What would happen if certain key elements and foundational pillars of our life framework turned out to be false? What if certain things we had assumed since we were born and had never questioned turned out to be wrong – and not only wrong but actually hazardous to our health?
I wonder sometimes if part of the lack of questioning our assumptions is out of fear of having to do something about it if we found out what we assumed turned out to be false or at least less certain than we initially believed. When truth hits us square in the eyes, depending on the nature of that truth we can never be allowed to comfortably return to the former way of life with any sense of complete security and integrity.
I wonder, because sometimes I consider the way in which people’s faith expressions is constructed. The way it is linked to their approach to church, the effect it has on their every day life and major life decisions, its influence on their key relationships. It is no surprise that these foundations have a bearing on the stability of that faith expression, if it’s on dodgy foundations then it’s unsurprising that the building isn’t that safe.
It’s not a hundred miles away from the parable about the sower where the environment in which some people’s faith grows is often up for being choked. So they may still attending church functions and doing church stuff but in actuality their relationship with God is unfruitful and they are pretty well deluding themselves that this might not be the life God wanted, but it’ll do for now.
The link to the gospel of Mark that I’ve begun reading is that the opening has little time for preamble and mushy stuff and cuts straight to the action where Jesus gets stuck into declaring the impending arrival of the rule of God. That rule of God has amazing consequences for what people are used to expecting from life. It challenges those pillars on which many have assumed their lives are to be lived by.
For some it is a reassuring and relieving revelation – it liberates them not from the rule of the Romans, but the rule of self and religiosity that had only brought about condemnation from within or without. For others though, even if on the surface it was appealing, in actuality such was the daunting nature of the invitation that they were not desirous enough to make the necessary changes to embrace this new rule – this real rule of God.
And so it is even today in His own church, there are those claiming to be followers who are unaware that the foundations of their faith are faulty as it’s based on institutions and practises that find no base in God’s Spirit and expressed in his word, but are rather as Jesus would point out to His own contemporaries, the traditions of man.
A bit like a lot of people who encounter Jesus, meeting the truth is realising that the work that needs to take place on the inside is just as much a matter of being under deconstruction as it is being under construction. The renewing of the mind that’s encouraged by Paul inevitably requires elements of bringing out wayward foundations, mashing them up, and replacing them with the revealed will of God.
That’s costly work, though. That’s costly, time-consuming, soul-revealing, painful, liberating, delivering work. It can be so much easier to skip it and just stick to what you know – but such is the love of God, you just know that ain’t a safe option anymore.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
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