Sometimes I offer my students a thousand dollars if they’ll simply believe that there is a pink elephant standing next to me at the lectern. I even give them a few minutes with eyes closed and heads bowed to work up the relevant belief. I have yet to have anyone take the deal. They know that nobody will believe them if they claim to have taken on the belief, so they chuckle at the ridiculous invitation. We all know that belief just doesn’t work that way.
Interestingly, though, we seem to forget that belief doesn’t work that way when we go out evangelizing. We present our friends with the rewards and punishments associated with believing, or failing to believe, that Jesus died for their sins and conquered death in his resurrection. We then invite them to bow their heads and take on the belief. When they open their eyes, we invite them to think of themselves as believers — as having crossed over from non-belief to belief.
It won’t be long before they’ll be aware of a certain tension between their lived experience and what they think of themselves as believing. “Why,” one might ask, “do I not naturally act as though Jesus gave his life for me? Why don’t I find myself behaving toward him the way I would toward any other living human being who suffered what he suffered to set me free?” So long as we take it for granted that we believe — after all, isn’t that what happened at conversion? — we’ll assume that the problem is behavioral. “I’m just having the hardest time acting out my beliefs,” we’ll say.
But with very few exceptions, no one has any trouble acting out their beliefs. You do act in accordance with your beliefs. More likely, you just don’t believe what you’ve thought of yourself as believing. Rather than trying to work up behavior consistent with what we think we believe, we should be begging with the man who wanted desperately for Jesus to free his son from the demon that possessed him, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
Interestingly, though, we seem to forget that belief doesn’t work that way when we go out evangelizing. We present our friends with the rewards and punishments associated with believing, or failing to believe, that Jesus died for their sins and conquered death in his resurrection. We then invite them to bow their heads and take on the belief. When they open their eyes, we invite them to think of themselves as believers — as having crossed over from non-belief to belief.
It won’t be long before they’ll be aware of a certain tension between their lived experience and what they think of themselves as believing. “Why,” one might ask, “do I not naturally act as though Jesus gave his life for me? Why don’t I find myself behaving toward him the way I would toward any other living human being who suffered what he suffered to set me free?” So long as we take it for granted that we believe — after all, isn’t that what happened at conversion? — we’ll assume that the problem is behavioral. “I’m just having the hardest time acting out my beliefs,” we’ll say.
But with very few exceptions, no one has any trouble acting out their beliefs. You do act in accordance with your beliefs. More likely, you just don’t believe what you’ve thought of yourself as believing. Rather than trying to work up behavior consistent with what we think we believe, we should be begging with the man who wanted desperately for Jesus to free his son from the demon that possessed him, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
- Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, 2009
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