5/14/2025

“I believe” are two of the most important words we can utter. Why? Because what we truly believe determines how we live. As a camp meeting preacher once proclaimed, “The reason some of you don’t live anything is because you don’t believe anything!” 

But our word, “believe,” has been impoverished. It is a word we toss around a lot without really thinking about it. We can say, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” and we can say “I believe it’s going to rain today” and we can say “I believe I will have a second piece of pecan pie.” 

One word, but the weight that one word carries differs in the way we use it!

The Latin root word  for“believe” originally meant to “give one’s heart” to something. It meant to trust something or someone, to give credence to what they say or do. 

But over the years, “believe” has come to mean a head-over-heart intellectual assent. When people ask, “What do you believe?” what they really mean is “What do you think?” Like I said on Sunday, it isn’t so much believing in Jesus as it is believing things about Jesus . . . and that doesn’t get us very far. 

When I think about discussions of faith I’ve had throughout the years, most of the time that’s what I meant: “what do you think is true?” The churches I attended (even the schools I attended) made “faith” more of a brain-centered way of thinking than a soul-centered way of living. 

That’s not just a recent problem.

1700 years ago, in 325 AD, the emperor Constantine called 300 representatives of the church together at Nicea (modern day Iznik in Turkey). Constantine made Christianity legal and the influence of Christianity, for good and for ill, spread rapidly throughout his empire (I say ill because Christians were never intended to have secular power. That rarely goes well, but that’s for another pastor’s note). But as Christianity spread, there were some heretical ideas about the nature of Jesus also spreading. Constantine believed to keep the empire together there needed to be one church, one faith, one practice. 

The result of the Council of Nicea was the formation of the Nicene Creed, which was good; however, it also marked a shift from Christianity’s focus on how we live to what we think. 

As long as what you think shapes how you live, that’s not bad. But there’s got to be something deeper.

Remember that “I believe” at its roots means “I give my heart” to something or someone.  But for most people these days “believe” leads us more toward “head” and less toward faith, which, as I hope you remember, starts with belief but also includes ideas of faithfulness, loyalty and allegiance. 

When most people say, “Yes, I believe that,” it means something completely different than “Yes, I give my heart to that.” If I give my heart to something, that’s going to shape my life far more than if I merely “believe” something. 

Part of the problem is that we don’t have a verb form of faith. We can’t say, “I faith in him” so we have to substitute “I believe in him.” To me, that seems like we’ve lost something in the translation. 

There’s a good example of this in the story of Jesus healing two blind men (Matthew 9:27-31). Jesus asked them, “Do you believe that I can do this?” They say, “Yes, Lord,” and then Jesus touches them, saying, “According to your faith be it done to you.” The Greek words for “believe” and “faith” are the same – we just can’t say it that way in English! 

You might ask, “Why couldn’t Jesus say, ‘According to your belief?’” That’s a different word in Greek, one that comes to us in the English as “dogma.” 

Jesus did not say, “According to your dogma, be it done to you.” 

No, the faith that saves us is more than giving intellectual assent to a list of dogma. The belief that saves us moves from a secondhand religion to a firsthand religion, from believing what you’ve heard or been taught about Jesus to being in relationship with Jesus.

It comes from “giving our heart” to Jesus, giving Jesus our complete allegiance, and loyally living for him as we faithfully live out our calling to love God and love others. 

Like the blind men in Matthew 9, according to our faith, it will be done to us as well. That doesn’t mean that if we “want it badly enough” or if we clap our hands enough, Tinker Bell will get well . . . even though some accuse us of believing like that. But it’s how we engage the world that will change the way we live. If we follow the example of Christ and march into this world hopeful, open to the Spirit’s leading, and trusting in Christ to lead us every step of the way, that sort of faith will not only change us, it will change the world. If, however, we say that we “believe” in Jesus, but live fearful, despairing lives . . . nothing will change. Not us. Not the world..

Our lives reflect what we give our hearts to. 

Blessings,

Pastor Terry