Ours Is An Ancient Faith

Recently, my Dad and I got lost in the abyss that is otherwise known as Ancestry.com.  Before we realized it, we had spent hours in front of the computer working on my family tree.  As I looked at my family tree that now stretched across the screen, I was reminded how quickly one’s relatives are forgotten. I was familiar with my great grandparents and had the privilege of meeting a couple of them.  But after that, the names were unfamiliar.  I’m not talking about people who lived a few hundred years ago.  I’m talking about people who were born during and shortly after the Civil War.

It is easy for me to become this way about my faith as well.  It’s easy to fast forward 2,000 years of history and immerse myself almost exclusively in the modern age.  It’s easy to ignore 2,000 years of faithful men and women who helped shape our faith, helped defend it from those that wanted to destroy it, and helped pass the torch to countless others until we had the opportunity to receive the “…faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.”

But there are a few ways that I have found to avoid this.

Last year at our church, our Pastor began doing a monthly series of Historical Sermons.  The point of this series is to expose us to messages that have served as milestones in the history of our faith.  During this series we have heard sermons from Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Charles Spurgeon, W.A. Criswell and many more giants of our faith.  These nights are great reminders that we stand on the shoulders of faithful, Godly men.  We did not make it here without help.

Another way we can do this is to expose ourselves to the rich history of worship music in our history.  As unbelievable as it might sound to some, Christians were able to experience incredible musical worship for 2,000 years without Chris Tomlin.  And as equally unbelievable as this might be to others, the church was able to worship long before Isaac Watts, Fanny Crosby, and Bill Gaither.  In our corporate worship, we blend these areas.  To lift up the theologically rich and powerful songs that the church has been singing for the last couple of centuries right next to the theologically rich and powerful songs that God is inspiring people to write today.

One last helpful way to do this is in our reading.  The history of brilliant Christian writers goes back to the ancient origins of our faith.  All along the way, God has greatly used both men and women to inspire, educate, convict and challenge the church.  We can learn from their original writings and learn from their biographies.  In his book, God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis explains this with more wisdom and eloquence than I could ever possibly formulate:  “Every age has its own outlook.  It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.  We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period…The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

Remember, ours is an ancient faith.  Let’s learn from the generations that have gone before us and faithfully pass the torch to the next generation when the time comes.