We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

2012-08-05

This Week’s Sermon: Sledge Hammer Faith

Greg is feverishly working on a new book on faith and doubt and he decided to preach on this topic for a couple of weeks. He’s also been dealing with this topic on the blog as a part of fleshing out the ReKnew Manifesto. This week he asks the question: Is certainty-seeking, doubt-shunning faith idolatrous? Many Christians assume faith means you must have perfect certainty in matters of belief. This makes doubt the enemy, and our job as Christians becomes the mantra of the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz, “I DO believe. I DO believe. I DO, I DO, I DO believe!” But biblical faith is not anything like a “strength-tester” from a carnival where you try to hit the faith-puck hard enough to ring the certainty bell at the top. Rather, biblical faith is entering a loving relationship with the One who created us and came to redeem us.

You can download audio and video files of this sermon from the Woodland Hills Church website.

After you’ve listened to the sermon, we invite you to share your thoughts with the rest of the ReKnew community on our Facebook page, or send us your questions here!

 Subscribe to Woodland Hills Church’s sermon podcasts through iTunes:

Normal Quality Audio | High-Quality Audio | Video

Category:
Tags: ,

Related Reading

Part Three of Greg’s Interview with David D. Flowers

Here’s the final interview that Greg did with David D. Flowers in which he discusses his upcoming book Benefit of the Doubt: Dismantling the Idol of Certainty. Check it out! From the interview: Faith in Scripture isn’t about striving for certainty: it’s about being willing to commit to a course of action — to a way…

Tips on what NOT to say to someone struggling with their faith

Neal Fowler via Compfight Here’s a post from a year ago from Elizabeth Esther on What NOT to say to someone struggling with their faith. Historically, the church has been a very unsafe place for people expressing doubts or struggles. Let’s be safer than this. From the blog post: “Don’t throw the baby out with…

9 Reasons Faith ≠ Certainty

One of the things that Christians typically believe in and that I’ve struggled with a great deal is the concept of faith. Like most Christians, I once assumed a person’s faith is as strong as that person is certain. And, accordingly, I assumed that doubt is the enemy of faith. That is, after all, how…

Reason is not the Boogieman

We beg to differ.

Tags:

Uncrossed

Did any of you catch SNL this weekend? They did a parody of Tarantino’s DJango Unchained called DJesus Uncrossed. Many were deeply offended by the depiction of Jesus in this, but David R. Henson blogged about how this skit revealed what we’ve already been doing for quite a while as a culture. In his blog…

Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 4

This is the fourth of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? We hope you’re enjoying these! They really provide a great overall approach to Biblical Criticism. If you missed the first three installments you can find them here, here and here.