We live in a time that has seen words be redefined and lose their traditional meanings to take on newer meanings that are really nothing more than a parody.  While we may not give this much thought, it is actually of the utmost importance when it comes to preaching, understanding, and living the Christian faith.

This is because words are not only words, but they create concepts and frameworks of thinking (see the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).  For example, when one believes that faith, is for example, nothing more than belief with zero evidence, and this person is a thinker, then it is highly unlikely when one hears that faith in Jesus is what God wants from us, that this person will even give Christianity serious thought.  And to be honest, this is a good thing because faith is NOT belief with zero evidence, and this is not its definition in the New Testament or indeed in early Christian literature, thus when early Christians preached that God wanted us to have faith in Jesus, they meant something else.

Yet, those who preach to a person with this conceptual framework attached to the word “faith” that we are saved by faith, then they will have lost a person due to their lack of understanding of what came to mind when this person heard the word “faith.”

There are many more words than just “faith” that must be RE-redefined in order for people to build the correct conceptual framework on which to accept Christ and His teachings.

Photo from Pexels

Words That Have to Be RE-Redefined:

Faith

Faith is popularly understood as belief without evidence.  This is not the Biblical meaning of faith.

Why people ever redefined this word may be due to a confusion that faith is believing without seeing.  Believing without seeing is not the same thing as believing without evidence.  For example, if I have faith in someone’s reliability, it is not without evidence, but rather it is because of the evidence of my prior experience dealing with that person.

If I ask that person for help such as in giving me a ride to work one day when my car is in the shop, then my faith is well placed.  I do not know for sure if he will come, I do not see whether he has set his timer to wake him up early and to get ready to pick me up, but I do have faith in him, and my faith will be realized and rewarded.

Faith is also in this case a way of seeing.  It is seeing through believing.

That faith is not blind is shown by the fact that we have the Old Testament prophecies foretelling the Coming of Christ.  We have the New Testament recording the work of Christ and the Apostles.  We have the works of the early Christians showing that they achieved what Christ intended.  All this is evidence for our faith.  The prophecies were written hundreds of years before Christ, and they were fulfilled in Him.  The New Testament has been subjected to critical historical analysis, and the result is that its portrayal of Christ is defensible when subjected to historical methodology.  Further, the works of the early Christians following the Apostles shows that they followed and furthered the things that were handed to them by the Apostles.

All this is evidence, and faith is a response to that evidence.  It is trust and loyalty (faithfulness) to Christ and His Church.  To get this corrected understanding of faith into the minds of your hearers before preaching will result in a different response from your hearers.  It will at the very least begin a dialogue, and dialogue was the main way the Christian faith spread.  This is how, for example, the Apostle Paul carried out his ministry.

Love

Love is popularly understood as romance or a feeling of euphoria.  This is not the Christian definition of love.

Love is when your actions are directed for someone else’s benefit by your own choice and care. Thus, love is often sacrificial and is not always reciprocal although it often does become reciprocal and when it does become reciprocal, it leads to a massive growth of love and thus develops a solid community.

Marital Love

When the Apostle Paul defined martial love in his Epistle to the Ephesians, he directed the actions of both spouses toward the other, not toward themselves.  He said to the husbands to love their wives to the point of dying for them, and the women to love their husbands to the point of submitting to them.

What the Apostle Paul said was radical in the Greco-Roman world.  Women were nothing more than stewards of the house and the source of legitimate heirs for the men.  If the men wanted, they could go to the Temple of Diana in Ephesus and worship her by sleeping with one of the 1,000 temple priestesses who engaged in the worship of Diana by ritual prostitution.  To forbid fornication and adultery, to make marriage only one man and one woman, and to tell the men to love their wives to the point of dying for them meant that the husbands were to give their entire lives and energies to loving their only wives.  What the Apostle Paul did was to bring a marital love that had been unknown in the Greco-Roman world.  The source of this understanding of marital love was Christ Himself.

Further, to tell the woman to submit to the men was not telling them to be slaves to the men. The women were really nothing more than that already.  Rather, he was telling them that they are no longer stewards of the house and the sources of legitimate heirs.  To understand what this submitting was, we need to understand how people begin to follow Christ.  They do it as a free response to His love.  So for the women, this submitting to their husbands is a free act of the will, an attraction to their husbands that results from a response of love to the husbands who were now to love their only wives with their entire lives.

It was a giving of oneself fully to the spouse.  This was nothing less than transformation of what love and marriage meant in the ancient world.

Happiness

Happiness is popularly understood today as a feeling of euphoria and excitement.

Yet happiness is not a feeling of euphoria and excitement, but it is a feeling of contentedness.  I think the reason these two ideas became conflated is because those who are content occasionally feel euphoric and excited, so people have forgotten the right road to that feeling and have sought the feeling by itself.

Rather, happiness is a feeling that everything is as it should be.  It is especially evident when someone is silent and alone.  If they are happy, then they will feel content.  If they are not happy, then silence and solitude are the most fearful thing they can experience.  True happiness may not even lead to a smile, yet it is true happiness if one feels content.

Most people today in the West are not happy, and what they think is happiness is not happiness. They are hungry for happiness and try to find it through various means whether it is sex, drugs, or the various types of entertainment.

When we tell them that the Christian faith will give them happiness, they will not find it if they understand happiness as a feeling of euphoria and excitement.  Thus, they will see Christianity as not keeping its promises and actually lying to them.

Christianity is not an easy road; it is full of tribulations.  Euphoria and excitement are often out of reach for many Christians such as those living under persecution, extreme poverty, or hardships. Yet the Bible promises that those who follow Christ will be blessed (see Matthew 5).  What does this mean?  This word “blessed” in Greek, which is makarios, indeed refers to happiness, but it is an internal happiness that makes one content, which is not the same as constantly euphoric and excited.  It gives those who are blessed a clear and convicting realization of purpose in their lives; they see that everything is as it should be between themselves, others, and God.  They can sit alone in silence and feel peace.  It was this type of happiness that was in the hearts of the martyrs and confessors when they suffered for Christ.  This is what led them to sing in their prison cells awaiting their martyrdom.  This is what led them to worrying about their own congregations rather than themselves when being led to their martyrdoms like St. Ignatius of Antioch.  Nothing could bring them down when they knew that the Lord of the Universe had redeemed them and had an eternal life prepared for them with our Lord Jesus Christ.

Christians should be clear when explaining what the Christian understanding of happiness is before telling people who are hungry for euphoria and excitement that following Christ will make them “happy.”  I even saw a pastor one time compare the happiness of following Christ to the high that former drug addicts got when smoking crack.  He said it was even higher.  He is confusing what people who smoked crack felt before when they had no feeling of contentedness or purpose, and that they themselves confused this feeling with happiness.

Happiness is blessedness, and blessedness is having full confidence in Christ Himself.  That blessedness will lead to wonders in a person’s life, but constant euphoria and excitement are not those, although euphoria and excitement may come, but then it will be rooted in Christ Himself.

Incomprehensible Words:

Then there are words that are totally incomprehensible even if RE-redefined, rather they have to be exemplified by life.

For example, try describing light to a person who never saw or describing music to a person who never heard.  Good luck. It is impossible.  Light can only be described to those who have experienced light.  In the same way, the following words can only be comprehensible to those who have experienced something of the reality that these words describe, even if to a little degree.

Hope

I remember the first time I had a student cry tears of joy because she had seen for the first time in her life that her work had value and a long-term value at that, and that her work led to real progress, and the result was that after so many years of being in below grade-level classes, she was going to start high school on grade level. I remember as I saw her progress throughout the year.  She had built hope and now understood its effect in her life even though she may not have associated her experiences with the word “hope.”  But if one were to come to her and describe hope to her now, she would understand it.  She would immediately connect the description of hope with the experiences she had.  I remember that this power of hope that began to live in her extended to her other classes; it affected her growth everywhere else.

I have seen the power of hope in many students.  It changes the way they think, behave, and work.  It brings in a flood of purpose and expectation in their lives.  It leads to happiness (“blessedness” in the Christian definition above).

These experiences of hope create a foundation which preachers can build on in order to bring to them the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Part of why the Son of God became Man was to speak our language, not only in words, but in sharing our life and personal dealings.  This includes the experience of hope.  But before hope can begin, faith must be placed in one due to his or her trustworthiness as built through experience.

There is a name under which hope is approximated today: Growth Mindset.  Most of the idea of Growth Mindset is nothing more than the Christian idea of hope.  But regardless, this concept is not widely spread today.  We live in an extremely competitive world, and some parents and communities expect nothing less than perfection.  To be perfect means there is no room for growth; it is either I am perfect or I am not.  It leads to hopelessness, and that in turn leads to depression, which in turn causes people to shut down and be closed to spiritual reality.

This is why Christians should be actively engaged in helping their communities because by doing so, we are building experiences of hope, and when the experience of hope is built, the Gospel becomes comprehensible.

Father

According to the National Center for Fathering, about 39% of children from grades K-12 live in a home without a Father.  This is nearly half of children living in the United States. This is a recent phenomenon; most children in the United States had a father present at home before the 1970s.

I remember in my second year of teaching, I gave my students the poem “O Captain! My Captain!” to read, and there was a stanza where the speaker shifts from saying “O Captain! My Captain!” to “O Father! My Father!” and one of my students raised her hand during the class’s independent work time and said, “I am confused.  Is this person his captain or his father?”

It may seem evident to those who have fathers in their homes what the author was trying to say, but for her it was incomprehensible.

I answered her by saying, “No.  He is saying he is like his father.  What is your relationship with your father like?”

And she answered, “I don’t have one.”

So I asked her work partner, and she responded, “I don’t have one either.”

So I spent the next 10 to 15 minutes explaining what fathers are like in the families where they are present, and what the author of this poem meant by using this metaphor.  They got closer to understanding the poet’s meaning, but it was still fuzzy in their heads.  There was simply no experience for them with which to connect what they were reading in order to understand what the author meant.

I also remember a student from time as a substitute teacher.  He was close to graduating high school, and he always spoke positively about his grandpa.  So, I asked him if he lived with him, and he answered that he did, and that his own father was not present in his life.  Yet based on the way he described the example of his grandfather and what he did for him, he had an experience of what a father meant.

For other children who live in fatherless homes, the ideas that these children associate with Fatherhood in their lives and the conceptual framework that they build about fathers is one of disappointment, distance, and disloyalty.

When we come to tell them that God is Father of all and we are all His children, then the first thing that comes to their mind is why they should even follow this God.  It is not a question of His existence that comes to their mind, but a question of His worthiness.  To such people, it is extremely difficult to accept the Gospel.

Shusaku Endo in his book A Life of Jesus, works on the assumption that it has been difficult for the Japanese to accept Christ because God is presented as a Father, and in their cultures, Fathers are seen as harsh and emotionally unapproachable. So, in his book he presents Jesus in a different way, as one who shares their life with them and exemplifies in many ways the virtues of a mother, who in Japanese culture is hardworking, merciful, compassionate, and often suffers, which is actually not unlike the similes God Himself uses in places in the Book of Isaiah.  See, for example, Isaiah 49:15 and Isaiah 66:13.

Husband/Wife

The understanding of marriage in the West has devolved to less than animalian.  Some animals are more faithful to their mates than some humans are to their spouses, for example, mourning doves and gray wolves. Marriage has become nothing more than an economic and social relationship with some nice feelings peppered on top of this.  Love may be the furthest thing from people’s minds when they hear the word “marriage” or “husband” or “wife.”

I have heard married couples say that “as time goes on, we don’t have the feeling of love that we once had, which was really strong at the beginning.  It is more of a companionship now.”

It is not surprising if they understand the definition of love to be romance or a feeling of euphoria. But that is not love.  And no wonder people say that love is dead.  It is because they never had love in mind when they spoke.  They had romance, and romance fades away with age like the flowers of the fields fade away with time.

When the Apostle Paul said, “Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church,” (Ephesians 5:25), he certainly did not mean, “Husbands keep the romance alive with your wives.”

Romance is a good thing when experienced between husbands and wives especially when they are young, but it is restricted to youth in the same way that simplicity is restricted to childhood.  But make no mistake; it is not the love which they ought to have for one another.

Rather, the love that they should have is what was described above under the RE-redefined definition of love.

It is this marital love that is essential to understanding the way God sees Himself and the Church in much the same way that understanding Fatherhood will help us understand how God sees Himself and the individuals who believe in Him.  If people connect the modern skewed conceptual framework of the relationship between husbands and wives when thinking about God, then it may produce awkwardness at best and repulsiveness at worst.

Conclusion:

We as Christians must till the ground before sowing on it.  In order to do so, we must engage with the wider culture and not simply take the approach that fundamentalist Protestants have been taking for decades which is, please forgive the idiom, to shove the Bible down people’s throats. Eating something slowly not only leads to nutrition and health, but also enjoyment.  Having something shoved down your throat is not nutritious and will lead to indigestion assuming it does not kill you first.  The message of Christ must be chewed on slowly and properly digested, and in order for that to happen, we must prepare people with the correct conceptual framework, and that framework line up with reality and experience.

It’s no wonder that people are not receptive to the Gospel.  The very words that we use to bring the Good News of Christ to them no longer have the same meanings they once had, and others have no meaning at all to them.  We are literally speaking another language to them and are getting frustrated that they do not understand.

We need to be more diligent and thoughtful.

If you found benefit from this blog entry, click here to like my Facebook page here OR sign up to my email list to receive my latest blog entries every week in your inboxes, and you will also receive my free eBook The Way of Christ.  Click here to sign up.