Put these three statements together and you will understand this sermon: Faith is walking to the edge of all the light you have and taking one more step; and A journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step; and Nothing great has ever been accomplished without great passion.

We began last week a four-sermon series called The Passion of the Christians. With all the rightful and wrongful hullabaloo over Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, what matters is not whether the movie does well because people like it, but whether people do well by becoming passionate followers of the passionate Christ. Do you connect to the story of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection? Not just are you moved by it, but does Christ move in you? Is your life wrapped up in Christ as Christ is in you? Can you say with Paul, I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now life in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me?

This is what the world needs from the church. We don’t need a church of respectable citizens who quietly mind their own business, bring the kids to Sunday school, and never say or do anything that causes trouble. If Christ himself had followed that approach, he would never have been crucified, and we would never have been saved. Neither do we don’t need a church, though, that thinks its first duty is to clean up the morals of society. No matter what you think about the whole gay marriage debate these days, seeing Christians passionately lining the streets with placards declaring that God hates sinners or that the choice is between Jesus and homosexuals is simply a distortion of the gospel. What is compelling about that? How does that lead to faith in Christ? If God hates sinners, then the church is as damned as those the church is damning.

No, we need passionate followers of Christ because this cross-bearing journey is the only one worth taking—it’s a journey that ends in the city of God with a people that are different at the end from the way they were at the beginning. Faith begins the journey, and faithfulness carries us home. They are not two things—faith and faithfulness, believing and behaving, trusting and obeying; they are two sides of the same coin of the divine realm. Faith is one of the three spiritual virtues that Paul says are God’s gifts to us as we travel the earthly road toward heaven. Faith, hope, and love: these three. And even though the greatest of these is love, love needs faith and hope in the backpack with it in order to make the trip all the way to God.

So, faith today. What is it? What is it not? Where does it come from? How can we get enough of it to keep us in the radical center of the will of God, which leads down the thrilling middle-of-the-road of Christian discipleship?

Faith is the spiritual sense by which we know, love, and serve God. Think of it—if God existed in our world in visible, tangible, or audible ways, we could use our senses to see touch or hear God. But God chooses to remain in the world the way air is in the atmosphere—present but hidden to plain sense. So God gives another sense that is not native to us—faith sense allows us to sense God’s presence. Faith, the writer to the Hebrews says, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But God has not left us to wonder entirely without hints of God’s presence. Jesus is the chief evidence of God in the world. He reveals God to us by showing us God’s compassion in his passion.

When Rabbi Stern and I saw the movie together two weeks ago, we commented afterward about how often Jesus quoted the Psalms in the midst of his trials. When he cries out from the cross, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me, he quoted Psalm 22:1. he good rabbi noted that this was itself possibly an act of faith in God, because although Jesus felt completely abandoned and alone in that moment, he was doing something the rabbis would frequently do: he was quoting the beginning of a psalm and leaving the ending open. As it turns out, Psalm 22 ends with the vindication of God’s servant, the anointed one, David. esus showed that his own faith was not in the strength of soul he felt himself, but rather in the trust he had in the God he could not see or feel or hear in the moment of his death. And then he cried out, Into thy hands I commit my spirit. Though he could not see or sense God, he trusted in God. And God raised him to new life, thus proving his faith and justifying the world despite its sinfulness.

The story is told in many ways, but one version has a little girl stuck in the loft of her home that is on fire. Her father is at the bottom of the ladder and calls to her to jump to him. The smoke is in her eyes, though, and she cannot see him. Don’t worry, sweetheart, he pleads. You don’t have to see me; I just have to see you. This is true of our faith in God. We do not have to see God or believe we can make it on our own. We simply have to trust in God more than ourselves. We must believe that God can see us and will catch us with strong and loving arms when we leap in faith.

Rick Warren is the pastor of the Saddleback Community Church in Southern California and the author of the runaway bestselling book, The Purpose Driven Life. Warren begins his book by undermining America’s self-centeredness: “It’s not about you,” he says. And that could not be truer: faith is not about you or me. Many people seem to think that faith is some kind of thing that gives you an extra boost in self-confidence—as if faith is really about self-esteem or believing in yourself. Or even more slippery, faith is about believing that God is taking care of your interests. But it always comes back to your own interests instead of the interests of God. If I hear one more rock star or movie star or sports star saying that faith in God is the secret to their success, I think I will vomit. You don’t know or understand God until you abandon yourself in trust to God, until you give up your own life to God and let God live through you.

That’s why Baptists prefer our mode of baptism. We are not saying that anyone who is sprinkled is going to hell; we simply know that no one ever drowned in a shower. Sprinkling lacks the gusto and drama of death that faith represents. We are buried with our Lord Jesus in baptism, we say. And when we come up for air, we know it is the resurrection Spirit of God that breathes into our souls the breath of life eternal. But we are not simply having something added to us, a kind of supercharging power. We are saying that we have been crucified with Christ and now whatever life we have is not our own. t’s about God.

So faith is a gift that God gives to us when we forget ourselves on purpose, as Thomas Merton put it. And faith is a gift that keeps on giving. Because what God gives us is not a thing but God’s own personal presence; the relationship is a lifelong affair. Too many Christians seem to act as if faith is something you get like a ticket at a Will Call window that allows you entrance to the heavenly park called Paradise. As long as you hang on to your Jesus ticket, you can get in when your time comes. But it makes no big difference to you in the meantime.

Faith is a journey that begins with confessing that Jesus is Lord and being baptized in the triune name. But it continues daily for as long as you live and calls for a growing knowledge of and faithfulness to God. It calls for your own passion, in other words, a passion to know and to love God more deeply. And that requires putting your thinking cap on. If the will is the proper provenance of hope, and the heart love, then the mind is the special organ of faith. If you are looking to renew your faith, then stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about God. If you want to grow in faithfulness, read of the ways of Christ in the Bible. You’ve seen the movie; now read the book. You might even subscribe to a spiritual or theological journal or two. I can recommend some to you. Spend some time in prayer—by yourself and with others. And join other Christians for regular worship and Bible study. It’s not only not about you but about God, and it’s also about others.

Moderate Baptists do not define their faith by a list of things they believe or don’t believe. We are not creedalists, even if the creeds are handy guides to faith. We don’t think signing the Baptist Faith and Message makes you a better Christian, even if it makes you a better Southern Baptist, don’t you know?! The novelist John Updike was once asked what he thought made someone a Christian. A Christian is someone who can say the Apostle’s Creed, he said. Well and good, but you can tell he’s no Baptist.If you believe some Baptists these days, though, it isn’t enough to believe in Jesus Christ; you have to believe the right things about Jesus Christ. It isn’t enough to trust that the Bible is the manger in which the Christ is laid, as Luther put it. The manger and the one who lies in it must be one and the same—the Bible and the Christ, both perfect in every way. Well, genuine faith does not require believing what any damned fool knows ain’t so, as Archie Bunker put it. Faith believes the truth, but that truth will only be fully revealed at the end of all things. Faith is the means by which we come to know God intimately and to live faithfully toward God in the meantime—not to know all the answers before their time.

So don’t check your mind at the door with your hat when you come to church. When you become a Christian, it ought to quicken your mind, and open it wider. Faith does not substitute for understanding; understanding is the reward for faith, as St. Augustine put it. Faith seeks understanding. We don’t need know-nothing Christians, and we certainly have had enough of pious Baptists who seem to celebrate their ignorance. But there’s a limit to the knowledge of faith, and humility is the proper posture of the faithful. We know now in part; one day we shall know in full. Admitting that you don’t know it all as a Christian is virtue, not vice; it is a sign of wisdom.

Browning Ware was the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Austin. He died last year, but his daughter Camille has helped bring his newspaper columns to print in a volume entitled Diary of a Modern Pilgrim. He writes: When I was younger, I thought there was an answer to every problem. And for a time I knew many of the answers. I knew about parenting until I had children. I knew about divorce until I got one. I knew about suicide until three of my closest friends took their lives in the same year. I knew about death until my child died. I'm not as impressed with answers as I once was. Answers seem so pallid, sucked dry of blood and void of life.  Knowing answers seduces us into making pronouncements.... I'm discovering that wisdom and adversity replace cocksure ignorance with thoughtful uncertainty.... More important than the answer is the Answerer. 'Thou art with me'—that's what we crave.

Faith engages the whole person in passionate trust in Christ to lead us on the long journey to God. Faith forsakes self for the sake of God. And when it does, it finds itself again in the faithfulness of God.