Faith matters - mixed messages
- Steve Richards
- Aug 7, 2020
- 2 min read
We’ve just visited the North Cotswolds; the furthest from home that we have travelled since January. Looking for somewhere to sit in Broadway, we found two suitable benches pleasantly situated on the main street. However, on each of them was stuck a notice warning that the wooden surface held a potential risk for COVID-19 transmission, and consequently it was best not to use them. Immediately behind the benches was an outdoor eatery complete with wicker chairs and tables where, doubtless, the proprietors are hoping for people to heed the government’s slogan ‘eat out to help Out’.
Life is full of mixed messages, none more so than with matters of faith. I was confronted with these, when, some decades ago, I started to take seriously the reality of God and how I might actually be accountable to him. Where was I to go for guidance? What about all of the different church denominations – C of E, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Methodist etc. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christadelphians, Mormons etc were wanting to add to the mix. And then there were the non-Christian ones: Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and loads I’ve never heard of. I certainly knew that two or three claimed an exclusivity to truth which, if they were correct, would mean all the others were wrong. Could I use this as a logical excuse to relieve me from pursuing matters further?
This would actually have been faulty logic. Why should a number of claims to exclusivity preclude one of them from being valid? If someone pursues this line of thinking by insisting that it does, then they are simply setting themselves up as making an exclusive claim of their own!
Christianity recognises that finite, human intellectual reasoning doesn’t possess the ability to get us to the God of truth. Rather, what we need is the God of truth to get to us! Some people might demand, ‘Then why doesn’t he?’ The first chapter in the Gospel of John reveals that he has done just this, ‘Grace and truth has come to us by Jesus Christ’. The same chapter says that this Jesus is God shown to us as a human person. In this way, we can get a handle on what God is really like. We can look at Jesus’ words, claims and actions and see whether he is a fraud or not. It’s important that we know whether he is, because he says that he is the truth personified and will not tolerate any rivals to the title.
Going back to those decades when I was wrestling with the mixed messages of faith, I came to see that there was no mileage in trying to sort out which denomination or which religion to sign up to. I simply needed to accept Jesus’ invitation: ‘Come to me all you who are heavy laden and burdened and I will give you rest for your souls’. It is true that you may hear mixed messages about Jesus with quotes from various Scriptures. We can live with this, so long as we understand that Jesus is still calling us to himself and not just a discussion about him.