Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

What is the value of knowledge if not combined with faith?

August 15, 2005

Spiritual Musings

Yes­ter­day, my pas­tor preached from Hebrew 4. At one point, he talked about need­ing to act when we hear God’s voice and he went to verse 2 of Hebrews 4:

For indeed we have had good news preached to us, just as they also; but the word they heard did not profit them, because it was not united by faith in those who heard.

I thought about some­thing I had seen last week on TV. I watched the end of a pro­gram that was a trib­ute to Peter Jen­nings. One of the things that they high­lighted was his curios­ity about the his­tor­i­cal Jesus. He had sug­gested hav­ing a reli­gious edi­tor sev­eral years ago and done sev­eral spe­cials cen­ter­ing about Jesus. It seemed that Peter Jen­nings had a lot of knowl­edge about Jesus, but sadly it does not seem that he ever com­bined his knowl­edge with faith. I came to that con­clu­sion based on a com­ment that one of his friends made. It is sad to think that Peter was close but it really means noth­ing apart from faith.

I think this really struck me now because of my expe­ri­ences in Hun­gary this sum­mer. It was so good to be back in a sit­u­a­tion where I observed stu­dents hear­ing the gospel and then chal­lenged to make a deci­sion on what they were going to do with Jesus. There were many who decided to act on what they heard and asked Jesus to be their Lord and Sav­ior. Oth­ers were still in the process and then there were oth­ers that just rejected the offer.

As I thought about it this sum­mer, the most impor­tant ques­tion any human being must answer is “Who is Jesus?” and “What am I going to do in response to Him?”