I was listening to a sermon podcast the other night at the gym (I always work out to sermons, they fire me up and I feel doubly productive), and the pastor suddenly said, “You don’t need me. You don’t need a preacher to tell you what the Bible says. Thank God for scholars and seminaries, but there’s no secret insider information. It’s all here. You can open up this book and have a faith for yourself.”

I wanted to yell “amen” in the gym. I’m not that kind of guy, to yell amen even at church, and this wasn’t a new thought I hadn’t heard before — but I thought of how alarmingly dependent we’ve become on forming our faith and philosophy from others. We wait for Sundays or the right celebrities or our circle of like-minded bloggers to affirm a kind of pre-established dogma, but don’t often investigate their words down to the bottom. And they’re just people, too, learning like me and you.

Continue reading “A Faith For Yourself.” →