Last week, along with going to a good church—where often one first learns to belong and then believe, we suggested ten essential beliefs for building a Christian life and legacy. In part 1 we noted the first five—hope, grace, humility, the fear of the Lord, and sin—and here are the remaining five:
- Spirituality, a word that can mean many things to many people, is still a good word to establish a point of common ground (regardless of ones spiritual background) and lead them toward Christ. The approach is similar to that which Paul used in Acts 17:22-24 in beginning with the “unknown God” and then proceeding to fill in the blanks.
“Spirituality is the attention we give to our souls, to the invisible interior of our lives that is the core of our identity, these image-of-God souls that comprise our uniqueness and glory…it is the concern we have for the invisibility that inheres [or that is inherent] in every visibility, for the interior that provides content to every exterior…True spirituality, Christian spirituality, takes attention off ourselves and focuses it on another, on Jesus.”
Eugene H. Peterson, Subversive Spirituality
- Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is God in the flesh and the only way to connect spiritually with the Heavenly Father. Although there are many roads that may lead one to Christ, there is only one way to God and that is through Christ (John 14:6).
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
- The Cross of Christ was necessary in dealing with the guilt and blame associated with sin. Christ’s payment for sins shows that we are loved by God and have eternal significance (John 3:16; 2 Cor. 5:18-21).
“Secular therapies too often…repudiate any sense of personal guilt. In particular, both cognitive therapy and Rogerian therapy seem to minimize the negative personal or individual moral dimensions of the human situation by rejecting ideas such as blame or guilt and the vital, related notion of repentance…The cross is, and must be, the ultimate ground of Christian confidence [self-worth]…Through the cross of Christ we are restored to fellowship with our Father God, with all the benefits this brings to us…That is how much he values us. He gives everything he has and everything he is for us. That thought must allow us to walk tall, secure in the fatherly love of God.”
Johanna and Alister McGrath, Self-esteem: The Cross and Christian Confidence
- Faith, an important part of our spirituality, is essential to pleasing God and is a gift that must be cultivated (Hebrews 11:1-6; Eph. 2:8-9).
“There is but one way in which God should be loved, and that is to take no step except with Him and for Him, and to follow, with a generous self-abandonment, everything which He requires.”
Francois Fenelon, The Many Aspects of Self-Denial: Full of Self, Empty of God
“Faith is the ‘yes’ of the heart, a conviction on which one stakes one’s life.”
Martin Luther, “Martin Luther — The Early Years,” Christian History, no. 34.
“Faith and works should travel side by side, step answering to step, like the legs of men walking. First faith, and then works; and then faith again, and then works again — until you can scarcely distinguish which is one and which is the other.”
William Booth, The Founders’ Messages to Soldiers
- Scripture provides us with God’s answers to life’s greatest questions: meaning, origin, destiny, and, for the purposes of this post, morality. Morals and values, then, must be rooted ultimately in ethics derived from the authority of God as revealed in the Bible rather than the popular mores of a given society or culture.
“If society’s values and morality do not spring from an eternal source, that society will be impoverished.”
George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury
“In every generation the Bible will challenge the values of the age and its definition of success.”
Haddon Robinson, in Leadership, Vol. 14, no. 2
“I prayed for Faith, and thought that some day Faith would come down and strike me like lightening. But Faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, ‘Now Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.’ I had closed my Bible, and prayed for Faith. I now opened my Bible, and began to study, and Faith has been growing ever since.”
Dwight L. Moody in Leadership, Vol. 10, no. 4