Jesus, and the Christian Faith

How Christians experience and express their faith varies from person to person, but our faith has at least two things in common.

• First, the Christian faith is more than just belief.
It involves commitment expressed in trust and obedience.

• Secondly, the Christian faith is focused on Jesus of Nazareth.
At its heart is our personal relationship with him.

For some Christians this relationship is experienced as warm and intimate, for others as intellectual and cerebral. However, whatever the experience of faith, the Christian’s faith is centred on Jesus, and on following him throughout life.

Why Jesus?

Christians believe in a God who is holy and just, loving and active. God does not simply sit quietly waiting to be found, but is seeking out people to be his own.

God has always been active, right from the beginning of creation, which he continues to love and preserve. When human beings began to go off the rails, he actively began to provide a solution to the problem.

• When the time was right in his eyes, he came to us as a man:
Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus revealed God to us in the fullest and best way, and he also gave us a path to follow in our behaviour to other people, and in our handling of the world. Finally he did something else, quite remarkable and wonderful.

God’s love wanted to enable us to share oneness with him, but his justice could not simply ignore the errors, wrongs and mistakes men and women had made.

• This crisis was overcome at great cost.

Jesus, who had never stepped out of fellowship with God, his Father, allowed himself to be put to death on a cross. By dying, he died for us; that is, in his death he carried the just punishment for human sins. He did this because God loves us.

God then did something amazing: he raised Jesus from death to a new life. He then enabled all who had faith in Jesus, that is they believed in him and followed him, to share in that new life.

• It was as if their old life died with Jesus on the cross;
their new life was his new life, and this new life is a family life!

He is our Father, and we are our brothers and sisters.
The Church is the name for this family of God.

• We do not ‘go to church’, instead we ‘belong’ to the Church.

We are part of this new community, as linked together as legs and feet, arms and hands. Thus God began a whole renewal of creation,
to be completed on ‘the lastday’ when Jesus shall return from heaven.