a word before we begin

You have seen them, My Friend, a thousand times, on the back of the car ahead of you in traffic. A little strip of bright vinyl with a saying on it, something cheerful and certain, designed to be read in a glance at a stoplight and never thought about again. That is what a bumper sticker is. It is a whole idea boiled down to a slogan, stuck on the back of a life, and forgotten. And I am sorry to say that a great deal of what passes for faith among us is held in exactly that way.

So let me ask you a question at the very outset, and I ask it gently, but I do mean for it to land. How much of what you believe have you actually examined? And how much of it did you simply absorb, the way you absorb the accent of the place you grew up in, because it was in the air around you, because your parents held it, because your pastor said it, because it was stitched on a pillow or printed on a mug or repeated so often by so many that you never once thought to ask whether it was true? We all carry more of that second kind than we would like to admit.

This booklet is not chiefly about arguing with the world outside; that is a different conversation for a different day. This one looks closer to home. It is about us, inside the church, and the things we have believed without examining, and, just as much, the way we hold those things toward one another. For some of the unhappiest divisions among brothers and sisters are not over the great clear truths at all, but over slogans we never checked and assumptions we never tested, hurled back and forth with a confidence none of us has earned. Its task is to teach a habit worth keeping for the rest of your life: the habit of taking a thing down off the bumper and actually looking at it.

chapter one

the bumper sticker faith

You cannot cure a sickness you will not name, so let me name this one plainly. And the sickness is this: a great deal of Christian belief is held for every reason under heaven except the one that matters. We believe a thing because our mother believed it. We believe it because the teacher we admire said it from the platform. We believe it because it sounds right, because it feels true, because it is comfortable, because everyone in our circle holds it and to doubt it would feel like betraying the family. These are powerful reasons. Not one of them is the same as the thing being true.

Now hear me carefully, because I am not scorning any of these. It is a mercy to be raised among believers, a gift to sit under a good teacher, a kindness to be surrounded by the faithful. A child rightly takes much on trust, and so, for a season, does a new believer. The trouble is not that we begin by receiving what we are handed; we all must. The trouble is that so many of us never move past it, never once take the thing down and turn it over and ask whether it will hold, so that at forty we are still believing on no firmer ground than we did at four: because someone we trusted said so.

And a faith held that way is a fragile thing, however sincerely it is held. For a faith you have never examined is a faith you cannot truly defend, not to the skeptic who presses you, not to your own child when she asks you why, and not, in the dark and doubting hour, even to yourself. When the storm comes, and it always comes, the slogan peels off the bumper in the wind, because it was only ever stuck to the surface. It never had roots. The Lord spoke of the seed that sprang up quickly and withered just as fast, because it had no root in itself, and an unexamined faith is very like that: bright and quick in the easy weather, and gone the moment the sun is hot.1

A faith you have never examined is a faith you cannot truly defend.

So this is the diagnosis, and I lay it before you not to wound but to wake. Much of what we hold, we hold like a bumper sticker, brightly and thinly and without examination. And the cure is not to believe less. It is to believe on better ground, to take the things down one by one and examine them, so that what remains is held not because it was handed to us, but because we have looked, and found it true.

examine everything

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sources & notes

  1. The parable of the seed with no root, sprung up quickly and withered under the sun, is the Lord’s own in the parable of the sower, Matthew 13:5–6, 20–21 (and parallels Mark 4:5–6, 16–17; Luke 8:6, 13). Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Matthew 13, on the shallow-soil hearer whose profession does not survive testing.
  2. Acts 17:11, on the Bereans who “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so,” and were commended for it as “more noble.” Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Acts 17, who takes the verse as warrant for testing even apostolic preaching against the written Word.
  3. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (“prove all things; hold fast that which is good”); 1 John 4:1 (“try the spirits whether they are of God”); and Hebrews 5:14, on those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil. Cf. Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Ready (on 1 Thessalonians).
  4. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Divide, Divider” (orthotomeō, 2 Timothy 2:15): literally to cut straight, as in cutting a straight road or furrow, hence to handle the word of truth without deviation or distortion. The principle that all Scripture is for the believer while not all is addressed to the believer (2 Timothy 3:16 with the dispensational distinctions of law and grace) is a commonplace of conservative dispensational teaching; cf. C. I. Scofield and J. Vernon McGee on 2 Timothy 2:15.
  5. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, and Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Wise (on 1 Corinthians), on 1 Corinthians 10:13, which promises a way of escape from temptation rather than a ceiling on affliction. The saying “God will not give you more than you can handle” is an extra-biblical folk maxim often confused with this verse; the point is widely noted in works on misquoted Scripture.
  6. “God helps those who help themselves” is not in Scripture; the phrasing traces to Algernon Sidney (1698) and was popularized by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack (1736), and stands nearer the opposite of the gospel of grace (Romans 5:6, 8). “Cleanliness is next to godliness” is likewise absent from the Bible; the saying is commonly traced to John Wesley’s sermon “On Dress.”
  7. Jeremiah 29:11 (“thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end”) stands within the letter Jeremiah sent to the exiles carried to Babylon (Jeremiah 29:1, 4), and its horizon is stated two verses earlier: the promise is bound to the completing of “seventy years” of captivity (Jeremiah 29:10). Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Jeremiah 29, on reading the promise in its exile setting rather than as an individual guarantee.
  8. The principal views on the timing of the rapture relative to the tribulation, whether pretribulational, midtribulational or prewrath, or posttribulational, are each held by men affirming the inspiration of Scripture and the bodily return of Christ, and turn on the weighing of such texts as 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, 2 Thessalonians 2:1–8, and Revelation 3:10. On the mode of baptism, baptizō means to immerse (W. E. Vine); cf. Acts 8:38–39 and Romans 6:4.
  9. Romans 14, on receiving the one weak in faith “but not to doubtful disputations,” with its warnings against despising and against judging a brother over disputable matters of days and diets (Romans 14:1–6). Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Romans 14, and Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Right (on Romans).
  10. 1 Corinthians 13:1–2, on knowledge and understanding without charity as “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal”; 1 Corinthians 8:1 (“knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth”); and John 13:35 (“by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples”). Cf. Charles H. Spurgeon on contending for truth in a spirit of love rather than contempt.
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