Why Your Beliefs Matter

Last Friday I opened a discussion on "Why Not Just Believe in Belief?" A related question could be raised: what's the big deal about belief, anyway? Specifically, why does the Christian message put such emphasis on believing in Jesus? It seems so simple, really almost too magical: if you believe in Jesus, everything changes. That's what the good news of Christ actually says. But doesn't it seem like there ought to be more to it, that there ought to be some requirement to clean up your act, to do right things? And shouldn't there be some credit given to people who don't believe in Christ, but live moral lives?

Clearly many people do live great moral lives without believing in Jesus Christ--great, that is, compared to the rest of humanity. If we're going to consider moral living as a means to salvation, though, we have to define what "salvation" means. There's a word that unfortunately means almost nothing outside the Christian community, so I hesitated before using it here. I can't think of a better choice, though, and I was going to unpack its meaning anyway, so maybe we can make it meaningful to all of us after all.

The first obvious sense of the word, stripped of its religious associations, is rescue, and the Christian meaning certainly includes that. It's rescue from ourselves, and from the trouble we've gotten ourselves into. Do you know anyone who lives up to what they think they really ought to be? I'm not talking about Biblical morality here, but about each person's own particular sense of what's right and wrong. The Bible actually says that if you don't know the Biblical law, your own standards will be your own test. The Bible also says no one passes. Our own experience agrees with that.

There's a kind of freedom that doesn't get much discussion today: the freedom to do what one knows is right. It's a kind of freedom we all experience sometimes, but not consistently. We are literally bound to our own passions that turn us away from our own goals, whether it's strengthening relationships with people we love, practicing responsible conservation, keeping our calories down and our exercise up, or whatever it may be. The problem is inside of us, and salvation, in Christian terms, has partly to do with gaining that kind of freedom--imperfectly for now, but perfectly in eternity.

That brings up another side of what "salvation" means: living forever with God. He is the source of all goodness, love, light, holiness, righteousness, and perfection. That sounds to me like a great way to spend eternity--provided I don't have a load of imperfection, hate, fear, and darkness inside of me--which is the condition we're all originally in. No matter how much good we may do along the way, we all carry that darkness along with us. Most especially, we are all quite self-centered, and much of even what we do right is for selfish motives. God's light exposes all that. We can't hide it with the good stuff we do; his perfection and light are too strong for any coverup to be effective before him. Moral living isn't good enough.

If we approached God with the stains we carry, we would be mortified next to his perfection. To spend an eternity in that condition would be hell. Have you ever spent time with someone you really, honestly knew was better than you in some significant sense? Didn't it make you feel a little uncomfortable--even if the other person was completely humble about it? Imagine that multiplied by infinity, and you have a sense what it might be like to set your own moral imperfection next to God's perfection. Salvation is not just about living a pleasant, innocuous existence in heaven where everything is okay forever. It's about being made ready for life with a great, good, glorious God.

But then why should believing be good enough? I have two reasons to offer. The first is the simpler one: God has graciously offered it as a way to receive the gift of life through Jesus Christ. He knows we can't make it to true life on our own. Jesus Christ's life, death, and resurrection were God's gift to pay the penalty for our sins and open the way for us to be made whole before him. I can't go into the theological ways that all works right now; the point for now is that God offers us a gift through Christ, one that we cannot earn but we can accept as a gift, and faith in him is the way we complete our part of that transaction.

Such faith is a deep thing. (I offer this as my closing reason that believing is so important in God's eyes.) To a great extent, our beliefs are who we are. Our beliefs determine every choice we make--every one, perhaps, except for those where there are genuine limits imposed on us by nature and circumstance. If you choose to go to school, it's because you believe something good will come of it. If you choose to love your spouse, it's because of your beliefs about that relationship. If you lie or steal, it's because you believe some greater good (also defined according to your beliefs) will come to you for it. If you choose to indulge an addiction, it's because you believe the pain of denying it would be far greater than the damage you cause yourself by giving in to it. If you believe in God, you choose to order your life according to an entirely different reality than if you do not.

There is a very short distance, Biblically, between belief in God and obedience to him. In Hebrews 3:16-19, and in Hebrews 4:2 and 4:6, unbelief and disobedience are terms used interchangeably. Hebrews 11 is the Bible's famous "faith" chapter, in which the Old Testament heroes were commended for their faith--faith which was shown, in every case, by something they did--by actions. One book later in the Bible, in James 2:14-23, it's explicitly stated that faith and deeds are inseparable.

I'll summarize now. Our moral deeds are not enough to gain us life with God, but he has offered us a way into that life by accepting his freely offered gift in Christ. The way he has determined for us to be able to accept that gift is through believing in him. Believing in him is no mere mental check-off, no simple assent to a creed; it's something that changes our whole approach to life, and is inevitably expressed through the way we live. What we believe determines the kind of person we are. It's no small thing to believe in Jesus Christ--it's the first step of a complete turnaround. The final step doesn't happen in this life; no one achieves perfect consistency in all their beliefs on earth, so Christian believers still do wrong things. But as a first step, it's what God is looking for, and through it he begins to transform us, to make us ready for eternity in his presence.

So if it seems like there ought to be more to it than mere belief, the truth is, when it comes to Jesus Christ, there really is no "mere" belief.

Posted: Mon - June 25, 2007 at 02:09 PM |

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Why Your Beliefs Matter

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson