"Not Saved By Faith"

Those were the words on a slide during a presentation by the Christian speaker and apologist Josh McDowell during a talk at the National Conference on Christian Apologetics in Charlotte yesterday.

Heretical? If taken out of context, yes. And he said he was scared of people taking it out of context...so please don't do that here. He went on to say that having faith doesn't save you. Jesus saves you. You can't just say "I have faith," because many people have faith. It needs to be faith in Jesus, the Jesus that was prophesied about in the Old Testament, walked the earth 2000 years ago, died on the cross, and rose again on the third day.

But all this faith is rubbish if we don't know about this Jesus in whom we put our faith. After all, we're staking eternity on this. C. S. Lewis once said, "Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."

So, what do we know about Jesus, about the Bible, about God, etc.? I know I've read things before, but I definitely need to review them, look at new things, and critically examine it all to see the veracity of it all. Christians should not gloss over things and just pretend/hope they're true. After all, the Bible never talks about having "blind faith." Child-like faith, yes, but not blind. (I need to think more on the difference between those two. Any insight from you all is appreciated.)

This doesn't mean you have to have a Ph.D. in Apologetics to analyze things or discover things. I definitely don't have that. But what I want to do is take a look at some of the things that are out there, "evidence," if you will. This evidence leads to knowledge and understanding, and once we have that foundation, we know that there is something on which we can place our faith and build our trust. (Taken from Greg Koukl's talk this weekend.)

Josh McDowell said yesterday that God doesn't use faith to create truth, but rather He uses truth to bring about faith. We see this in John 20.30-31 (and in many other places in the Bible), where signs from God (or in this case, Jesus Himself on Earth) were done so that we may know Him and believe in Him.

So, I invite you, whatever you believe, to join me in attempting to find out more about what could possibly be "of infinite importance." I'm sure I'll have bumps along the way, and I definitely welcome questions/comments from anyone. I can't promise to have all the answers, but perhaps answers isn't what it's about anyways. One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the artist Grace Hartigan: "I cannot expect even my own art to provide all of the answers – only to hope it keeps asking the right questions."