5 Things Christians Say, But Few Believe

Belief is to Christianity as a motor is to a car. It’s essentially the whole thing. As followers of the Way, we are told to walk by faith, not trust our eyes, and see that which cannot be seen.

Not having seen Jesus, we put our trust in him.

Not having touched the Father, we still pray to him day after day.

As a believer, you kind of have to – believe in order to qualify. Most of us understand that, and so we do our darned best to conjure up a smidgen of belief. We fake it until we make it. We hope that if we say it enough times, it’ll finally become true. We hope that maybe, just maybe God will be like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, and turn our mouse sized faith into a team of horses that bring a chariot to the palace.

Here are 5 things that most Christians say, but for the time being – don’t believe.

Prayer Works

It’s not so much that we are lying, but if we believed it worked then we probably wouldn’t wait until it was our absolute last option. If we believed that prayer was the answer to our many problems, we’d try it sooner. As Oswald Chambers has said, “We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense”. Most of us have so many problems in our life, we might actually fulfill Paul’s challenge to “pray without ceasing”. But then again, if we prayed half as much as we complained, we might not have quite so many problems. Having dealt with the root of the problem, we could stop running around like headless chicken and get some work done.

The Bible is the Absolute Authority in My Life

If only this were true. It should be what we believe. It certainly has the credibility we need. But, when it disrupts what we think SHOULD be true, we rarely bend our belief structure to match those red, life giving letters. We come up with explanations faster than a two bit magician comes up with fake doves up his sleeve. We qualify, quantify, and generally do just about anything it takes to maintain our oh so comfy status quo. The very definition of authority means that it defines our status quo. When we have to twist it to accommodate our lives, then it’s lost whatever authority we claimed it had in the first place.