My dad was reading us the story about when Jesus cursed the fig tree. If you are not familiar with the story you can read it in Mark 11:12-25. Jesus was hungry and he walked up to a fig tree but there were no figs on the tree, because it wasn’t the season for figs. He says “may no one ever eat your fruit again!” The fig tree then withers up and dies!
It was at this point in
the story that I shouted "Now
that's just stupid!" This did not
receive a positive reaction from my parents.
“How dare you call Jesus, stupid?” My response didn’t really help
matters any, “Uh, I’m not calling him stupid, just what he did!” For some
reason, my 8 year old brain was more concerned with the poor fig tree than the
deeper lesson Jesus was trying to teach his disciples.
There have been many
times that I have had a negative reaction to the words of Jesus. My next instance was when I heard that he
said, “Love your enemies, and if they hit you on the cheek offer them the other
one!” “What, that's just stupid!" But years later as I watched the movie “The
Passion of the Christ,” I watched Jesus live this principle out on a level no
other human being ever has.
Another saying of Jesus,
which I have currently had to wrestle with is when he instructed us to “become
like little children” to get into the kingdom of heaven. I have always thought this meant we should
have “child-like” faith (aka, naïve.)
I saw an example of “child-like”
faith last night. I asked my youth group
“Why do you believe that the Bible is true?”
I received mostly blank stares until a couple of kids spoke up, “Because
the Bible says it’s true!”
I quickly tried to show
them that their statement was circular reasoning. But
later I realized that this is exactly where my faith started. I trusted my parents and they said the Bible
was true, so I just believed them. In
fact that is where almost all of my information came from when I was
little. My parents said it, so it must
be true.
Upon further
examination of what Jesus was trying to teach us in “becoming like little
children,” He goes on to say “Anyone who becomes as humble as this little child
is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
The reason why children
are teachable is their humility. They
realize they don’t know anything. On the
flip-side of this is the arrogant person who thinks they know everything, they
are the ones who are truly stupid!
Child-like faith is a
great place to start but isn’t where God wants us to stay. Look at Ephesians
4:14 “Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and
blown by every wind of new teaching. We
will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they
sound like the truth.”
Foot Note: I also don't think that believing the Bible "because the Bible says its true," will suffice. To read about evidence for the truth of the Bible click here:
or here:
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