Articles

It has been fashionable for some time now to affirm that all religions are beautiful and true, each in its own way. People are prone to say something like “I believe what I believe, and that’s good for me. You believe what you believe, and that’s good for you.” This notion even has increasingly crept into the church, where Christians, for fear of being thought bigoted or unkind, are reluctant to say that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to true life.

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Sin is a word and concept that many Christians have grown so familiar with that they risk forgetting all that it means. Like a word we’ve turned over in our minds so many times that it has begun to seem unreal, the idea of sin can seem totally disconnected from our experience. We need sometimes to be reminded of what sin is and of its real, destructive power.

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Whether in education, medicine, the trades, or a host of other fields, professional development usually includes a period of apprenticeship. It is not surprising when a teacher in a classroom delegates instructional responsibilities to a student teacher or when a physician asks a medical resident to take the lead in an examination. We understand that this is a necessary part of how people learn the skills of the field they are entering.

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Shortly before Jesus’ trial and crucifixion, the Gospel writers tell us of an encounter that is at once strikingly intimate and profoundly strange. As John records it, Mary the sister of Lazarus—the man Jesus had raised from the dead not long before—came to Jesus while He was eating with Lazarus and other guests, “took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair” (John 12:3).

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On one occasion, Jesus told the story of a lost child (Luke 15:11–32). Many of us are familiar with this parable, in which the Prodigal Son left his father’s home and squandered his inheritance through reckless living—and then, upon the son’s sorrowful return, his father met him with tremendous compassion and rejoicing.

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In the psychological realm, the word of our age is self. From self-care to self-talk to self-esteem, hardly a day passes when broadcasts, podcasts, podiums, and even pulpits fail to remind us that our fundamental problem is a dearth of self-regard. And the answer, we are told, lies in telling ourselves that we are lovable: “It doesn’t matter what I do. It doesn’t matter who I am. I am a lovable person.”

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The story is told of a young pastor who, in his first pastorate in Philadelphia, was visited by a group from his congregation. Coming into his home, one of the members told the minister, “You aren’t a strong preacher. In the usual order of things, you will fail here. But a little group of us have decided to meet every Sunday morning to pray for God’s blessing upon you.” In God’s providence, that little Sunday-morning prayer group grew to one thousand people in number. And it was that group and that prayer meeting which underpinned the ministry of J. Wilbur Chapman, one of the great American preachers around the turn of the twentieth century.

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Jesus Christ’s teaching about possessions is radical. It confronts both the selfish society in which we live and the sleeping church, which has so often gone with the flow of the world’s anxieties and greed. If the church is to be a shaft of light in the world’s darkness, then those who follow Christ will need to demonstrate a godly outlook toward worldly goods by embracing an absolute trust in the Father’s provision.

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To one degree or another, everyone has faith. Anyone who has sat down in a barber’s chair has exercised faith in the barber’s skill. Anyone who has used an app to send money has trusted that it will get to the right person. But when it comes to the realm of religious experience, all kinds of spurious notions about faith abound. Indeed, one of the great barriers to an experience of true faith in God is confusion about what that faith actually is.

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There’s something about one year ending and another beginning that encourages reflection on what life is really about. As we reflect on the previous year’s joys and disappointments and wonder at what the coming year might bring, we often are more ready than usual to face questions about mortality and significance. Such musing may lead us to resolutions for good behavior—but it would be better if it led us first to pray the prayer of Moses in Psalm 90:12: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”

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