I said something at the end of yesterday’s sermon that I wish I would have had time to explain better…but the service is only an hour and we stick to it.
I said “I don’t understand how one man, Jesus, can die to save many… I’ve read the verses, I’ve read the books, I even know how to pronounce substitutionary atonement…I just don’t know how it works…I just know that God says he’ll accept Jesus as payment…and that’s good enough for me.”
What I didn’t have time to say:
“I also don’t know everything about how the laser scanner works at Walmart. I don’t know how a bar code communicates the price and quantity of an object to the main computer-it looks like a bunch of lines to me. I don’t know exactly how electronic banking works and how Walmart can remove money from my account when I purchase my cart filled with Bondo, motor oil, candy, and shotgun shells. (I swear I had that “ultimate redneck combination” in my cart one time!) I just have enough faith in the system that I don’t leave the check out line and go to the service desk to “make sure” my bill has been paid. I just wheel my cart out of the store as fast as possible and head home. I don’t understand completely how the transaction works..but I have faith in the system. The idea that we have to “completely understand” the intricacies of how something works before we can have faith is nonsense…in fact it may be the opposite of faith.”
