Faith or Worship?
Not everyone who said Lord, Lord will enter his kingdom??? What does that means? Someone once said the time is fast approaching when one will either be a mystic or an unbeliever. He’s right. None of us can rely much longer on the fact that we were once given the faith and that we still walk within a community that, seemingly, has some faith. These things are no longer, of themselves, enough to sustain faith in an age which is as agnostic, pluralistic, seductive, and distracting as is our own. The dominant consciousness of today society is agnostic. God has essentially no place in their normal consciousness, even within the very discussion of religion. That is basically true of all of us today, not just of non-Christians, though it should be affirmed with more sympathy than sarcasm.
Faith is not easy today for any of us. To have real faith, an actual belief in God, requires something more than simply continuing to roll with the flow of our own particular faith communities. Being born into a Christian family and worshipping within a Christian church can give us a relationship to a religion, to an ideology, to a truth, and to a community of worship; but these things, of themselves, are not the same thing as an actual faith in God. Just as we have people who believe but do not practice, many of us practice but do not believe. To actually believe in God today, one must at some point in his or her life make a deep, private act of faith. To make an act of faith requires an inner journey, a journey into the deepest recesses of the soul where I must face my weakness, my sin, my infidelities, my lies, my rationalizations, my constant avoiding of the searing truth. Ultimately, that is what each of us needs from God—someone who can console us and someone to be for us that trusted confessor, that person before whom no secret need to be hidden. To relate to God in this way is to have faith. And this means consistently sharing all of our secrets and fears in those lonely, private hours when there are just the two of us and nobody else is around.
