SIMPLY CHRISTIAN - EXCERPTS 7

7 Believing and Belonging  

這是我最喜歡的一段，讀到這裏，我想這正是過去的我的寫照，驕傲而固執地從自己的智慧，知識和邏輯出發，卻最終被神的大愛和大能征服。這段文字清楚地表明了發生在我身上的我自己也不明白的變化。如果我早一點看到這些前人的文字，我就不必憑著若隱若現的光和召喚在黑暗裏彷徨這長長的六年，我的經曆以前的基督徒早就經曆過，而且總結成了文字。我不知道，而神早就知道。我隻覺得自己是如此幸運，因此也希望朋友們可以藉此得到益處，不再走我走過的彎路。
…

So what is involved in hearing and responding to the Christian gospel? What does it mean to wake up to God’s new world? What does it mean, in other words, to become a member of God’s people, of Jesus’s people – of the church?

The gospel – the “good news” of what the creator God has done in Jesus – is first foremost news about something that has happened. An d the first and most appropriate response to that news is to believe it. God has raised Jesus from the dead, and has thereby declared in a single powerful action that Jesus has lunched the long-awaited kingdom of God, and that (by means of Jesus’s death) the evil of all the world has been defeated at last. When the alarm clock goes off, this is what it says: Here’s the good news. Wake up and believe it!“  

This message, though, is so utterly unlikely and extraordinary that you cannot expect people simply to believe it in the same way they might believe you if you said it was raining outside. And yet, as people hear the message, at least some find that they do believe it. It makes sense to them. I don’t mean the kind of “sense” you get within the flatland world of secular imagination. There the only things that matter are what you can put into a test tube or a bank account. I mean the kind of sense that exists within the strange new world which we glimpse, even if only for a moment, in the way we glimpse a whole new world when we stand in awe in front of a grate paining, or are swept off our feet by a song or a symphony.  That kind of “making sense” is much more like falling in love than like calculating a bank balance. Ultimately, believing that God raised Jesus from the dead is a matter of believing and trusting in the God who would, and did, do such a thing. 

This is where our word “belief” can be inadequate or even misleading. What the early Christians meant by “belief” included both believing that God had done certain things and believing in the God who had done them. This is not belief that God exists, though clearly that is involved, too, but loving, grateful trust. 

When things “make sense” in that way, you are left knowing that it isn’t so much a matter of you figuring it all out and deciding to take a step, or a stand. It’s a matter of Someone calling you, calling with a voice you dimly recognize, calling with a message that is simultaneously an invitation of love and a summons to obedience. The call to faith is both of these. It is the call to believe that the true God, the world’s creator, has loved the whole world so much, you and me included, that he has come himself in the person of his Son and has died and risen again to exhaust the power of evil and create a new world in which everything will be put to rights and joy will replace sorrow.  

The more conscious we are of our own inability to get it right, perhaps even our own flagrant disloyalty to the call to live as genuine human beings, the more we will hear this call as what it most deeply is. It is the offer of forgiveness. It is the summons to receive God’s gift of a slate wiped clean, a totally new start. Even to glimpse that is to catch your breath with awe and gratitude, and to find an answering, thankful love welling up inside. As we aw earlier, just as you cant set up a staircase of human logic and climb up it to get to some kind of ”proof” of God, so you can’t set up a staircase of human moral or cultural achievement and climb up it to ear God’s favor. Form time to time some Christians have imagined that they were supposed to do just that, and in their efforts they’ve made a nonsense of everything. 

But the fact that we cannot ever earn God’s favor by our own moral effort shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the call to faith is also a call to obedience.(以前的我最不喜歡聽這個，我不願意被任何人管，自己覺得自己有原則，有良心，做人很不錯，絕不願失去自由。可是現在我嚐到了順從上帝，這公義，仁慈，聖潔，遠遠高出我們智慧的父的甘甜。他都是為我們好，雖然也許我們一時看不到，不明白。在他裏麵，我更自由) It must be, because it declares that Jesus is the world’s rightful Lord and Master. That’s why Paul can speak about “the obedience of faith” (這常讓我思考保羅這個人，他的背景，曆史和他的性格，是什麽力量是他這麽順從，獻身) Indeed, the word the early Christian used for “faith” can also mean “loyalty” or “allegiance”. It is what emperors ancient and modern have always demanded fo their subjects. The message of the gospel is the good news that Jesus is the one true “emperor”, ruling the world with his own brand of self-giving love. This, of course, cheerfully and deliberately deconstructs the word “emperor” itself. When the early Christians used “imperial” language in relation to Jesus, they were always conscious of irony. Whoever heard of a crucified emperor? 

When we see ourselves in the light of Jesus’s type of kingdom, and realize the extent to which we have been living by a different code altogether, we realize, perhaps for the first time, how far we have fallen short of what we were made to be. This realization is what we call “repentance,’ a serous turning away from patterns of life which deface and distort our genuine humanness. It isn’t just a matter of feeling sorry for particular failings, though that will often be true as well. It is the recognition that the living God has made us humans to reflect his image into his world, and that we haven’t done so. (The technical terms for that is “sin”, whose primary meaning is not “breaking the rules” but “missing the mark,” failing to hit the target of complete, genuine, glorious humanness。) Once again, the gospel itself, the very message which announces that Jesus is Lord and calls us to obedience, contains the remedy: forgiveness, unearned and freely given, because of his cross. All we can say is “Thank you.” 

To believe, to love, to obey (and to repent of our failure to do those things): faith to this kind is the mark of the Christian, the one and only badge we wear. That is why, in most traditional churches, the community declares its faith publicly in the words of one of the ancient creeds. This is the stamp of who we are. When we declare our faith, we are saying yes to this God, and to this project. That is the central mark of our identity, of who and what the church is. This is, by the way, what St. Paul meant when he spoke of “justification by faith.”　God declares that those who share this faith are “In the light.” He intends to put the whole world to rights; he has already begun this process in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and in the work of his Spirit in the lives of men and women, bringing them to the faith by which alone we are identified as belonging to Jesus. When people come to Christian faith, they are “put in the right” as an advance sign, and as part of the means, of what God intends to do for his whole creation. 

Christian faith isn’t a general religious awareness. Nor is it the ability to believe several unlikely propositions. It is certainly not a kind of gullibility which would put us out of touch with any genuine reality. It is the faith which hears the story of Jesus, including the announcement that he is the world’s true Lord, and responds from the heart with a sure of grateful love that says:　＂Jesus is Lord. He died for my sins. God raised him from the dead. This is the center of everything.＂Whatever you come to this faith in a blinding flash or by a long, slow, winding route, once you get to this point you are (whether you realize it or not) wearing the badge which marks you out as part of the church, on an equal footing with every other Christian who ever lived.  You are discovering what it means to wake up and find yourself in God’s new world.

What’s more, you are giving clear evidence that a new life has begun. Somewhere in the depths of your being something has stirred into life that was previously not there（我正是這樣的感覺）　It is because of this that many early Christians reached for the language of “birth”. Jesus himself, in a famous discussion with a Jewish teacher, spoke of being born “from above”： a new event similar to, though distinguished from, ordinary human birth (John 3). Many early Christians picked up and developed this idea. As a newborn baby breathes and cries, so the signs of life in a newborn Christian are faith and repentance, inhaling the love of God and exhaling an initial cry of distress. And at that point what God provides, exactly as for a newborn infants, is the comfort, protection, and nurturing promise of a mother.