Sources

The Root of Faith (Radix Fidem) is in the heart; the Sources of Faith are the hand of God in your environment.

Some of you may have been following my conversation with Steven on various points of faith and religion. God can use anyone, including someone as deeply flawed as me. God uses broken vessels because there aren’t any other kind in this world. He always initiates repairs, but the process is never finished until after we leave this world. Christ alone died sinless.

So the Lord can use anyone to ask the right questions, or simply to trigger a revealing moment when the heart is able to break through a long-standing mental barrier. It’s moments like that when I realize this or that issue might require a fresh discussion because even I wasn’t all that clear about it in the past. As always, this is a matter of opening my faith to your examination, not promoting my religion as the model for all humanity. Radix Fidem isn’t religion, but a path to building your own religion. I take it for granted that I cannot help everyone — indeed, I expect it’s very few. I’m called to help some of those who can’t find Christ in the mainstream. I’m out on the slender edge of what the mainstream even recognizes.

By the same token, I’m obliged to stay on the path I see God drawing for me. Conviction is a fancy word to indicate things God has carved into our souls too deeply to ignore. You need to recognize your own, and don’t be surprised if it means drawing boundaries — that business of moral domain. We are all feudal servants to God (ANE feudalism), and He delivers to each of us a portion of His eternal domain to occupy and develop for His glory. That naturally excludes some territory that is none of my concern.

So I press the issue of heart-led awareness as a sort of goal, an indicator of something we all have to explore. Included in this is the firm assurance that fellowship in faith excludes those who don’t take Scripture seriously. We can argue about what it says, but we cannot argue with what it demands of us. While discussion of those demands will inevitably sound like doctrine at times, the point is that I take the Bible as the official record of God’s revelation. We are bound to agree with it.

That does not exclude the vast ocean of ideas that arise out of pagan sources. Where did Abraham get his basic assumptions about God? It was a mixed bag of ancient religious notions. God was able to penetrate this stuff with sufficient clarity that Abraham knew his calling and was able to obey. Like all of us, he had his flaws and made mistakes, but in the end, God recommended him as a model of faith. And Moses? He took Abraham’s intellectual legacy and added a lot Egyptian religious notions, too. It doesn’t take a genius to trace the differences between Abraham’s religious language and that of Moses, though it does take a bit of education. I’m hardly the first person to notice this; I learned it from far better scholars. And on top of all that, Moses also spent a chunk of his life with Jethro, a priest with yet another flavor of religious background.

What Moses produced was not an eclectic intellectual exercise in religion. He did spend that time with God on the mountain. Moses had a direct encounter with God’s Spirit, but he also came from a culture that already took the heart seriously as a faculty superior to the brain. So we know that his heart was ascendant in the process of wading through the influences and recognizing what was true. All truth is God’s truth; to the degree something from any source at all reflects His glory, it is acceptable. The heart knows — it’s the brain that needs training.

Please note for a moment that Scripture also takes seriously the concept that your heart can be wrong (2 Chronicles 25:2). That is, your heart can hold false or divided loyalties. In Hebrew thinking, the heart was the seat of the will, as many scholars can tell you. That’s where commitments reside and decisions are made. Of course, it’s hard to come up with clinical discussion here because the heart itself is a symbolic image, but the faculty of faith (commitment) in your heart can be wrong. Still, the Spirit of God who gives life to our dead spirits is never wrong. But He speaks through the heart into our awareness. Clarity comes from a desire, and consistent intent to obey.

In terms of our human psychology, that could be expressed as simply following your own conscience, but we have to note that the conscience is merely the mind’s own awareness of conviction, not conviction itself. Still, the path to peace with God is obeying your conscience until the conscience discovers by experience what is or is not from faith. Your conscience is alive and needs nurture and development. At some point you can begin to shift your awareness into your heart and learn to test your convictions with less drama and trauma. You can begin to discern more accurately what faith demands of you.

You learn to distrust reason, not wholly, but simply as matter of flesh, same as your various fleshly appetites. They aren’t evil, but they are unrestrained. They have no inherent recognition of moral priorities. Moving your awareness into the heart tends to unite our various internal voices and heal the rifts and conflicts. Still, the intellect is under the Curse of the Fall as the pinnacle of human nature without God. It would naturally get some things right and plenty of things wrong, because it can neither generate nor properly discern moral truth on its own. Moral truth is essentially revealed from the God who makes all things. The universe is built on His character, and only our hearts are capable of seeing that character in the world around us.

Pursue His character wherever you discern it. The world around us is loaded with a very human mixture of truth and deception. Your answer will never be precisely the same as mine. Each of us has to decide what differences and how much difference is a distraction and hindrance to our calling. Fellowship will always be limited as long as we remain in the flesh. As long as you can tolerate what I write, I’m ready to be your pastor/elder. The boundaries are for you to draw internally, as they are for me.