The Faith of Christ

Christianity is a God-based faith in which God reveals Himself through the person of Jesus Christ. Not only does Jesus reveal God, He also reveals what it means to be perfectly human.  He was as fully human as He was divine.

As a human being, Jesus provides us with a model of perfect human faith. His example shows what is meant by living with God as our ultimate concern. The ultimate concern of Christ was to seek His Father’s will and pleasure.   In John 14:31 He said “I love the Father and do exactly as the Father commanded Me.”  In John 15:10 he said “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” 

We see how Jesus lived out this ultimate concern through in Gospels, through four axes of faith (perception, action, community, and time) and eight points of those four axes (knowledge, passion, submission, outer action, self-awareness, community, heritage and hope.).

In the axis of perception, He experienced God and the world through seeking both objective knowledge and subjective experience. 

He was a scholar of the Scriptures and the world around Him. He was able to hold his own among the intellectuals of his day, even at a very young age. He encouraged his disciples and his opponents to study the Bible.  He reasoned with his opponents—he did not just preach at them, and understood their questions and arguments.  Even on the day of his resurrection as he walked with believers on the road to Emmaus, He pointed them back to the Scriptures.

He was also a student of people.  He knew the hearts of men not only from divine revelation as good, but from personal observation, as He grew in wisdom and in stature. He was a student of nature as well.  The examples He used in His teachings show this. He paid attention to the movements of the  birds of the air and the lilies of the field.  He was familiar with the works of men of his day, including farming, fishing, shepherding—the most common occupations of His day.

He did not just take authority for granted, but challenged authority with critical thinking.  Even so, He took the Word of God as His final authority, and used it as a basis for His thinking.

Jesus did not just perceive God and the world with his mind; he sought to understand God and the world with passion and emotional involvement. People were not bugs to be studied from a distance, but lives to be experience though empathy and compassion.  He was also passionate, and deeply cherishing the emotional and subjective experience of His father. 

He broke tradition among the Jews in not addressing God simply as His sovereign king, but also calling him “Abba”—daddy.  For all his life, He reveled in a passionate, emotional connection with the Presence of God, which was only broken on the Cross.  The shock of that emotional separation caused Him to cry out ‘my God, why have you forsaken me,” using the words of Psalm 22.

He did not just pray to God to receive from Him, but to experience His presence.  He spent time every morning and evening in regular contact with the Spirit of God. He listened to and obeyed the Spirit, and had supernatural experiences and visitations from angels. He was as much a mystic as a scholar, and stayed in contact with God through the mind and the heart.  

In the axis of habits.  He practiced both inner submission and  activism. 

Jesus spend much time in submission and silence.  He did not begin His earthly ministry until the age of thirty,  waiting for God’s time instead of rushing ahead.  Whenever there was a time of particular peril or opportunity, His first reaction was to seek God in prayer. He prayed and fasted for forty days to experience God’s presence in His life.   He made a daily habit of submission, silence and stillness.  He attended worship not only to preach, but sometimes just to sit in silence and worship among the crowd.

But when the time came to act, He acted decisively. He spoke out against injustice and hypocrisy.  Risking his own life, he drove the moneychangers out of the temple.  He healed the sick  raised the dead,  cast out demons, and performed miracles by the power of God.  He was exemplary in his forgiveness and compassion to others. 

In the axis of community, he was both self-aware and compassionately involved in community. 

His self-awareness is shown especially John’s gospel, which is full of statements about Himself.  “I am the door.” “I am the Good Shepherd.” I am the light of the World.” I am the way, the truth and the Life.” His assurance of Who He was in God gave him the power to stand up against the ridicule and slander of the religious leaders.

Nevertheless, He entered fully into soul friendship. He made it his practice to take His disciples with Him everywhere. In spite of being rejected by the religious leaders, He remained a faithful practicing Jew, fully participating in public worship.  He was surrounded by crowds most of the time. 

In the axis of time, Jesus respected the past, present, and future. 

He was in touch with his tradition, identifying Himself as first being in the tradition of the prophets of Israel. He often told his disciples that He had come first to the House of Israel. He identified Himself with Abraham, David, Moses, and Jonah.  He did not reject that tradition, but built upon it, emphasizing the connections between His teaching and the tradition of the past.

He was not stuck in the past, however. He was not afraid to change traditions when they needed to be changed. One of His favorite phrases was “You have heard it said. . . but I say.”

He connected with the future through practical hope. He talked to his disciples about heaven, promising that He would be with them there forever.  He believed that this world would get better, too.  He preached the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. He believed in his own resurrection and through His triumphant return the scattered and immature disciples who followed Him would be turned into a force so strong that “the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”

Faith in Christ is important, but just as important is that we emulate His faith in every way we can.

Where do you have the faith of Christ in your own life?  Where do you see yourself falling short?  Where else do we see Christ connecting with His Father in faith.

Let’s talk about it.  Write your comments below.