Beliefs: Stated and Functional

Here are a couple of my stated beliefs:

1. God in Christ alone is my salvation. 2. God has made Christ to be my righteousness, my worth, and my significance.

These are beliefs that I am quick to state and explain if provided an opportunity. I am quick to affirm verbally that there is no salvation for me apart from that which God has accomplished in the Messiah. He alone is my righteousness, worth, and significance. It is only in the Messiah that I am accepted in God’s sight. Only in him is true humanity progressively restored in me.

I could go on and on with statements like these, but I have learned that stated beliefs are often just that—stated. Those beliefs listed above are too often not functional in my life, that is, too often my thinking, desiring, and living do not flow out of them. So, I am learning to ask myself questions like these:

1. Where am I actually seeking my salvation in any given moment? 2. Where am I actually locating my righteousness, my worth, or my significance right now as I teach this class or lead my community group? 3. What am I thinking I must have right now in order to feel truly human?

Questions like these force me to move beyond thinking merely in terms of beliefs that I affirm intellectually. They aide me in discerning what my heart is currently functionally believing regarding where my salvation, righteousness, and worth are found. Too often I find myself seeking salvation in how people think of me or in how successful I am at this or that. Though my stated belief is that Christ is my significance, I often catch myself locating my significance in my performance as a husband or father or as a professor.

Fortunately (understatement), the gospel frees me to admit this and face it head on. Jesus once said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick…I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13). Seeking my salvation, righteousness, worth, or significance in anything other than God are symptoms of the sickness of which Jesus speaks, that is, they are symptoms of a profoundly fractured and corrupted humanity. My default mode as a fallen human being is to seek my salvation in something other than in God’s Son, to seek my worth and significance in my vocational performance rather than in Jesus. But this means that Jesus came to seek someone like me, to call someone like me. He came to restore in me that which was lost at the fall, namely, a humanity that is joyfully centered upon God.

So, because of who Jesus is and what he accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection, I am free to confess my sin of wayward seeking and locating and rejoice afresh in what God has made the Messiah to be for me. Amazingly, the good news of God’s accomplishment in Jesus is His power to progressively make my stated beliefs functional in my living.