The Essence of Christian Faith
At the heart of the Christian faith is Jesus, the Son of God who came to reconcile us to the living God and to give us eternal, fulfilling life. He asked us to follow Him. What does that look like?
One day, Jesus’s followers came to Him with a question: what was the most important commandment?
Jesus’s Jewish followers looked to Scripture for how they should live since the law regulated every area of human affairs from criminal justice to immigration to social justice to work and even rest.
Jesus, whose messages upended how they thought about the world, responded by simplifying the entire law into two basic commandments: 1) Love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind; and 2) Love your neighbor as yourself.1 A decision to follow Jesus is a commitment to loving God and loving people.
Loving God
When my father died, I had a huge problem with loving God. In the middle of my grief, I felt disoriented. Staying connected to God was difficult and sometimes He felt distant.
How do we hold on to the truth that God is always there for us, inviting us into deeper relationship with Him when the wounds we sustain along life’s journey lead us to question whether He is really there or even loves us?
This is a huge tension and for many people, it unfortunately becomes a deal breaker to following Jesus. When we begin to look at the life of Jesus and see how He willingly suffered for our sake, it becomes easier to love God even in the middle of life’s hardest moments.
Loving Others
Loving others is not always easy. Of course, it is easy to love those who love us, but that is not the standard. Jesus does not simply tell us to love our friends. He tells us to love our enemies too. When some of the people around Jesus heard this command, they tried to get around it with a legalistic question: who exactly were they being called to love?
In response, Jesus told a story of a Samaritan man who was on a journey and came across an injured Jew. This Jew was the victim of a brutal robbery and left for dead on the side of the road, ignored by people who should have known better: priests and such. Although Samaritans and Jews did not get along, this Samaritan man looked at this Jew and with no regard to his ethnicity took him under his care, at his own cost.2
What does it look like to love those who we least agree with, those who we least respect, those who might even hate us the most? This story tells us that love is messy, inconvenient, and costly. In today’s hyper-polarized world, that can feel like an impossible goal, yet loving everybody is the standard Jesus set.
The Essence of Following Jesus
The essence of Christian faith is loving God and loving others even when it is not easy (or perhaps when it is especially hard). It is not easy to love God when we are in the middle of suffering or when we feel disappointed with Him, nor is it easy to love those who hate us. Loving God and others is hard to do well when we begin to confront the practical realities and tensions along the way. Yet, it is not impossible!
The goal of this newsletter is to help people who want to follow Jesus navigate these tensions. This goal stems from my own walk with Jesus, often navigating dueling ideas and conflicting emotions while trying to understand the heart of God. In a world filled with many different voices, I aim to make difficult subjects accessible promoting deep rigorous thinking on topics such as truth, justice, and relationships with compassion and empathy. Using the Bible as the foundation, drawing upon stories and other Christian thinkers, I hope to show that authentic relationship with Jesus is the best way to resolve the tensions that come up as we seek to follow Him. Along the way, I hope readers will cultivate a healthy, vibrant relationship with Jesus that leads to a fulfilling life.
Thank you for coming on this journey with me.
Karibu
Luke 10:27
Luke 10:25-37
Beautifully expressed - thank you!