You must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.
Eric Liddell was the child of missionaries in China, born 1902. When young, he was sent to a boarding school in England, where he became a great track athlete. He excelled at the short distances, like the 100 meter. He won a spot on the British Olympic team in 1924 where he won a gold and bronze medal for the 400M, and 200M. He was a natural for the 100M but he refused to run, because the race was on Sunday, and he’d made a personal commitment to observe a weekly sabbath, which he chose not to break, even for the Olympics.
This conviction showed up later in his life, where he returned to China to serve as a missionary. He married the daughter of Canadian missionaries and had a family. After the Invasion of Pearl Harbor, expats were encouraged to leave China, because of ongoing conflict with Japan. Liddell’s wife and children returned to Canada, while Liddell stayed, not wanting to break the commitment he’d made. Eventually he was captured by the Japanese, and died in an internment camp. His life story is the basis of the movie, Chariots of Fire.
Eric Liddell’s faith and commitment can look to some like excessive. Not run the 100M race because it’s a Sunday? Stay in China because of your missionary commitment? But Liddell lived true to his faith, and did not compromise it because of worldly expectations.
The appointed writing from 2 Peter makes a great connection between faith and love. The author basically says that in order to support your faith, be good. In order support being good, you need to have knowledge, presumably in order to know what is good. In order to have knowledge, have self control. In order to exercise self control, you need endurance. Personally, that’s a challenge for me, as I can have self-control, until. . I’m tempted to give it up. In order to support endurance, the author says, have godliness, and in order to support godliness, have affection, and finally, in order to support affection, Love. Basically, he’s saying that loving each other supports having faith.
I hadn’t thought about this, but it makes sense. God is love. Loving each other is sharing God’s love, is sharing God. God is in me and in the other person I’m loving. When we share love, we are sharing God. That same shared God is the god that graces me with faith.
I’m a pretty linear thinker, so I guess I’ve seen love and faith as causal – have faith, therefore I love. But today’s reading turns that around and says that when we share love, we support and grow faith. Share love, therefore I have faith.
This morning, I’m thinking about love and faith. It feels that I’ve grown in both over the past year. I don’t know which comes first, the faith or the love. They are both gifts from God. But what I am noticing is that when I am gifted with more of one, the other grows too. More faith grows more love. More love grows more faith. Today, I want to see the connections between faith and love, and not overthink it, but just enjoy them both.
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