“Come to faith, all you who are weary and burdened, and it will give you rest.”
“Let the little children come to faith, and do not hinder them.”
“Whoever comes to faith will never go hungry.”
Not as good as the original, is it? But somehow or other, “come to faith” seems to have taken over. It’s increasingly used to state the aim of evangelism: “We’re praying than many will come to faith.” And it’s a common way of describing someone’s conversion: “Beth came to faith as a teenager.” But the more I hear it, the more it troubles me—and I think we’d be better off if we stopped saying it. Here are my reasons.
Come to Jesus, not to Faith
You’ve probably worked out my first reason already: coming to faith wasn’t what Jesus called people to do. He wasn’t engaged in a religious campaign to get people to believe. He called everyone to come to him! He was the centre of his gospel of the kingdom. He presented himself as the only source of the life. More than that, he presented himself as more necessary and more precious than everything we have, including our own lives (for e.g. Matt 4:17–22; 5:11; 10:37–39; Jn 6:28–29; 12:23–26; 15:18–21).
Everybody Already Has Faith
Many years ago, King Charles said he wanted to be crowned not as the defender of the [Christian] faith but as the defender of faith. In a postmodern way, he was recognising the fact that we all have faith of some kind. The universal human problem isn’t lack of faith; it’s wrong faith, misdirected faith. We point our faith in the wrong direction: we believe the lie, we trust the unworthy, we commit ourselves to what we should never love and treasure (for e.g., Job 8:13–15; Jer 2:26–28; Rom 1:25; 2 Thess 2:11–12; 1 Tim 6:10; 2 Tim 3:2–4).
Look to the Object, Not the Subject
Imagine an archery competition, with a line of people facing the target. “Coming to faith” makes us look sideways along the line of archers, with our focus on their arrows. What we should be focusing on is the target and whether they’re going to hit it. The expression “coming to faith” has us looking the wrong way: at the subject, the person who does the believing, instead of at the object, the person we believe in. Our eyes should always be fixed Jesus, in whom we believe (Heb 12:2).
Beware Navel-Gazing
The more we talk about faith, the more we end up looking inwards: do I have enough faith? Do I have the right kind of faith? Too easily this spirals down to having faith in faith itself. The solution to this nervous navel-gazing? Directing our attention outwards, to the Lord: “Faith withers and dies when it becomes the centre of attention. There is only one way to promote faith … and that is by giving our attention to God more and more”.[1]
Beware Shorthand
My fifth and final complaint takes us back to where we started: by far the worst thing about the expression “coming to faith” is that it leaves Jesus out. The obvious response is, “No it doesn’t—because we all know that ‘coming to faith’ is shorthand for ‘coming to trust Jesus.’” But do we all know this? Won’t at least some of our hearers take our words at face value, assuming that we mean what we say? They won’t do the mental translating we do, because they won’t know that we’ve been speaking in shorthand.
There are many shortcomings in the phrase “coming to faith”. Isn’t it time to stop using shorthand and say what we mean? What we all need most—and what we Christians should want most for everyone else—is to come to Jesus, and to stay there.
[1] J. P. Cockerton, To Be Sure? Christian Assurance—Presumption or Privilege? (Christian Foundations 19; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), 78f.
