Faith

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For some of us it’s a rude experience. Off goes the alarm and we jump out of bed, dragged out of a deep sleep. For others, it’s a quiet, slow process. You can be half-asleep and half-awake, until gradually you realize another day has begun. Most of us know something of both, and a lot in between. Waking up offers us a basic picture of what happens when God takes hold of your life.

There are classic wake-up stories. Saul of Tarsus was blinded by a sudden light on the road to Damascus, stunned by the presence of Christ. John Wesley found his heart strangely warm, and he never looked back. They are just two famous men who ‘woke up’ to the good news, but there are millions and millions more.

There are also stories of people who are both half-awake and half-asleep. Some take months or years, maybe even decades, during which they aren’t sure whether they are outside the Christian faith looking in, or inside looking around to see if it’s the real thing.

And there are people who are somewhere in between. But the point is this: there’s such a thing as being asleep and being awake. It’s important to know the difference and to be up and ready.

The act of waking up is an early Christian image for what happens when the gospel of Jesus enters a person’s mind and soul. “Sleep” was a way of talking about death in the ancient world of Israel.

The earliest Christians believed that resurrection was what every human being really needed—not just in the end, in the new world that God would make, but in their present lives.

God intends to give us a new life within his new creation. But the new creation has already begun with the resurrection of Jesus.

We are to come through death and out the other side into a new kind of life. We are to become daytime people, even though the rest of the world isn’t awake yet. We are to live in the present darkness by the light of Christ, so that we are ready when the sun comes up. That’s what it means to respond to the call of the Christian gospel.

Being a Christian is not a matter of “having a new religious experience.” It may feel like that, or it may not. For some people, becoming a Christian is a deeply emotional experience. For others, it’s a calm, clear attitude of what really matters in life.

So what’s involved in responding to the message of the Christian gospel? What does it mean to wake up to God’s new world?

The gospel—the “good news” of what God has done in Jesus—is news about something that has happened. What has God done? He raised Jesus from the dead, defeating death at last, and thereby launched his long-awaited kingdom.

This news is so extraordinary, however, that it’s difficult to believe. And yet, as people hear the message, at least some find it makes sense to them—not in the same way as everyday events in our lives. This kind of “making sense” exists even for a moment-- for example, when we enter a new world of imagination through the door of a great painting or symphony. Put another way, the experience is more like falling in love than balancing our checkbook.

This is where the word “belief” can be misleading. It includes both believing that God has certain things and believing in the God who performed them. This is not belief that God exists, though that’s involved, but a loving, grateful trusting spirit.

When things “make sense” in that way, we are left knowing that it isn’t a matter of figuring it all out by ourselves. It’s Someone calling us with an invitation of love and obedience.

The more aware we are of our own inability to “get it right” on our own, the more we will hear this call of faith to believe. It’s the offer of forgiveness and to receive God’s gift of a clean slate, a new start in life. Such a gift of grace makes us catch our breath with awe and gratitude. Just as you can’t use human logic to prove God, so you can’t use human moral or cultural achievement to earn his favor.

But the fact we can’t earn God’s favor by our own effort doesn’t blind us to the fact that the call to faith is also a call to obedience. It must be, because it declares that Jesus is the world’s rightful Lord. That’s why Paul can speak about “the obedience of faith.”

When we see ourselves in the light of Jesus’s kingdom, we realize how far we have fallen short of what we were made to be. This is what we call “repentance,” a serious turning away from patterns of life that distort our genuine humanness. It’s recognition that God has made us to reflect his image in his world, and that we haven’t done so.

You may come to this faith in a blinding flash or by a winding route. But once you get there, you will wear a badge that marks you as part of Christ’s church. And you will discover what it means to wake up and find yourself in God’s new world.

(This article was adapted from Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, a book by N.T. Wright, bishop of Durham, England, and noted scholar and author.)

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