Letter: Take your faith seriously

Hello, you. I know how you feel. You're so comfortable with the world, comfortable with life. Nothing too great & exciting, but even so, nothing so desperately troubling that you feel the need to humbly pray to God and read the Bible. You're okay with going to church, especially when your friends are there, and you're also okay with saying a quick prayer and maybe reading a small bite of the Bible before you sleep. You enjoy youth camps, you enjoy the emotional highs you come out with, you enjoy the games played, the funny pictures taken, the special t-shirt you get. So yes of course, you'd say you enjoy being a Christian. But if you didn't have friends around you who also go to church, if you get too busy with the world to pray and read the Bible, if youth camps aren't fun and emotionally exciting enough, would you reconsider how much you enjoy Christianity?


Is your Christian faith really about God? Is your Christian faith really about Christ? Is your Christian faith strong enough to propel you to fight for a close relationship with God even in comfortable times when you don't feel troubled, even when you have few friends in church, even when your church sings only hymns whose lyrics you don't understand and don't get goosebumps singing? If your faith is really about God, nothing else matters and nothing in this world will do. If your faith is the result of having really "tasted and seen that the LORD is good" and seeing that knowing Jesus has "all-surpassing worth" compared to anything the world can give, then it should be the very centre of your being, giving light to every other area of your life, infusing and permeating every second of your day. It should be the teabag that colours the waters of your whole life. More magnificently, it should be the sun in the solar system of your life, the source of all energy. The Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Neptune... the planets in your life however distant will be illuminated and will only be made sense of in the light of Christ your centre.

You probably think this kind of faith-filled life is only for pastors and 'holy people'. But why is it automatically bad? What does the world, which doesn't take Jesus seriously, have, that is so desirable you cannot leave it? Where is the everlasting satisfaction of living empty ordinary lives in the world? Have you really thought about your destination in eternity? what you're going to spend your temporary time on earth doing, and whether you will sit on your rocking chair decades from now, old and frail, and really mean it when you say, "I have lived well, and meaningfully"? What on earth are you here for? Did you just emerge here from your mother's womb as a multitude of uniform cells with no other purpose than to slog around and thoughtlessly demonstrate scientific laws? Don't the whispers of love, peace and joy defy the science you learn, and show you that there is a divine reality beyond us, which you are called to be a part of? And if you know you are called to that divine reality, it means you throw your entire life into it. You jump in - your whole body into the waters of truth, not just touching with your tiptoes. Otherwise, you surrender your life wholly to the wasteful, temporal clutches of this temporary world. It's one or the other.

I exhort you, friend, to think hard. Your faith is not about emotions alone. Your faith is not just about fuzzy sensations of the heart. And your faith is not only a pick-me-up method when you're down in the dirt, stressed out about life, and want to melt away your worries with Christian songs and the Psalms. Your faith is something I implore you to think hard about. When I was younger I didn't think very much about faith. It was a cool part of my life, a lovely identity to call myself a Christian. I had a genuine relationship with God, as you probably do too. But there was some hard barrier in the soil of my heart that prevented my faith roots from growing deeper. That hard barrier in the soil was apathy: a lack of concern about trying to know God. A lack of true, God-centred enthusiasm about my faith. I enjoyed reading Psalms and maybe the Gospels too, but when I encountered a Bible verse I didn't quite understand, I didn't bother digging deeper. When I didn't feel close to God, I didn't bother to persistently ask God to make His presence clearer, to give me vision, to take away my blindness and deafness of heart, to lift the clouds so I could see Him better. My faith just didn't matter enough to me in that stage of maturity.

Of course, I cannot say of myself that my faith matters 'enough' to me yet: It's only when I meet God face to face that I'll be perfect in every way. As I grow closer to God day by day, my faith will be perfected in Jesus. But there's no time in life that's too early to start taking your faith more seriously.

Remember: the heart of your faith is not the enviable fun of youth camps, the tear-jerking songs, the poetic Bible verses handlettered nicely as your phone wallpaper. It's not even your routine of reading a page of the Bible a day, or saying grace before your food. The heart is not the particular church gathering you go to each week, and it's not even the nice Christian friends you have in church. The heart of your faith is Jesus Christ. The heart of your faith is God. God, who sent His one and only Son to die for us, sinful though we were, to ransom us; to set us free, to make us new, to enable us to live lives that matter in the scope of eternity. This heart of your faith will move you and change you so dramatically that you align everything in your life to God. Regardless of hypocritical friends in church or cold & long Sunday services, you persevere and press on to cling on to God, knowing He alone is the true portion and true reward of your faith. That's when our faith matters: when it's really about God.

When you enjoy youth camps, you celebrate God. When you tear up and cry desperately during a song that has touched your heart, you are crying out for God. When you pray and read the Bible as a daily routine, you are meeting with God, the Creator King of the Universe, without whom all this world around us makes no sense. And when, with God's help, He has opened our eyes to this beautiful reality, our faith will be able to stand any trial. For we know God is with us, and He is all we need for eternity.

I implore you, friend, and I remind myself wholeheartedly, to take faith seriously.

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