Signposter

I believe in the importance of the intellectual aspect of growing in faith.

After all, the bible is there to help us understand our faith. Believing in God because he has revealed himself to you and has planted that faith in you is well and good. And you feel it, thrive in it and live in it, so why the need to explain it?

Imagine a person coming to you and asking about your faith. And to the best of your knowledge, you try to explain the gospel, because that’s the single most important thing every Christian must know. God made man and loved us so, but man sinned, our relationship with God was broken, Jesus Christ came to die and be resurrected so that the relationship can be restored. Then imagine that person asking a whole lot more questions. Like how does it make sense that Jesus is God’s son and yet is God? If God is all powerful, why did he let Adam and Eve sin? And yeah where did evil come from if God is all good and he created everything? And at some point you might break down and just keep saying ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I’m not sure’ or ‘Maybe you should ask someone else about this’, or perhaps, in frustration, ‘I have faith and you don’t!’ At this point the person might look at you, hurt, and turn away. And with a heavy feeling at the pit of your stomach, you realize that the person might just be another lost soul, looking for answers, a ghost of your past.

I believe people can come to faith through the intellectual approach as well. Of course, it is always up to God to reveal things to us, and to give us the right amount of wisdom we need at the moment, and Christians are but vessels to help make this happen. That is why I believe we must strive to better understand our faith, so that when we share, we can share with confidence and conviction. We are even called to defend our faith against those who choose to tear it down. How can we do that if we purely rely on the emotional aspect of it?

You see, Christianity is not just a feel-good thing. And just like how Christianity should not be anchored on ‘feelings’, it should also not be anchored on ‘intellect’. When we use the bible, we don’t just use it to make us feel better about our circumstances. It is way more than that. We use it to make disciples, just as Jesus Christ has demanded. And in a world where people begin to question, people begin to examine their lives, people are full of doubt and skepticism, people begin looking for answers, and people begin looking for purpose, the Christian must stand and start putting up signposts. And to do that, one must be equipped with the right emotion, the right knowledge, and most of all, must be completely reliant on the bible and the prodding of the Holy Spirit. After all, you are not making those signposts for yourself.

To end, this is what Bishop N.T. Wright has to say, “Being a Christian isn’t about just stumbling our way through the world the way it is, maybe making a little bit of difference here and there, but eventually having this spiritual destination (called heaven) where we go when we die. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world. In the Bible we are promised new heavens and new earth, and those go together. In Revelation, the last scene of the Bible, the climax is not that we get snatched up from earth to heaven; it’s that the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth. Now what we can and must do is to set up signposts for the Kingdom. When the Kingdom comes, those signposts will be seen to have really partaken in the reality toward which they point.”