Scripture Reference: Romans 1:16; 1 Timothy 1:8-14
“I am not ashamed of the gospel,” shouted the apostle Paul. He might not have been, but sadly, the truth is, most of us are.
At school? At work? Or, the bridge party? The discussion turns to religion or the latest clergy scandal, and everyone speaks disdainfully about the church’s hypocrisy. Is it possible in these situation you feel like a fool at times to admit you’re a Christian during these times?
Why is there such little boldness these days about the Christian faith? While there may be many reasons for our feelings of timidity, one reason is often the Bible itself. Many people today view the Bible simply as a collection of myths and fairy tales, clever to read and full of morality tales but hardly acceptable to the scientific mind.
“You believe the Bible?” one man asked me a long time ago as if surprised. “It’s so outdated and full of nothing but myths and fables. How can you honestly believe all that stuff you read?”
He had a point, to a degree. The Bible can be hard to believe, even harder to explain. Since the dawn of the Freudian era, we have come to think about the world in ways different from our ancestors. Due to this, I believe, is one source of our embarrassment.
The Jewish rabbi Harold Kushner touches on it in a story he tells of a boy who was asked by his mother what he had learned in church school that day:
The boy described the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, but when he came to the dramatic portion about the crossing of the Red Sea, he edited the story saying, “Moses took out his walkie-talkie and called in the Israeli Air Force to bomb the Egyptians, while the others built a pontoon bridge to cross over the Red Sea.”
Perplexed at his version of the story, the boy’s mother asked, “Is that how they told you the story?”
He dropped his head and muttered, “Well no, Mom, but if I told you the story the way they told it to me, you’d never believe it!”
That’s truly the sum of our problem, isn’t it? Whenever we read the Bible, we are suddenly thrust into a world which seems so foreign to us, especially in the western world. A world where seas part and folks trek across on dry ground; bushes burn but are not consumed; manna drops out of the sky to feed hungry people; folks walk on water; the blind are given their sight; paralytics, and quadriplegics are made to walk; and the dead are brought back to life. How do you explain that kind of world to a people who live in a world accustomed to analyzing itself under a microscope?
My point? You can’t explain it! The stories of our faith live on from generation to generation, not because skilled practitioners of religious truth perfect better ways of explaining the stories but because the stories themselves have a life of their own. Yet that is the key; they are stories and accounts of faith! They need no explanation. They need simply to be told. The more we seek to reduce the Christian narrative to a carefully categorized set of propositions, the greater our anxiety will be about the Bible and our faith. In short, the more we try to explain the Bible, the less confidence we have in the Bible.
It’s time we let the Christian story speak for itself. Its story is our story. If our interest is in strengthening the believing person’s confidence so he or she can say with the apostle Paul, “I am not ashamed of the gospel,” we will come closer to accomplishing that objective, not by wrangling over whether the hare chews the cud (see Leviticus 11:6), but by affirming the truth of the Christian story. Do we need to be ashamed? Absolutely not!
With that in mind, I’ve listed a few reasons why we do not need to be ashamed of the Christian faith. To be continued over the next several days.
To Be Continued
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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