Let’s get down to the foundations and make sure our view of God, ourselves, sin, and living in response to God’s grace is all as biblical as it can be.
Photo: [link]Jianxiang Wu[/link], Unsplash, CC0
Happy New Year! As we head into 2022, I imagine we are more aware than ever that we don’t know what these next months might bring.
We may face worldwide challenges and global concerns. We may face changes closer to home that we did not anticipate. We may thrive, or we may struggle.
How should we head into the unknown?
It is always a good idea to check our foundations and get back to basics.
In 1173, they laid the foundations for the bell tower of Pisa Cathedral, Italy. This freestanding structure took quite a while to complete. Within five years, the building was up to the second level, and it was already leaning.
The foundation was the problem. Construction was delayed for most of the next century, but by the 1270s, the builders were up to the higher levels and were trying to fix the noticeable tilt by building one side higher than the other.
The tower was finally completed in 1372. It has survived four earthquakes, and scientists believe it may stand for another two centuries. But the issue remains – the building is tilted, and the foundation is the problem.
The same is true for us in our Christian life. We tend to make tweaks at higher levels of our spiritual life. Perhaps a sophisticated theological nuance, or maybe a clever new personal discipline will fix the issue?
The reality is that whether we have been a Christian for decades or for only a short time, the foundation is the place to make adjustments.
Whether our struggle is overtly spiritual or seems to be disconnected from our personal spirituality – I am thinking about marital issues, relational struggles, emotional stress, etc. – whatever the problem, we always do well to take a look at our foundations.
So what are the foundations of our faith?
We need to evaluate how we answer four basic, foundational questions:
The God revealed in the Bible, the Trinity, is different to and better than any other god that humanity has ever imagined. And yet, how easily our view of God shifts from the biblical revelation of the unique glory-giving, relational, Triune God to a more generic power-God or a more mystical experiential-God.
Too often, we fall into inadequate views of God that diminish the impact of knowing Him in our daily lives.
Thankfully, we can remember that if we want to know what God is like, we need only to look at Jesus. Jesus came to reveal God to sinners and to rescue sinners for God.
Our struggles in life should push us back to the fundamental reality of spending time growing deeper in our relationship with Jesus. Making tweaks at level 7 or 8 of our life will not help us anywhere near as much as time spent with Jesus as he reveals God’s heart to us.
The Bible reveals to us the wondrous complexity of humanity. From the beginning, it points to our image-bearing relationality, creativity, and diverse abilities. It goes on to emphasize our inherent value and worth.
It also underlines our fallenness, as we will see in the next question. One of our significant problems is that the cultural “water” we swim in every day seeks to blind us to the relational dynamic hard-wired into our very core.
Our world bombards us with the message that our value and worth come from accumulating wealth, knowledge, achievements, capacity, or influence. So we play the game by the world’s rules and wonder why we struggle and burn out.
Yet deep down we resonate with the idea that our greatest joys and our greatest struggles all happen in the context of our relationships.
Don’t pursue a sophisticated solution to life’s struggles when getting back to basics often helps so much: invest in your walk with the Lord, love your spouse, play with your children, laugh and pray with your friends.
We live after Genesis 3. The world as we know it is a fallen world. There is no single moment of our day that is not pulled down by the gravity of fallenness. And yet, so often, we live and think as if the Fall didn’t make that much difference.
We spot sin in others but believe ourselves to be untouched by so much of it. Sometimes we become experts at acting like the older brother in Luke 15, condemning the sins of our younger brother while not recognizing how deeply infected we are, too.
How easily we blame circumstances for our struggles. If only my spouse would change, or the government, or the media, or my church. If only, if only . . . and yes, there certainly are problems in all of these people and institutions.
But are we dreaming of changes at a higher level of the tower while missing the most profound issue of all?
Sin is the problem, and I am not immune to it! When we stop to remember how desperate our need is, it drives us back to the foot of the cross, broken and needy. That is actually a great place to be.
If the ultimate issue in this world is sin, and it is far worse than we have ever grasped, then that means the solution must be far better than we tend to think.
Our problem is not only our guilt and shame but also a hard, stony heart that rebels against God, and the total absence of the life of God through the Holy Spirit.
In the Gospel, we have a complete solution! By God’s grace and through the death of God’s Son on the cross, we have sins forgiven, a new heart bursting with love for Him, and the Spirit of God pouring out God’s love into our hearts.
May we never think ourselves too sophisticated to celebrate the good news of God’s love for us in Christ. May we never lose the wonder of the cross. And as we live the Christian life, may we continue to live it by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us.
So make sure that you allow the Bible to be a relational nudge that leads you towards a deeper relationship with God. Make sure that you allow church fellowship to be that relational nudge, too.
Whether we have been following Jesus for eight weeks or eighty years, it does us good to get back to the basics.
Instead of adjusting the building project at level 7 or 8, let’s get down to the foundations and make sure our view of God, ourselves, sin, and living in response to God’s grace is all as biblical as it can be.
We naturally drift away in all of these areas, so let’s be sure to invest in the foundations of our faith for greater spiritual health and ministry fruitfulness this year.
Peter Mead is mentor at Cor Deo and author of several books. This article first appeared on his blog Biblical Preaching.
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