Take Charge

There is something I found that I have been struggling with throughout my entire Christian life.  It is something that I believe is a struggle for every believer and an issue that most of us don’t even realize that we have.

I struggle with building my faith off the faith of others.

I look back at how I have come to the doctrinal beliefs that I have this day and realize that the majority of them are just ideas that I have adopted as my own from men who I trusted and not from personal study or reading of the Scriptures. (Not that I am saying these were not godly men but rather that I have not tested what I have taken as Truth.)  What I need to be doing is testing everything I hear before I accept it as truth.  Over this past year I have found myself, instead of just dismissing different doctrines out of hand, taking what I have heard and testing it through Scripture myself and I have found that much of what I had taken as truth were simply the beliefs or personal convictions of others and not the Truth of God’s Word.  I have had to rework my thinking because of God’s Word being taken out of context or from taking man’s words as Scripture.

I say all of this not because I am going to give you a list of some doctrine but rather to make the point that we cannot live off the faith of others but need to be taking charge of our own faith.  We are told to be continuously training ourselves.  (1 Timothy 4:7-8)  We are told to test everything we hear (1 John 4).  We cannot as Followers of Christ just assume that everything that comes from the pulpit is true.  It is not enough to know what you believe you also NEED to know why you believe it.

We need to take charge of our own faith and stop living off the faith of others.

~ by Bryan Stafford on December 19, 2008.