter 5, that’s how it was with the old system of animal sacrifices, because you had to be perfect and sinless to be on good terms with God, and even the high priest was a fallible sinful person.

Every high priest selected from amongst humans is appointed to represent people in their dealings with God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. The high priest can empathise with people who are ignorant and misguided, because he himself suffers weaknesses. Because of this, he must offer sacrifices for sins for himself, as well as for the people.

Any sins which anyone committed had to be dealt with in order to win back God’s favour. This involved offering animal sacrifices, with the death of the animal being a substitute for the death that the sinner deserved as a consequence of committing the sin. The system of sacrifices was like a dog chasing its tail. No sooner had a sacrifice been made than more sins had been committed, even by the guy who was making the sacrifices. The only solution was to have a perfect, once-for-all sacrifice to take away sins forever.