Nov 25, 2009
The difference between the definitions of the word "faith" that
many churches and church bodies have adopted are extremely
subtle. On the one hand, many people take faith as "being
optimistic", having a good attitude and such. I remember
years ago I had one of my first bosses tell me "attitude is
everything", and he pretty much expected his employees to live and
work by that advice. Being young, in my very early twenties,
I had no idea that life would come along and dash that advice to
pieces. Failure often comes even when we sincerely believe
we'll succeed.
I recently looked at an article on Wikipedia on Fear, and there was some
interesting information listed there. The single most
surprising thing I found was that teenagers these days fear, in
order of most important, the following things: terrorist
attacks, spiders, death, being a failure... being a
failure? They actually fear failure! It's second only
to death, and if we could examine the raw data I'm sure we would
find that it's actually second on the list, since fear of terrorism
would include fear of death, and perhaps spiders would fit that
category as well. The fear of failure is rampant in our
culture, and it's likely that this fear drives nearly everything we
do. There are people who never try to succeed at anything
because of fear of failure. There are people who are
overachievers because if they fail at one thing, it's not so bad
because they are so successful at other things.
And in this, we look for advice, life coaches, programs, self help
books, anything that will help us with this drive to succeed and
fear of failure. But this simply isn't what our Christian
faith is about. In fact, our Christian faith tells us we are
worse than failures. We're sinners who have offended a just
and holy God, who created us in His image, and because He freely
chose to love us rather than destroy us, has accomplished in Jesus
Christ everything we need.
Everything, people.