That if
you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that
God raised him from the dead you will be saved. For it is with your heart that
you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and
are saved. For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile – the same Lord
is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls
on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Charles Blondin, AKA “The Great Blondin”, became famous in the mid
1800’s for his exploits as a tightrope walker. He was so famous at one point
that Abraham Lincoln referred to him in a campaign speech leading up to the
election of 1860. On June 30, 1859 Blondin became the first man to walk a
tightrope stretched across Niagara Falls. The rope was 1,100 feet long, over 3
inches in diameter, and strung 160 feet above the water. He walked without a
safety net or harness of any kind.
Over the next few years he accomplished the feat many more times, often
with increasing degrees of difficulty. He crossed the tightrope on stilts; he
crossed pushing a wheelbarrow; he once carried a chair across and stopped to
stand on it with just one chair leg balanced on the rope. He even carried his
manager piggy-back as he cross the falls.
There is a story that Blondin once tried to get a volunteer from the
adoring crowd to sit in the wheelbarrow as he pushed it across the tightrope.
As the story goes he shouted to the crowd, “Do you believe I can cross the
falls on the tightrope?”
The cheering crowd roared, “We believe! We believe!”
He said, “Do you believe I can push this wheelbarrow across the rope?”
Again the crowd shouted, “We believe! We believe!”
Then Blondin asked, “Which one of you will sit in that wheelbarrow?”
Silence.
That story, whether apocryphal or not, has been told and retold by
preachers through the decades, because it illustrates the difference between believing with one’s head
and believing with one’s heart!
Paul says,
That if
you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that
God raised him from the dead you will be saved. For it is with your heart that
you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and
are saved.
Notice where Paul says belief takes place; in the heart. He doesn’t ask
us to believe in Christ’s resurrection in an intellectual sense, although
intellectual understanding is certainly important. He doesn’t ask us to believe
in the idea of the resurrection; in the idea of forgiveness for sin; he asks us
to believe in our hearts. Why?
Let’s go back to the “Great Blondin” for a moment. The reaction of the
crowd to Blondin’s invitation proves that there is a kind of faith that does
not include the heart. There is a kind of faith that is superficial and risks
nothing. But there is another kind of faith that is so profound, so certain, so
committed, that it risks everything.
This is what Paul means by “believe
in your heart.”
Someone has said that the longest journey a man ever makes is the 18
inches between his head and his heart. The journey of faith begins with the
mind; we hear, we understand and we believe. But the journey from mind to heart
requires a decision; a gospel decision. For until faith erupts from our hearts,
it’s just information.
Have you made the journey?
Pastor Brian Coffey
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