Mountains: Find Hope and Vision in God’s PresenceSample

Reconstructing Your Faith in an Age of Deconstruction

Everywhere I turn these days I’m invited into conversations with disillusioned Christians who are leaving the church. These men and women confiding in me are suffering through an erosion of trust—in the faith of their youth and in fallen leaders. As credibility crumbles, hurting people are deconstructing what used to anchor them to Jesus.

It’s not lost on me that you might feel as if I’ve been reading your mail. If church hurt is your story, there’s plenty of space in this study for Jesus to tenderly bind up your injuries. You are safe in his tender care. This week’s lesson is for anyone nursing pain points like judgmental, hypocritical Christians; fallen faith leaders; or ministry conflict.

Yes, our faith leaders have always been imperfect—and the church today is in the middle of a great revealing. Yet, I remain hopeful because the uncovering of sin could lead to a great wave of repentance and reformation.

Thankfully, we are not alone in this reckoning. Through the centuries, our brothers and sisters in the faith have challenged the status quo many times over. In some cases, the people of God chose to repent and rebuild. We see an example of that in our mountaintop story from Matthew 5.

We also see that purposing to do better won’t cut it. We have to become the kind of people who are able to do better. How do we do that? Every decaying and rotten plank in our spiritual house needs gutting. We must live repentantly and in a constant state of rebuilding our faith based on what we learn from Christ.

The Sermon on the Mount shows us what it looks like when God’s demo day is followed up with heart renovations. More specifically, what it looks like when the Torah—the laws given to God’s people at Mount Sinai—is not just obeyed but also reconstructs who we are to our core, shaping our inner spiritual lives with Kingdom values.

In short, the law of God rooted in our hearts looks like Jesus. And Jesus will call us to follow him so closely that our own lives will embody the spirit of the law. The laws Jesus presents to us through his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7 are not etched onto stone tablets as on Mount Sinai; they are ingrained in our hearts through Christ’s love and the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus came as a new Moses on a new mountain to fulfill the laws of God in his Sermon on the Mount because we need more than inscriptions telling us what to do (and not do); we need the Holy Spirit’s will to help us choose obedience. We need our hearts changed by God’s love so that we can do what’s right.

Jesus was not abolishing the law; he was deconstructing how we apply his teaching and reconstructing our applications. The beauty of the Jesus way is that allowing his laws into our heart of hearts changes us from the inside out.

Prayer: God, thank you for being my relational, covenant-keeping God. Help me be wholeheartedly devoted to your ways. May the condition of my heart align with your Spirit. In Jesus’ name, Amen.