Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 18, 2007
CHRIST AT THE CENTER:
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT – FAITH
Scripture: I
Corinthians 12; Hebrews 11
INTRODUCTION
As we continue to explore The
Gifts of the Spirit during this Lenten season, having talked together about
hospitality, unity, wisdom and knowledge, today we’re going to concentrate our
minds and hearts on the gift of faith.
The Catholic theologian
Joseph Fort Newton once said that “Belief is a concept held in the mind, while
faith is a fire that burns in the heart.”
The truth is that we cannot embrace the Christian faith without the full
engagement of both our minds and our hearts.
But sometimes we lose sight
of that reality, and tilt all the way over toward head knowledge, declaring
that what we think, know and believe about the Bible, the doctrines, the
confessions and the creeds is the most important thing…or, we lean in the other
direction toward the emotions and experiences deep down in our souls, saying
that what we feel about the faith is the real goal.
I have here in my hands a
copy of Thayers Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, and if we turn to the word “faith,” which in the
Greek language is “pistis,” recorded more than 140 times from the Gospel of
Matthew to the Book of Revelation, the definition literally combines both what
we believe in our minds and what we feel in our hearts this way: “faith – a conviction or belief respecting
our relationship to God and divine things…and, trust and holy fervor born of
faith within us” (page 512).
I
Now, that may be more than
you bargained for this morning regarding definitions. But I think all of this has profound
implications for us as Christians who seek to follow Jesus Christ in our
journey of faith.
It began for me, as it did
for many of you, when we were children and our parents taught us to pray and to
read the scriptures. This is a copy of
Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible, which my mother and father gave to me in 1953
when I was baptized out on
That is how my own faith
journey began, and in the words of the Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones, “I am
most of all thankful for my birthplace and early nurture in the warm atmosphere
of a spiritually-minded home, thankful indeed that from the cradle I was
saturated with the Bible and immersed in an environment of religious experience
and reality…there is nothing I would ever exchange for that.”
You see, in the Presbyterian
Church we pay attention to both the head and the heart as our children grow up
in the faith. And in this congregation,
as our young people come to what John Calvin called “the age of discretion,”
after a year of Bible study, exploration of Jesus’ life, death and
resurrection, and deeper reflection on the creeds and church history, including
the Reformed Tradition, we confirm them at the age of 13 or 14 when they make
their own public confession of faith on Palm Sunday.
Those Sunday morning classes
and worship services for our teenagers are mixed together with retreats,
mission trips and small group experiences which nurture both the head and the
heart, the mind and the soul. And so it
can be for all of us who desire to grow and go deeper into what we
believe. There are a myriad of
opportunities here for people of all ages, and for folks who find themselves at
different stages along the way in their journey of faith.
But the spiritual bottom line
is always the same – to focus our lives on Christ at the center, to open our
hearts and minds to His presence and peace, to receive the gift of faith that
the Lord offers to all of us, and to discover His grace which is sufficient for
our every need.
II
Now as you may know, there
are those on the outside looking in who say that we Presbyterians tend to be
too formal, rather traditional and not all that emotional in the way that we
“do church.” Some even describe us as
the “chosen frozen people of God,” and they wonder if we really know what it
means and how it feels to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Dr. Will Willimon, for many
years chaplain at
“I was in a meeting not long ago where
persons gave testimonies about their religious experiences. One man rose and said ‘I was a Methodist for
38 years before anybody ever told me about Jesus.’
Now what he may have meant to say was
‘I belonged to a church for 38 years before I really experienced my faith and
began to live it.’ I can understand such
delayed response.
But I cannot understand the attitude
which I am afraid this man meant to express.
I am afraid that he was speaking as if he had just begun to hear the
real truth about God. And I wanted every
person who endured him in all of his years growing up in church school, every
preacher who had tried to preach the gospel to him, every Christian who had
tried to tell him about Jesus, to rise up and ask ‘What do you think we were
trying to get into your head for all those 38 years?’”
Lest we Presbyterians and
Methodists become too defensive, the same thing is often said about the other
mainline Protestant denominations – lots of order but not enough ardor. A long list of rules and regulations but
short shrift given to hand clapping, let-it-all-loose celebration, and on and
on it goes.
But sometimes the criticism
comes from the opposite direction, as was the case with Malcolm Muggeridge, the
former agnostic and editor of Punch Magazine who became a Christian through the
witness of Mother Teresa. Muggeridge had
a sense of humor, and this was his description of a life-long friend, whom he
said was “the quintessential Anglican who loved God with his whole heart and
doubted Him with his whole mind.”
The truth is, we cannot
receive the gift of faith, believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ and become
fervent disciples all the days of our lives without fully entrusting both our
hearts and our minds to Him. John Calvin
described it this way: “Faith… cannot be
grasped by reason and memory only but is fully understood when it possesses the
whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.”
III
That’s what the Apostle Paul
wrote to the Corinthians about the gift of faith, and that’s what Jesus Himself
said was the greatest thing, the most important thing of all: To love the Lord your God with all your
heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27).
And that is why, in this
church, we pay attention to both dimensions of who we are and the way God
created us to be related to Him through His Son our Savior Jesus – to believe
with our minds and to trust in our hearts as we receive the gift of faith,
which is our salvation.
Every person who joins this
congregation is asked publicly before the Session to re-affirm their faith in
Jesus Christ as the Lord of their life.
And every Sunday morning, just before the Benediction, we invite anyone
who is thinking about committing their life to Christ to come forward so that
we can talk together about that centrally important decision of faith.
If that is what you have come
here looking for and hoping for today, then you are in the right place at the
right time to say “Yes” to the Lord who has called all of us to follow Him.
In one of the first sermons I
ever preached from this pulpit, I told you the story about a tight-rope walker
named Harry Blondin, who back in the 1920’s became famous for a stunt that
brought him national attention.
He announced in advance that
on a Saturday afternoon, he would walk across
Everyone cheered, and Blondin
bowed. But then he called out loud to
those gathered there, “Do you believe I can do it again?” The voices cheered louder, and one man spoke
up for them all, “Yes, yes, I believe that you can!” Blondin looked him right in the eye and said
“Then get into the wheelbarrow sir, because we’re going across together.”
I don’t know how that story
turned out, but I do know for certain that when Jesus Christ calls a person to
follow Him, we must believe in our minds and trust with our hearts that He will
guide us and provide us with all that we need as He leads us forward into the
future saying “Be not afraid.”
CONCLUSION
And that, my friends, is what
Hebrews chapter 11 tells us about putting our faith into action. The author begins with these words:
Now
faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
And then we read the long
list of names of faithful men and women who trusted their lives to the Lord –
Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab,
Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jepthah, David and Samuel and all the others – who faced
trouble, suffering, danger, death and all the powers of darkness, but
Through faith, conquered kingdoms, enforced justice,
received promises…and won strength out of weakness
(Hebrews
11:33-34)
Do you know what that
means? It means that the Gift of Faith
which we have received isn’t supposed to be just a cozy relationship between us
and Jesus. The gift of faith, given to
all who believe, is what God wants us to share with a world in desperate need
of His love and grace, His power and peace, His forgiveness and reconciliation,
His hope and salvation.
And the question is: “If we,
as people of faith, don’t go out there and do that, who else will?”
In the name of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.