Originally written February 25, 2019
“We don’t do what we believe; we do what we value.” So said one of my mentors in the fall of 1994.
I remember where I was sitting when he said it. I was in a conference room adjacent to the dining hall at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California. I was on the left-hand side of the long conference table, two seats from the front where he was standing. It was the first seminar of my Doctor of Ministry degree.
Of all the things the two professors leading that seminar said over the 10 days we were on campus, that one is the one that stuck the most for me.
His point was that we say we believe a lot of things. We say we believe in a lot of things. But believing (or believing in) something often makes absolutely no difference in how we live. The only way our beliefs affect our lives is if we assign value to them. As a result, he said that if we want to know what someone values, look at their calendar and their checkbook. (You can see that this was a few years ago. Some people today don’t even know what a checkbook is).
If we value something enough, it affects how we invest our time and material resources.
When I was doing research for my book Culture Wars (published in 2007, and revised and re-released in 2014), I found supporting data that said most people agreed that their personal religious beliefs had little effect on how they lived their everyday lives. About all it affected was how they spent a couple of hours on Sunday (or whatever day constituted the day of worship within their belief system).
Put that together with the growing sentiment in culture that beliefs should be held privately and not imposed on anyone else, and you have even more evidence of the shrinking effectiveness of “belief.”
Certainly there is a faith application to this. Some people refer to Christians as “believers.” But the “belief” that the Bible describes as identifying and aligning with Christ is a belief to which value has been assigned. When John 3:16 says that “whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life,” it is not simply mental acceptance and agreement that Jesus existed, but a value-assigned belief that changes a person’s approach to living.
It is my personal preference to use the word “Christ-follower” instead of “Christian.” Maybe “value-er” is a better word than “believer.” (Except
But I think, we can even make a case for values apart from the faith component. There are plenty of people who say they believe in family values, but they spend virtually no time building up the members of their household.
There are plenty of people who say they believe in the rule of law … until the law requires them to do something inconvenient.
There are plenty of people who say they believe in making our neighborhoods safer, but spend virtually no time being neighborly.
There are plenty of people who say they believe in tolerance and compassion until they are asked to be tolerant and compassionate toward someone with whom they disagree.
Lest anyone think I’m criticizing, that’s not my purpose here. I’m just making an observation that what we need most is not more believers in concepts, but value-ers of purposeful living.
Our lives (not just our beliefs) matter to God.
What might our communities be like if we assigned more value to living with purpose?
Be amazing today, my friend.
