Heroes of Faith

Spirituality Column - #17 – March 6, 2007
Current! In Carmel newspaper

Heroes of Faith
By Bob Walters

C.S. Lewis once spoke of a sculptor’s chisel; how the violence of hammer hitting chisel against a rough surface eventually makes a perfect shape. It was a Christian metaphor for how God shapes us with suffering.

Suffering? Christ? What about abiding love and salvation from our sins? Sure He suffered, but that was so we’d have neat stuff and great lives and …

Please.

The truest but most overlooked (and undersold) passages in the Bible are the ones where Christ assures us that being with Him in this world will create for us persecution, and no exclusion from suffering. It’s not a message the prospering “health and wealth” TV preachers sell. If our faith is right, they fervently preach, God will bless us with tangible evidence of His love.

Balderdash.

Throughout the New Testament, Jesus not only tells us to expect exactly the opposite (John 16:33); He tells us God wants the opposite from us as well.

Christ doesn’t want our “stuff;” He wants our faith. In perfect symmetry, Christ doesn’t promise us “stuff;” He promises His faithfulness.

In John 11 Lazarus is raised from the dead; showing a large, Jewish crowd that Jesus could defeat death; it was a miracle. But perhaps the greater and more instructive element of that story comes earlier, when Lazarus’s sisters Mary and Martha must believe that Jesus can save their brother (John 11:4, 25), even after Lazarus is buried.

Here is what Christ is asking us: Can we have faith in His love amid a world that constantly throws at us suffering we cannot possibly understand?

Christ saved us from our sins, but not from our suffering. Suffering, or not suffering, isn’t finally the point; faith in Him and the eternal life He promises is the point.

Faith is what makes a hero in Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), a Carmel resident, asks those Christians who disagree with him to pray that he gets a new car.