What Faith Can Do for You!

Dear Friends,

I’ve been out of town the last couple of weeks and I missed sending my regular email communication with you.  Last Sunday we started our new series of studies entitled “Heroes by Faith.”  The goal of this series is to inspire us to be heroic in our lives because of our faith.  Faith can make heroes of us all!  Here’s one example:

I recently read about A. N. Wilson’s exciting turnaround.  He is a brilliant philosopher, and many hoped he would become the next C. S. Lewis, an intellectual champion for the Christian Faith.  But as a young man, he began to question his faith. By his thirties, he had lost all religious belief and publicly repudiated his Christianity.  He not only became an atheist, but he relished the role of a harsh critic not only of Christianity but of any faith in God at all.  Wilson even wrote a book claiming Jesus was a failed messianic prophet (2004′s Jesus). But then, praise God, he experienced a major turnaround in his life.  On the Saturday before Easter in 2009, he wrote a shocking article for London’s prestigious newspaper, The Daily Mail, in which he detailed his return to faith.  It all began with his participation in a Palm Sunday service. He writes:

When I took part in the procession last Sunday and heard the Gospel being chanted, I assented to it with complete simplicity. My own return to faith has surprised no one more than myself. Why did I return to it? Partially, perhaps it is no more than the confidence I have gained with age. Rather than being cowed by them, I relish the notion that, by asserting a belief in the risen Christ, I am defying all the liberal clever-clogs on the block. …

But there is more to it than that. My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known—not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die. …

Sadly, [the secularists] have all but accepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity, and that the few intelligent people left in the churches are there only for the music or believe it all in some symbolic or contorted way which, when examined, turns out not to be belief after all. As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational.

Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat. The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story… Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it. But an even stronger argument is the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives—the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle on a daily basis, the man, woman, or child next to you in church tomorrow morning.

A.N. Wilson made a heroic turnaround in his life because of the heroic faith of ordinary men and women who lived out the blessed realities of being a follower of Jesus.  Do you need a turnaround in your life?  Do you know someone who does?  This is one of the many great things faith can do for you!  Please prioritize being a part of this series.  This Sunday we’ll look at the first hero of faith in the Bible, a man named Abel.  See you then!

Love in Jesus,

Pastor John