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.
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!
Category: General
Tags: Faith, Religious Idolatry
Related Reading
Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 8
This is the eighth of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? In this segment, Greg gets into the nitty gritty of why portions of the birth account are not the dumbest lie ever. If you missed the first seven installments you can…
Thinking Biblically?
Olga Caprotti via Compfight Micah J. Murray over at Redemption Pictures posted this reflection called Beware of Thinking Biblically. The image of a google search on the topic is worth the price of admission. Christians throw around this phrase in some really damaging ways, as Rachel Held Evans demonstrated in her recent publication of A Year…
Does God Still Heal?
In the ancient world Jesus was known first and foremost as an exorcist and a healer. These two activities are mentioned in every summary of Jesus’s ministry found in the Gospels. It’s common for Western Christians today to accept that infirmities (sickness, disease, injuries, disabilities and deformities) are part of God’s mysterious plan for their…
The Bible is Infallible NOT Inerrant
While the cruciform understanding (explained here) of the “God-breathed” nature of Scripture is in tension with the way most talk about inerrancy (See previous post on inerrancy), I do not believe it is at all incompatible with what the Church has always sought to express by affirming the “infallibility” the Scripture. The core conviction is that Scripture will…
Changing Beliefs
Stephen Mattson is a follower of ReKnew and a member of Woodland Hills Church who posted a piece on Sojourners titled Christians: It’s NOT a Sin to Change Your Beliefs. He points out that doubt and questions are a natural and needed part of any Christian’s life, and our community needs to change the ways we…