My impression is that faithful readers of Common Grounds Online do not suffer from any want of critique from the more fundamentalistic strains of evangelicalism still dominating the religious experience of so many in America today. For most of us, the pendulum is still swinging quite in the opposite direction without too much help, thank you very much. Yet a recent Saturday morning children’s devotional I attended warrants some comment.

Halftime at my 9-year-old daughter’s basketball league is given to “devotional time,” due to the fact, I assume, that she plays in a church league. The speaker opened his message by holding a pen out in the palm of his hand. “Who would like to have this pen? It’s a free pen and anyone who wants it this morning can have it.” It took a minute or so before someone mercifully played along and walked up to take the free pen.

“You see,” he explained, “that’s exactly what the Gospel is. It’s free and it’s available. But you don’t have it until you receive it. And once you’ve received it, you need to use it.”

Again, my intention is not to nitpick what was likely a kindly volunteer at a simply country church function. Rather, the comment revived my recent quest to identify the nature and practice of this most fundamental of Christian acts: believing. The message of the Gospel, we were told growing up, was not activated in the life until it was “received” and “believed.”

My question for the gentleman speaker last weekend is simply this: when presented in this way, how do you avoid making faith meritorious? The gift of the Gospel exists, as it were, outside of me prior to my conversion. What releases the effects of that gift into my life is the simple act of “receiving and believing.” So then how is faith not a condition of salvation? How is salvation “free” if it costs me an act of reception in order to enjoy its effects?

My intention is not to launch into an explanation here, but merely to offer some observations. First, the sensations associated with the act of believing are painfully hard to define in that world. The descriptions believers give of the event usually end up being marked by some vague inward impression that they are in fact feeling positively towards the speaker’s message. They agree with them. They like what they are hearing. They are willing to go ahead with the emotional transaction, albeit with wildly undefined currency.

Second, one of the near results of this kind of thinking is that is places the directional compass of salvation on the self and not on Jesus. Faith has got to be faith in Jesus, not faith in my faith. Therefore, the act of believing, if considered in the context of the Christian’s larger story, must have the net result of causing me to focus less on my self and more on Jesus. Self-absorbed Christianity should be a contradiction in terms.

Finally, my suspicion is that this confusion is due to the fact that a fully Biblical consideration of faith cannot be separated from its spiritual flip-side, repentance. Faith and repentance are regularly spoken of together in Christian spiritual theology. Why? I suspect because there is no turning TO when there has not been a turning FROM.

That is to say, repentance leads me to despair of myself, to stop focusing on my ability to do anything about my current spiritual state, to drop my arms helplessly at my side and admit that I am powerless before my addictions, broken but for his grace. Ironically, this painful, Spirit-created admission with its attendant posture towards God, my neighbor, and myself IS the very posture of believing. I am in fact believing when I own this truth about myself: that I am a sinner, that I am needy, that I am hungry.

Horatius Bonar, in his little book, God's Way of Peace, describes the absurdity of a man who insists that he doesn’t know how to believe as being like “a man wearied with a journey, and is not able to go one step farther, [and says] ‘I am so tired that I am not able to lie down,’ when indeed he can neither stand nor go. The poor wearied sinner can never believe in Jesus Christ until he finds he can do nothing for himself.”