Here’s today’s set list of music at the Awakening Service at FCC. This will be linked to The Worship Community.com blog where other worship bloggers post their setlists.
Here’s what we did:
Your Grace is Enough
Baptism of Carley Duncan!
All Because of Jesus
Hands of the Healer
In Jesus’ Name
Message: Part one of Growth (on the Fruit of the Spirit)
From the Inside Out
Lead Me to the Cross (Communion)
God has always been the initiator of relationships. God SPOKE and amazing things happened.
But in order to make humankind He created something unique, for we are the embodiment of the image of God.
And then He gave us an overall purpose to populate and exercise dominion.
And He gave us a unique purpose which can only be found in relationship to God:
If You can use anything, Lord, You can use me.
If You can use me, Lord, You can use anything.
Worship always evokes a response to join God in His work.
I have no problem being demonstrative in my worship. My audience is God. But I do struggle with teaching others to do the same. Because I know it’s uncomfortable at first. But it’s so freeing soon after.
We have to worship with more than our mind. It reflects our “whole worship” of living for God in all areas of our life. Raising my hands in particular is meaningful to me because that is how I say (while I’m singing or listening) with my body, “I need You Lord. I depend on You. Like a child is dependent on a parent, I long for Your care, Your provision.” It’s not to impress other people. Frankly I don’t want it to distract someone else so I probably do it less than I want to or feel like it. What do you think?
In “Experiencing God,” Henry Blackaby suggests there are 7 realities in the process of experiencing Goed.
How have you “experienced God?” Like Blackaby suggests or in different ways?
Here’s a recap: Modern Christianity has misunderstood the word “faith” for primarily “head knowledge agreement with certian principles or truths.” Yet, there are other ways we should understand faith.
Faith as assensus: faith as belief which I mentioned above.
Faith as Fiducia: “trust” in God. Faith as trust is like floating in a deep ocean.
Faith as Fidelitas: “fidelity.” Faith as fidelity means loyalty, allegiance, the commitment of self at the deepest level, the commitment of the “heart.”
4. Faith as visio: The closest English equivalent is “vision,” which suggests that faith is a way of seeing. In particular, this is faith as a way of seeing “what is.”
Of course, there are 3 ways we can see and each goes with a particular way of responding to life. First, we can see reality as hostile and threatening. God is the one who is going to get us–unless we offer the right sacrifices, behave the right way, or believe the right things.
Second, we can see indifferently. This is the modern secular viewpoint that what is just is. Less paranoid than the first but basically characterized by the here and now which leads to being concerned primarily for ourselves and those who are most important to us.
Third, we can see “what is” as life-giving and nourishing. This is seeing reality as gracious, the way Jesus spoke about the birds and the lilies. God is generous. This way of seeing makes possible a different response to life. It leads to radical trust and frees us from anxiety and self-preoccupation.
Thus, faith as visio is seeing reality as gracious. Its opposite is seeing reality as hostile and threatening or as indifferent. This is closely related to fiducia, as trust. What it adds, though, is that how we see reality and our ability to trust are connected to each other.
Significantly, the last 3 understandings of faith are all relational. Where did we go wrong? Certainly Martin Luther’s faith was not primarily assensus. He is responsible for making “faith” so central to the Christian vocabulary. Luther started with assensus aplenty but a transformation occurred through an experience of radical grace that transformed how he saw (visio), led him to see that faith was about trusting God (fiducia), and led him to a life of faithfulness (fidelitas) to God. For Luther, saving faith was not assensus. It was about visio, fiducia, and fidelitas.
That is not to say that assensus doesn’t play a role. There ARE affirmations that are central to the Christian faith. In other words, there are ESSENTIALS to the Christian faith that we must believe, assensus. But how many people do you know who “accepted Christ” and said the “sinner’s prayer” but have no fiducia, fidelitas, or visio in God? TONS! That’s the problem. We’ve compartmentalized our “beliefs” from our “actions” and our attitudes.
So what kind of faith do you have? Do you merely have the “head knowledge” down? The “facts” about God and Jesus and the Bible? Or do you have that on top of radically trusting God to the point that it’s changed who you are and how you treat others.
2. Faith as Fiducia: There is no close word for faith as fiducia in English except for perhaps “fiduciary,” which doesn’t get us very close. Fiducia is faith as radical “trust” in God. IT DOES NOT MEAN TRUSTING IN THE TRUTH OF A SET OF STATEMENTS ABOUT GOD. That would simply be assensus under a different name.
Faith as trust is like floating in a deep ocean. That metaphor comes from 19th century Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard. Faith is like floating in 70,000 fathoms of water. If you struggle, if you tense up and thrash about, you will eventually sink. But if you relax and trust, you will float. It’s like the story of Peter walking on the water with Jesus–when he began to be afraid and take his eyes off Jesus, he began to sink. Faith as trust is trusting in the buoyancy of God. A biblical metaphor that fits fiducia would be trusting God as our Rock or Fortress. We trust in God as the one we rely on. He is our foundation and safe place.
The opposite of faith as fiducia is not doubt or disbelief, but mistrust. More provocatively, its opposite is “anxiety” or “worry.” Little faith and anxiety go together. If you are anxious, you have little faith. Thus we can measure our degree of faith as trust by the amount of anxiety in our lives. Can you see why faith as radical trust has great transforming power?
3. Faith as Fidelitas: The closest English equivalent is faith as ”fidelity.” This is faith as “faithfulness” to our relationship with God. It means what faithfulness is supposed to be in a marriage: we are faithful to our spouse. Faith as fidelity means loyalty, allegiance, the commitment of self at the deepest level, the commitment of the “heart.”
Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to STATEMENTS ABOUT GOD. Its opposite is not doubt or disbelief. Rather, as in a human relationship, its opposite is infidelity. The Bible uses the metaphor of adultery. Another vivid biblical term for infidelity to God is idolatry. Faith as fidelity is the meaning of the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.” It is the meaning of the Great Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Of course that is also closely followed by the command to love our neighbors as ourselves. Therefore, to be faithful to God means not only to love God, but to love that which God loves–namely, your neighbor, and indeed the whole of creation. Faith as fidelitas thus includes an ethical imperative.
Hope to finish this series of posts tomorrow…but start answering, “What does my ‘faith’ look like most of the time? Assensus (you’ve just agreed with principles and truths about God), fiducia, or fidelitas?
Never struggle with your faith again? False teacher! If you had these “truths” you wouldn’t charge $35 for them.
How would you define faith, particularly as it relates to God or Jesus?
For some time we have equated “faith” with “belief.” I have faith in God=I believe God. This preoccupation with “believing” and “beliefs” has a crucially important effect: it turns Christian faith into simply a “head matter.” Faith becomes primarily a matter of the beliefs in your head–of whether you believe the right set of claims to be true. This virtual identification of faith with believing a set of statements is thus a serious impoverishment of the word “faith.”
Faith is at the heart of Christianity. All but 2 of the 27 New Testament books uses the noun “faith” or the verb “believe.” Moreover, the New Testament gives it crucial significance. Jesus said things like, “Your faith has made you well.” From Paul we are “justified (made right by God) by grace through faith.” The author of Hebrews extols its heroes has having lived by faith. And of course, the most widely known verse in the Bible, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
In this history of Christianity, it has 4 primary meanings. Let me explain each using the 4 words from Latin that we could translate “Faith.” I owe the origins of these thoughts to Marcus Borg’s “The Heart of Christianity” chapter 2.
1. Faith as Assensus: The closest English equivalent is “assent.” This is faith as belief, as giving one’s mental assent to a proposition, as believing that a claim or statement is true. This notion that Christian faith is primarily about assensus, about belief, about a “head” matter is recent.
2 developments account for its dominance in modern Western Christianity.
The first is the Protestant Reformation, which not only emphasized faith, but also produced a myriad of new denominations, each defined by its distinctive “beliefs” or doctrines. So faith began to mean “believing the right things.”
The second development was the Enlightenment and the birth of modern science. The Enlightenment identified truth with factuality. Truth is that which can be verified. The Enlightenment called into question the factuality of parts of traditional Christian teaching. So “belief became about believing a notion contrary to evidence, contrary to what reasonable people know.” For instance, when do you use the word “believe?” Probably when you’re not sure, or when you don’t know. There are some things you know, and other things you’re not sure about, and so you can only believe. Believing and knowing are contrasted. Faith is what you turn to when knowledge runs out. Even more strongly, faith is what you need when beliefs and knowledge conflict.
The opposite of faith as assensus is doubt, or even stronger, disbelief. Faith as belief is relatively impotent, relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can still believe all the right things and still be miserable. You can believe all the right things and still be relatively unchanged.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about other ways to understand “faith” that bring power and change to the Christian’s life.
