Of all the things I’ve learned this past few weeks, perhaps none is more significant than the fact that, regardless of how many steps I’ve taken all my life, the most important step I’ll ever take in my life is the next one.  In some ways, all the steps I’ve taken up until now won’t mean a thing if I don’t take the next one.  My doctors have told me that if I don’t get this knee moving after knee replacement surgery, it will freeze up, lock down, and I’ll never walk normally again.  If I only did what I felt like doing right now, I’d just lie down.  But, if I give in to only what I feel like, I’d never walk again.  The next step I take is the most important step I’ll ever take.

Not that I was totally unprepared for all of this.  I’d read about this “procedure.”  I’d observed many of you experience this “procedure” yourselves.  But, it’s one thing to read, another to observe and altogether another to experience something firsthand, wouldn’t you agree?  Indeed, this past couple of weeks, I’ve been reminded of something Will Rogers once said.

Of course, Will Rogers said lots of things worth remembering.  An Oklahoma-born humorist and social critic, his one-liners had a common sense cutting edge.  Like, “Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco.”  And, “Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.”  And, “Never miss a good chance to shut up.”  And, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”  And, “The quickest way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your pocket.”  Those are good enough in their own right.  But, none of what Will Rogers said has had more personal meaning to me than his comment about how people learn.  “There are three kinds of men,” Rogers said.  “The ones that learn by reading.  The few who learn by observation.  The rest of them have to pour too much gas on the fire and get burned to find out for themselves.” 

Now, the reason that isn’t very funny is because that’s not exactly what Rogers said.  What he actually said had something to do with electric fences, bodily functions and a painful lesson in what a wonderful conductor water can be.  But, he wasn’t a Baptist preacher facing a congregation on Sunday.  Nonetheless, he was right on the money.

There are some things that can be learned by reading.  Frankly, I wish more Baptists read more.  We are such gullible people, too often led around like we’ve got a ring in our nose by the latest theological or church growth trend or fad.  It wouldn’t hurt to read and think for ourselves a little more. 

It is also true that there are some things we can learn by observation.  In fact, on this special day in our church’s life when we are honoring those who have been members for fifty years or more, I’d encourage you to look around, especially those who are youngest among us.  In a day of rapid change and superficial commitment on nearly every hand, observe what has happened in the life of this church, the kingdom of God and this community because of those who believed in making long term commitments.  What a wonderful witness!

Reading and observation can be good teachers.  Some things, however, can only become ours if we take steps of personal experience.  Some folks who were only observing Jesus at a noncommittal distance once asked him, “‘How long will you keep us in suspense?  If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’”  As if to say, “If we just had more information, more evidence, as Will Rogers might say, “straight from the horse’s mouth,” then, “we’d have all we need to believe.” 

Jesus’ seems to indicate that just having more information rarely solves our faith problems.  “‘My sheep hear my voice.  I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.  No one will snatch them out of my hand.  What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand.  The Father and I are one.’”

In my younger years, especially in my younger years when I spent so much time doubting my salvation, I often found myself referring to this passage for comfort.  What a wonderful promise!  Our salvation is more about something God is doing than what we can do.  It’s more about the fact we are known by God than what we know about God.  It’s more about how well we are held in his strong hand than how well we hold on with our weak hands. 

However, at this juncture in my walk with Jesus, this text has taken on a whole new dimension of meaning.  Jesus is saying that the faith we seek to hold on more strongly is waiting for us on the other side of taking the next step, of following him one more time.  The next step with Jesus is so important because, no matter what we’ve known or believed or trusted up until now, the faith we need to follow Jesus tomorrow will not be ours until we take the next step into tomorrow.  That’s always the tough part, though.  As Eugene Peterson has said so eloquently, “It has always been more difficult to come to terms with Jesus as the way than with Jesus as the truth, more difficult to realize the ways our thinking and behavior” must become “fused into a life of relational love and adoration with neighbor and God, God and neighbor.”  Yet, “only when we do the Jesus truth in the Jesus way do we get the Jesus life (Eugene Peterson, “Transparent Lives,” Christian Century, November 29, 2003, pp. 21-22).” 

Jesus even said as much - “‘I have told you and you do not believe.  The works that I do in my Father's name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep My sheep hear my voice.  I know them, and they follow me.’”  What distinguishes true followers of Jesus from those who are not is not how much they know but how closely they follow.

When we read the scriptures carefully, we’ll discover that, by and large, the faith of its writers was something they learned by more than just reading and observation.  It is from another’s faith honed in the “valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23)” that many of us are comforted as those shadows lengthen over our lives.  Those were words written by someone who knew the experience of a radical trust in God shaped by some of life’s most difficult circumstances.  Someone who knew what it means to trust God’s good purpose even when life’s most immediate experience said they should do otherwise.  Despite where we’ve come from or what we’re currently experiencing or what all the evidence around us may otherwise suggest, it is only those who take the next step with Jesus, whatever that may be, that will be able to discover the faith they need to take the next step. 

All of this reinforces something we too often overlook.  It’s one thing to get started with Jesus.  One of the greatest challenges of being a follower is keeping our faith up to date by taking the next step, every day.  One of our young married couples told me that they have just recently started a new tradition to enrich their marriage.  Every day at the end of the work day, they get something to drink and sit at the dining table and talk about what the day has meant to each of them.  They’ve found that this simple little step of catching up at the end of the day has begun to profoundly enrich their marriage.  They are practicing what most people in good marriages eventually come to learn.  Vows made at the altar must be kept up to date.  It’s not good enough to know that at some remote time in the past you said, “I do,” if you aren’t constantly “doing” what those vows mean.  So it is with faith.  Making our commitment to Jesus in the remote past has little meaning to our lives now if we are not keeping our faith up to date.  Otherwise, our faith becomes sterile and has little effect in radically reshaping our character according to the way of Jesus.  When that happens, what we say we believe and how we live can become profoundly disconnected from each other.

The city of Rockwall has been celebrating is sesquicentennial this year.  Lots of interesting stories have been turning up.  Especially the one about Anderson Ellis.  Anderson was a black man accused of raping a white woman in Rockwall County in 1909.  When he was captured, he was taken to the town square and, in the shadow of the city’s most prominent churches, tied a stake and burned alive with 1,000 people looking on (Steve Blow, “Acknowledging a grim past can help us face the future,” Dallas Morning News, Sunday, April 25, 2004, 1B).  Less than 100 years ago!  I couldn’t help but wonder, as I read the article, how many of those 1000 people were members, maybe even deacons or Sunday School teachers or even pastors, of those Baptist and Methodist churches. 

Yet, as appalled as we are looking back on what our forefathers did less than one hundred years ago, I can’t help but wonder.  Less than one hundred years from now, what will our spiritual descendants find appalling about what we were willing to stand by and condone?  What are we blind to today that those who come behind us will find us unfaithful to have allowed? 

We ought to do some serious thinking and observing then take the next step that thinking and observing demands with respect to faithfulness, justice, mercy, forgiveness, generosity, loving our neighbor, beginning in our marriage beds and working its way out from there to the fartherest reaches of our lives.  How is the faith we claim in Jesus being kept up to date enough to radically reshape every area of our lives?  Whatever steps those who came before us should have taken and regardless of what steps we may have already taken, what steps with Jesus should we be taking now?  It takes some serious, hard, committed thinking followed by hard steps, one at a time, not superficial mimicry of whatever comes down the pike next or a simple giving in to whatever we feel like doing no matter how it affects anyone around us.

In all the good that has come from our culture’s interest in Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ, not all of it has reflected serious thinking.  Though the title escapes me, someone has actually written a book suggesting that all true, serious followers of Jesus should consider going so far as to actually follow the dietary rules the people in Jesus’ day would have followed.  As though eating the same kind of bread Jesus ate equates to receiving the bread of life!  A serious thinking doctor has suggested that we think twice.  He pointed out that, in Jesus’ day, people rarely lived past the age of thirty-five and that, if you made it to forty, you were an old person. 

Come on!  Can’t we do better than simple mimicry and go further to ask the harder questions.  The real test of our relationship with Jesus is how it radically reshapes the ways in which we relate to one another now and give ourselves to the task of working to bring the will of God on earth as it is in heaven.  “The test that finally proves the value of” all of our biblical studies “is the ‘fruits test’: ‘A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit . . . Thus you will know them by their fruits’ (Matt. 7:18, 20).  The value of” what we’ve come to learn about God’s truth “will be tested by” our “capacity to produce persons and communities whose character is commensurate with Jesus Christ and thereby pleasing to God . . . that there can be no true understanding apart from lived obedience, and vice versa (Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Harper Collins, 1996, p. 7).”

Frankly, isn’t this what makes being a Christian and a part of Christ’s church both thrilling and challenging?  We have a step to take with Jesus that no generation has ever been called to take.  Each of us individually and as a church faces that thrilling opportunity!  We have a chance to chart courses no other generation has ever taken, ever!  Thanks be to God!  And, God help us!

We have come a long way.  The evidence of that is all around us, in the flesh.