Fascination or Faith

Fascination or Faith:

In Jesus’ “parable of the sower” (Matt 13) the point of the story is the condition of the soil. The only soil where the seed takes lasting root is where the soil has been broken, harrowed, and then cultivated and cared for.

People are easily fascinated, absorbed, and intoxicated with all kinds of gospel seeds - a hobby, a new relationship, their career, themselves... even the gospel of Jesus.

Sharing the Good News, i.e. the gospel of Jesus Christ, is absolutely essential - and a forgone conclusion in Jesus’ parable to His disciples, but the determining factor - the point of Jesus’ parable - is not the gospel message, but the essential need for broken, harrowed, tilled, fertile soil.

In the case of the rocky soil “they sprang up quickly,” so the Christian life has every appearance of thriving - until the heat of the sun causes it to wither. In the case of the seed sown with the weeds there is again every evidence of life until “thorns came up and choked them.”

Fascination with Christ is like the rocky and thorny soils; there is a surface level appearance of life and growth, but it is not sustainable. Difficult circumstances in life readily unveil that the soil of your faith was never broken, harrowed, tilled, or cultivated by God - Jesus was never LORD of your life; He was merely a passing fancy or novel idea.

The true test of authentic, external, transcendent faith as a divine grace-gift from God is that it is unrelenting, ferocious, jealous, and irrepressible. It is not seasonal, bi-annual, dependent upon circumstances, geography, weather, or social approval.

The New Testament continually challenges its audience (you and me) to examine our lives to make sure we are not simply fascinated with Christ, but that we have faith as a grace-gift of God. The NT continually challenges us and pushes us to never accept some watered-down synthetic version of faith so that we will neither deceive ourselves or be deceived by others.

The greatest test and testament of faith is how we respond when baked by the sun and when the weeds of life try to choke us out, i.e. the tragic and “unfair” circumstances of life.

Is it something like that that caused you to throw up your hands and walk away in disgust? Then your faith was never anything more than a fleeting fascination.

You can leave it like that -OR- you can earnestly pray to Jesus for the real kind that never withers and will never be choked out because it is sourced in God Almighty, “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion..."

So what about you? Fascination or faith?

Blessings,

-Kevin