THE DYNAMICS OF FAITH FORMATION

Religion

This sermon was preached by Rev. Paul Mims at the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Cherry Log GA, last Sunday, October 28th.

Acts 9:20-32

In all of us believers there has been a spiritual and a practical dynamic in the formation of our faith. If these were healthy and occurred at the proper time in our development in Christ, then our faith is well formed. If not, our faith could have been mal-formed and is in need of reformation.
We are going to study the faith formation of the Apostle Paul around four broad concepts that are common to us today. You will have the opportunity to compare how the Christian faith was formed in you with how it was formed in him.

Spiritual formation is the process of Christ being formed in us by the Holy Spirit which affects our minds, our hearts, our behavior, and our choices. Some people have the privilege of Christian parents and their faith formation begins early. Others who do not have Christian homes are privileged to be in a Christian youth group. With the secularization of our society fewer people are coming to faith in Christ in the first fourth of life.

Saul was very religious from his youth, but did not come to faith in Christ until he was about thirty three years of age. His total Christian ministry was only about thirty seven years. He spent about thirteen years in preparation for a missionary career of about twenty three years.

Last week, we studied how Saul was converted as Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus. Following conversion, the first and most basic dynamic in our faith formation is that

I. FAITH FORMS THROUGH THE INFLUENCE AND HELP OF THE PEOPLE WE ADMIRE. (9:19b) “Saul spent several days with the disciples in Damascus.”

It was the prayer of Stephen that made it hard for Saul to escape his Christian witness. He prayed “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” (7:60) Never had he seen anyone like this. He both delighted and was disturbed in the stoning of the deacon, Stephen. This hounded him all the way to Damascus. Usually, there is a person who typifies what a Christian ought to be that sets us to giving the faith some serious thought. Who was that for you? A mother or father who showed you the way? Perhaps it was a friend, or a teacher, or a pastor.

There were others who also were instrumental in Saul’s faith formation. There was a man in Damascus named Judas who was the first to open his home to him. The first one to pray for him was Ananias. He was sent by the Lord to tell Saul that he was chosen for a special cause in the Kingdom. Later, Barnabas would make him known to the Christian leaders in Jerusalem.

The first to recognize my spiritual hunger was my mother. Her name is Julia. It was her prayers and determination to give me a wholesome view of the Christian faith that was my foundation. There were two pastors that influenced me in my teen years. Dr. Thomas Field instructed me in the basics of the faith and baptized me. Dr. Gerald Martin recognized my call to ministry and provided me with opportunities to serve. Our youth minister was a returned missionary from South America, Miss Gladys Farmer. She also taught Bible at our high school. She had crippling arthritis and sometimes had to come to youth events that she had planned in a wheel chair. But her spirit was a powerful influence on all of our youth. Then, there was my friend, Glenn Herndon. We began our spiritual pilgrimage at the same time and encouraged each other in the disciplines of Bible reading and prayer. My Royal Ambassador leader was Wayne Jones. This was an organization similar to our AWANA. The Sunday School and Church Training leaders were Mr. and Mrs. Romine. Week by week, they faithfully taught me about the Christian walk. But making all of this possible was the congregation of First Baptist Church in Quitman, Georgia. A healthy church is so vital in the faith development of its people. My early church experience was a happy place around which I built my life. Then at seventeen, when I went off to college, I was privileged to serve as youth and music minister at Central Baptist Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee under pastor Ken Combs. I have told you all of this to emphasize that faith formation requires time and the influence of many people.

Wayne Major said, “I conducted a personal survey for an evangelism course in seminary, examining the ways people come to faith in Christ. The single most influence in leading people to Christ? By far, it was the parents. Behind parents came pastors, youth pastors, Sunday School teachers, adults of the church. The influence of the adult members of the church upon our youth cannot be over-emphasized.”

II. FAITH FORMATION IS ENHANCED BY AN UNDERSTANDING OF OUR PURPOSE IN LIFE. (9:20) “At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God.

Dr. Luke tells us the exciting story of Saul’s early attempts at service and when we co-relate this with what Paul said in Galatians 1:15-24, we can get a picture of the first steps of his faith formation. William Barclay put it together for us:

(1) Saul is converted on the Damascus road. (2) He preaches in Damascus. (3) He goes away to Arabia. (4) He returns and preaches in Damascus for a period of three years. (5) He goes up to Jerusalem (6) He escapes from Jerusalem to Caesarea. (7) He returns to Tarsus, his hometown, and the regions Cilicia and Syria.

All of this is a period of about thirteen years. It is his time for faith formation in Christ. Let’s look at it a little more closely.

Soon after his marvelous life transformation and his early proclamation that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, he goes to Arabia, possibly to the area of Mt. Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments and the Law. All of his training to this point had been in the understanding and implementation of the Law. He had been a Pharisee who devoted himself to a strict interpretation of the law in order to please God. That was the devotion of his whole life. Now, he became devoted not primarily to the Law, but to the one that the Law pointed to. He had to go through a radical process of rethinking everything that he had believed to this point in his life. So he needed time alone to go through all that this would mean for his future life. There is no way to know for sure, but I think that he formulated there the theology that he later wrote about in Romans and in the letter to the Galatians 1:11-23. “I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. For you heard of my previous life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of god and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when God who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, and was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him for fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles – only James, the Lord’s brother. I assure before God that what I am writing to you is no lie. Later I went to Syria and Cilicia. I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report: The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.”

Did you discover your life’s purpose early? Did your faith relate to that purpose that carved out your destiny? A person who knows both his faith and his life’s purpose and relates them so that they grow together is indeed blessed.

Griffith Thomas said, “As water never rises above its level so what we do never rises above what we are…We shall never take people one hair’s breadth beyond our own spiritual attainment. We may point to higher things, but we shall only take them as far as we ourselves have gone.”

William Law said, “If you stop and ask yourself why you are not so devoted as the (early) Christians, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.”

III. FAITH IS FORMED IN THE TRIALS WE FACE. (9:23) “After many days had gone by, the Jews conspired to kill him.” (9:29) “He talked and debated with the Grecian Jews, but they tried to kill him.” Saul did not have an easy beginning in his new faith and testimony. F. F. Bruce in his classic work on PAUL APOSTLE OF THE HEART SET FREE says: “It is possible that during the years he endure some of the hardships that he later lists in 2 Corinthians 11:22-27…they must be assigned to a stage in his career when he still submitted to synagogue discipline…So long as he made a practice of visiting the synagogue as an observant Jew in each new city to which he came, he was obliged to accept its discipline, until he finally withdrew from it. It may well be that some of his experiences of the thirty none lashes belong to this Cilician phase of his life.”

Five times I received from the Jews forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned.” (2 Corinthians 11:24-25)

That was a severe discipline designed to get him to recant and stop his foolishness of preaching about a Galilean carpenter who claimed to be the long awaited Messiah who was crucified, buried, and risen again from the dead and was now ascended to the right hand of the Father.

Today, Christians are so easily offended and want to leave the church and become inactive simply because someone said something to them about the way they behave or live. The town and cities here in the nation are filled with people who once were active in their church and seized upon a pale excuse to turn from it all.

We have developed some very poor and weak disciples of Christ who have no backbone and no fortitude to endure anything difficult for him. But those who do are the ones the scripture speaks of when it says, “Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus…If we endure we shall also reign with him.” (2 Timothy 2:3,12)

Phillip Yancey wrote, “Human beings grow by striving, working, stretching; and in a sense, human nature needs problems more than solutions. Why are not all prayers answered magically and instantly? Why must every convert travel the same tedious path of spiritual discipline? Because persistent prayer, and fasting, and study, and meditation are designed primarily for our sakes, not for God’s. Kierkegaard said that Christians reminded him of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through…We yearn for shortcuts. But shortcuts usually lead away from growth, not toward it. Apply the principle directly to Job: what was the final result of the testing he went through? As Rabbi Abraham Heschel observed, “Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken.” Philip Yancey, Disappointment With God, Zondervan, pp. 207-8.
But here at Cornerstone we have a congregation of saints that are growing in their faith and in their service to our Lord. You are not spiritual babies that have to be rocked to keep you from whining. Many of you have walked with the Lord for many years and you demonstrate a spiritual maturity that is unique in today’s church. To be healthy a Christian has to eat the meat of the word and not try to sustain spiritual life on the milk of the word. Very few in our congregation can be slain by a word not fitly spoken because you keep you keep your eyes on Jesus and draw from his strength to be an overcomer. A healthy church produces healthy youth group. A healthy church develops healthy leaders. A biblical church exalts Christ, reaches out to the lost and hurting, and becomes a force in the community for the Kingdom.

Thank you, Cornerstone for wanting to be a church like that!

Praise to our Lord for being formed in us

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