The End of Faith

My faith is coming to an end.

OK, I admit it right up front. The title is designed to grab some attention, at least in the circles I run in. I'm not rehashing that REM line about losing my religion. I'm thinking about something a guy named Peter said a while back. You remember Peter, the brash bold guy who followed Jesus? One minute loudly proclaiming that he would follow Jesus to the death, the next denying he even knew Him.

If anyone ever looked like he was losing his religion, it was Peter. One of the most vocal followers of the radical Son of Man, Peter was in the spotlight during a famous and very public fall from grace. It was crunch time, and Peter just seemed to throw it all away. Then Jesus is publicly crucified. Peter's faith seemed dead and the One his faith was in was dead too.

Game over. Finis. The End.

But faith, like love and hope, has a life all it's own. True faith, the Bible kind of faith, is not of our own creation or invention. This isn't something we cook up on our own. The Bible teaches that God has provided for us His very own faith, not based on circumstances but that calls things that be not as though they were.

Peter walked through some painful moments, and perhaps he thought he had lost it all. But then something unusual happened. Jesus rose from the grave (I'm not making this stuff up - there were hundreds of eyewitnesses to all this, several of them wrote a book about it.) Peter thought he had come to the end of his faith, but then Jesus showed up and made some mighty promises to Him. Our faith is like a seed, and the Words of Jesus are the life inside the seed. They've found seeds that were thousands of years old, and when they planted them, they grew! ( http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/12/MNGJND7G5T1.DTL)Nobody knows how a seed has life in it, but it does. God's promises are like the life inside the seed of faith.

So Jesus restored Peter. And a humbler and bolder Peter now went forth. Peter came to realize that faith doesn't quit, and it doesn't die easily. That the only real end to faith is not a death, but a goal.

In I Peter 1:9, Peter declares that we are receiving the end of our faith, the salvation of our souls. Faith doesn't stop or end or quit. When I get to Heaven, my faith will be fulfilled. But in this life the only end of my faith is the salvation of my soul. Other translations say it like this: the goal of your faith, the outcome of your faith, "the reward for trusting Him will be the salvation of your souls."

Sometimes it looks dark. Some things we walk through are painful at the time. As followers of Jesus, we don't quit. Our faith is not as fragile as it first seemed. There is an end to our faith, but it is not something lost, it is something gained: The Message translation says it like this: "Because you kept on believing, you'll get what you're looking forward to: total salvation."