Home » Programs » Meeting Jesus » Ritual Faith

Ritual Faith

What we believe has a great impact on our life. Religious people aren't the only ones who "live by faith." Everyone does. Our everyday behaviour reveals what we believe to be true.

Without working too hard, we can come up with several different kinds of faith that operate in various areas of our life. Of course, the kind of faith we are mostly interested in is the kind that brings us into a relationship with God. We might call that True Faith. But there are other kinds of faith that people depend on which may look good from the outside, may even satisfy us to some degree, but are simply not adequate when we take a long hard look at them.

Some people have what I’d call "Ritual Faith." We could characterize this faith as rigid, deep, and superstitious. When I was a little boy, my family lived on a farm. We had an elderly neighbour who had stopped farming, but he loved animals. He would often drop in to visit and if there were a new calf in the barn, he'd always want to see it.

I have to interrupt myself to tell you something about our house. The back door led from the kitchen into the woodshed, through the back yard, to the barn. We always used this door when we were going to the barn for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was the most direct route. Secondly, it allowed us to leave our smelly boots in the woodshed instead of bringing them directly into the house. The front door faced the road and we always used it when we were going anywhere else than to the barn.

Now this old neighbour always came in the front door. In fact, all of our visitors used the front door. What interested me so much, when I was a child, was that our neighbour would always go out the front door, even if he was on the way to the barn with us. He would always make some excuse to use the front door, while we'd go out the back. When I asked my mother why, she told me that he believed it was bad luck to enter by one door and leave by another. This didn't fit with my experience, but this old man didn't just believe it, he lived by it.

Ritual Faith like this is held so strongly that it is often confused with true faith. This is faith, not in God, but in our ability to control our life, our environment, our future, by doing certain things in a certain way at certain times. The bad news is that these superstitions take control of our life even as we employ them to try to gain control.

The faith that saves us doesn’t bind us; it liberates us. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). The faith we need is not tied to rituals, not even religious ones. It has nothing to do with anything we can do. It has everything to do with what Jesus has already done.

What He did was to defeat death on our behalf. By surrendering to death in our place and then rising from the dead, he secured victory over our greatest enemy. He removed its sting. Instead of death being merely the end of physical life, it becomes the portal through which we enter into the presence of God and a deeper realization of the eternal life He gives us. By believing that Jesus died for us and rose in victory, we identify ourselves with the One whose very name means Saviour.

Our old neighbour’s beliefs about the importance of entering and exiting a house through the same door was sincere was misplaced. A superficial acknowledgement of Jesus death on the cross and resurrection is well placed, but unless sincere, such a belief does not touch our lives. True faith is both sincere in character and placed in the right object. Using a metaphor related to sheep and the sheepfold, Jesus said: “I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture” (John 10:9 NKJV)

Ron Hughes
© January 2008