No matter how many good reasons I might give for believing in the God I see in Christ, none of these can compel anyone else to believe in him. To tell the truth, I didn’t really come to my belief by a lot of close observations and hard thinking. I can’t take any credit for my believing, as if it were my own good work. I suspect that something of Christ got into me and that he is, in me, believing in himself. The hidden God hides himself in the people of his true church. We simply discover this miracle that he has worked in us. My believing is more his work than mine. But now that I do believe in him, I can see that my belief is quite sensible and that it makes sense of everything. My belief also gives me a program for living constructively. Its value can be judged only by the last word that will be spoken about it by the highest authority at the end of history. In the meantime, lacking anyone to surpass Jesus in mastering both life and death, I have decided to stick with him. I have put myself and my deepest concerns trustfully in his hands. All my weight is resting upon this God. I believe that he is able to uphold me through everything. Because I believe in God, I shall come to know more about God. When I believe enough in a surgeon, I will allow him to cut me open under anesthetic when I’m unconscious and helpless. Then I come to know something about his skill, about my own condition, and perhaps about what new health is like. Because I believed in God first, I have come to believe the Creed.
I probably shouldn’t expect anyone else to believe the Creed unless they think well of the way I and my fellow believers live. What a man really believes IS shown through his actions. My life story will illustrate what my creed really is. A man’s beliefs are the most important thing about him. If a prospective son-in-law believes that the world owes him a living, the girl’s father had better have a little chat with his daughter! So when I say that I believe in God, I don’t mean that this is merely my go-to-church-and-say-my-Sunday-prayers frame of mind. It’s got to make a difference at my office tomorrow because I believe in God. My wife and family must not be worrying about what I’m doing when I’m out of their sight. I must watch how I spend my life’s time and money because I believe in God. Since my faith affects all of me, it will affect everything I touch. My point of view, my reactions, my decisions, all will be influenced by the fact that I believe in God. Well, lots of them are. But again and again I somehow get a wild idea that I can run my life in some way other than Christ’s way. That spells trouble because my life strangely insists on being run according to Christ’s way or else it kicks back at me. I just hope that when I fail to live my normal faith, the tragic cost of my failure will prove, in a left-handed way, that my normal faith is quite right. Whether I practice what I profess or not, I have to come back to belief in God. His rebuke convinces me as much as his blessing. Even the man who believes in unbelief finds out a lot about God’s ways sooner or later, whether he likes them or not.
Books by Dr. John A. Ross
