Saturday, February 18, 2006

When Peace Yields to Faith

Many Christians hope for a nice, quiet life. It's a biblical hope (see 1 Tim 2:2), but interestingly, the "hall of faith" (Heb 11) contains not a single account of a peaceful and quiet life.

To reconcile these two -- a desire for peace with the violent reality of a life lived by faith -- there seems to be a point where to be peaceful is to be unfaithful. At some point peace yields to faith.

The faith chronicled in Hebrews 11 is both passive and active. It's passive faith to suffer mockings and floggings, to be killed with the sword, to be tortured. But faith is to be aggressively active too; it puts foreign armies to flight, conquers kingdoms, receives back the dead, enforces justice, obtains promises.

I desire a quiet, peaceful life. But there will be situations where I must choose: peace or faith. At that point, peace is cowardly and treasonous. And not becoming of those whom the world was not worthy.

2 comments:

Summer said...

This is a great follow up on Friday night's study--we were glad to see you /Kristin there.

Tim said...

Thanks; we were happy to be there. We're glad you've started to blog. It'll be one way of getting to know both of you better.