Shayne Looper: Faith is a lifelong journey

Over many years of pastoral ministry, I have listened to parents and grandparents tell the same story, which differs only in the particulars. It goes like this: “Junior accepted Jesus when he was 6. He loved to go to Sunday School and church and won a Bible for memorizing all his verses. He was always singing Sunday School songs and hymns. He says he still believes in Jesus, but he has no interest in church and doesn’t like it when I talk to him about it.”

There is always an unspoken question behind these conversations: “Is my child (or grandchild) saved? Will he go to heaven when he dies?” It can be summarized like this: A person indicated belief in Jesus at a certain time in the past but now shows little or no evidence of such belief. Is his or her past belief enough to save their immortal soul?

Christians have answered this question in various ways in the history of the church, but one shared theme among the different viewpoints has been that a person who truly believes will continue to believe. The continuation of belief is stressed throughout the New Testament, especially in the Gospel of John, which uses some form the word “believe” nearly one hundred times.

To believe, trust, or place faith in — all are different ways of translating the same Greek word into English — is a major theme in the Bible. The New Testament uses the word in its noun and verbal forms 277 times. St. John states his purpose for writing his Gospel in this way: “that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and so that by believing you might have life in his name.”

In the beginning of the fourth Gospel we are told that John the Baptist’s mission in life was to testify in such a way that “all people might believe.” The reason this is important is that those who believe are given “the right to become children of God.”

After saying this in his book’s prologue, St. John goes on to tell the stories of numerous people who did believe and received that right. There was Andrew and an unnamed man who followed Jesus. There was Andrew’s brother Simon Peter, who later became chief of the apostles. There was Philip and his friend Nathaniel.

While John demonstrates the others’ belief indirectly by their actions, Nathaniel’s belief is stated directly by Jesus himself. The important point of all this is that Andrew, the unnamed man, who may have been St. John himself — he is always reticent about mentioning himself — Peter, Philip, and Nathaniel had all believed in Jesus.

So, why in the next chapter, after narrating the first of Jesus’s miracles, does John say that his disciples “believed in him”? Hadn’t they already believed in him? Clearly, they had, but now they do so again.

Later in the same chapter, John looks ahead to a much later experience of the disciples. After three years of being with Jesus almost constantly, seeing an untold number of miraculous events, witnessing Jesus’s crucifixion, and knowing him raised back to life, John says that the disciples recalled Jesus’s words from early in their association with him and “then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.”

Hadn’t these men believed in Jesus three years earlier? How is it that they keep putting their trust in Jesus? Could faith be more than a one-time thing?

The answer is clearly yes; faith is more than a one-time thing. Faith is the primary characteristic of a person who belongs to God, or as some people prefer to say, is “saved.” They don’t just put their faith in God once at the beginning of their “religion period.” They continue to trust God, which is to say, they continue to entrust themselves to God, throughout their lives.

St. Paul confirms this lifelong repetition of belief in his Letter to the Romans, the grandest exposition of faith ever written. Early in the letter, he writes that the righteous — those who have been accepted into God’s family — will live by faith. In fact, the righteousness from God is revealed “from faith to faith.”

People cannot stop trusting God because they already did that when they were 6, or 16, or 60. The Christian life is a life of faith. It goes from faith to faith, from trusting God today to trusting him tomorrow, to trusting him on our final day.

— Shayne Looper is a writer and speaker based in Coldwater, Michigan. Contact him at salooper57@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: Faith is a lifelong journey