When she sits behind the wheel of her white pickup truck the world seems livable. When she looks out the window she sees the beauty of an uninterrupted creation. A creation that has no faults or errors. However, when she starts driving her pickup down the highway at a mere fifty miles an hour, she starts to see the side- effects of a lost and alluded reality. She drives over road kill, gets honked at for going too slow, and even feels the anger rise up in her heart as someone cuts her off.

Living faith is a lot like driving a pickup truck. The first time you get behind the wheel you have a sense of excitement and wonder. You feel a certian amount of freedom from your old life of asking for rides to your new life of independence. There is a sense of excitment and sense of legalism when a person enters into the faith. We throw away all of our "bad" c.d.'s. We burn all our "bad" books, we throw out all our "bad movies" and we live in a world of compete abstinance. We don't cuss, drink, spit on the floor. We become perfect moral beings.

We live in a moral perfection until we get hurt by another christian, or until we are confronted by a situation where morals don't apply.

Our perfect morality that starts our faith journey off suddenley comes to a hault as we realize that Jesus didn't come and die so that we could be good, neat, moral beings.

When we find ourselves living by our own moral standards we find ourselves treating our faith cheaply. The reason I say this is because when we balance our own lives on the thread of morality we are living in the shallow end of the pool. We have created our own personal law and that at times becomes an idol. The church often gets focused on doing. The church often gets focused on saying. If we do and say then we will achieve our salvation. If we serve the church until our fingers fall off and if we say that we are christians until we loose our voice we still are not grasping the reality of faith. Doing and saying are wonderful venues of showing people the Gospel. But they are not the foundation of our faith.

Our faith cannot be morality, or actions, or words.

Our faith is believing the story and living it out. Not just teaching the story, or praying the story, or moralizing the story, or acting the story, but actually believing the story.


When we believe the story we seek to holistically represent the Gospel in our human existence.

Our faith will bind our divided parts. Our faith will be a catalyst and a sustaining reality in bringing us into completion through Jesus.


But, we first have to believe in the story.