The scripture we read today is from the Gospel of Mark, the first book to be written out of all the books that write about the works of Jesus. And we have read the very first chapter of that book. I want to talk to you about this today, as it deals with what is central to our faith.

Since you came to church, you’ve probably heard a lot about faith, haven’t you? So you might have determined yourself, “I should start having faith since I am going to church!” You may have even thought, “I’m going to have faith and courage and try to overcome this hard world!” But there will be a difference between the faith that you’re thinking of and the faith that you need to know at church.

The faith which God is speaking of is not in this world. It is something you have never heard of before. Many people who don’t even attend church stand far off and evaluate the church as such and such. However, they are only looking at the surface of things. In fact, people outside of the church will never understand the church. They have no way of knowing the faith of the people who go to church. What you might have known until now is your own subjective understanding.

Faith, which the world speaks about, is a little bit like this: for example, when I was in university, there was a sports session where I had to put in as many goals in the basketball hoop in 1 minute. Since I had not played basketball much, I couldn’t get many in the hoop. Therefore, I had to practice, and I tried to shoot the ball from below the hoop. Since I needed to get as many goals in the hoop in a short time, I couldn’t throw from afar. But the outcome would really depend on how much I practiced, wouldn’t it?

Yet I didn’t have a lot of time to practice, and my turn was coming up. So, what I decided to do was practice in my mind. I remembered a book I read on that—if you practice in your mind, believe in your mind, and picture it in your mind concretely, it would lead to such results. Although I couldn’t get a chance to practice on the court, I kept imagining it. I pictured myself shooting the ball into the hoop and believed that it will happen. “I will surely get the ball in! I will shoot more than 20 goals in that one minute!” I believed that and practiced it in my mind. Then something remarkable happened. I doubled my score compared to when I didn’t practice in my mind. So, I believe that it works. If you really believe that something will happen, repeatedly think about it, imagine it, and picture it, specifically; it really is effective and helpful.

Now, is this faith? Is this the faith which the church speaks about? It is not at all. Such practice has nothing to do with the church, Jesus Christ, or God. This is something practiced by various nations or generations from a long time ago that any human being can try, and therefore you don’t need to go to church for that. It would be better off to lie down and imagine rather than coming to church.

The church, however, is where you come to receive something that the world cannot give. It is still faith, but not the kind of faith that people have or that originates from a person’s heart; it is to believe in what God has revealed. It is God’s faith. This faith did not come about by man, nor was it deduced by man, but it is believing in what God has revealed.

Though we say believe, this can be described differently―acknowledging what God has taught. It means to acknowledge what God taught us. That is our faith. It is about having God’s faith. In the scripture we read today, it says regarding that faith, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” There is an object of our faith which is to believe in what God has taught, namely the gospel. Please repeat after me.

“Believe in the gospel!”

What do we believe? We believe in the gospel. And what is the gospel? The gospel is the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. In this world, we never heard about “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Although “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” might sound simple, made up of only a few words, the meaning imbedded within is far more than you think.

Thus, if you think to yourself, “Oh, I know what faith is,” then it will take you a long time to have faith. It will take a long time for you to have faith. Hence, you must discard any preconceived notion you have about faith. You are mistaken if you’re thinking, “What’s so special about going to church? What’s special about people who believe in Jesus?”

Indeed, Christians are quite responsible for the fact that people have come to have such misunderstandings. Because while they were supposed to introduce the gospel precisely, they haven’t failed to do so. Many preachers failed to preach the gospel, inadvertently preaching faith that originated from man as though it came from God. Hence, people around the world misunderstand that as being the gospel.

Let me give you an example. I once heard a sermon from a Christian channel. The preacher was a famous American pastor. I listened from halfway into his sermon. But for a long time, he was talking about the topic of “Don’t eat too much sugar.” He spent a lot of time emphasizing the harmfulness of sugar on your health and that you shouldn’t eat too much of it. Of course, you could talk about such things. It can serve as an analogy to explain something. So I was curious about what he was trying to explain by talking so extensively about the harmful effects of sugar and decided to listen to the end. But his conclusion was, “So, do not eat too much sugar!” That was his advice. Those were the words coming from the pastor of this big church during the worship.

To be honest, this has nothing to do with the Christian faith. Such topics can be covered in a Buddhist temple or a community center. It is something we can talk about with friends. It is because of such messages that a lot of people leave the church disappointed, thinking, “Oh, there’s nothing much in a church!”

But what you can hear in the church is something you have never heard about before, and even if you do hear it, it will be hard to understand. What Christians believe in is not of the nature that you can possibly grasp by hearing about once or twice. People introduced you to the church so that you could ultimately gain what is so good, what you would’ve never imagined before. They wanted to introduce you to that, which is so good that they invited you to church and are leading you step by step. And for that reason, we can’t tell you too much from the very start.

However, what we are trying to introduce to you is incredible. It is what you cannot even imagine. You have not even thought about it. With man’s ideas, even if you might think or imagine something great, something good that people could give you, it wouldn’t even come close to a fraction of what you can obtain at church. This, in other words, means that the faith you anticipated is far from the faith you will hear about at church. Unless you renew your heart completely, you may not even have the chance to ready your heart to receive this, and you might leave the church after just a few visits.

A while ago, a person I knew came to our church. That person’s child had cerebral palsy, and they relied on the hospital for treatment for a long time, but the child could not be cured. The child was about twelve years old. The parents had been to many places, even a Buddhist temple. As a last resort, they came to our church.

When they came to church, the mother expected her child’s sickness to be healed right away. That’s all she had anticipated. However, the church is not here to only heal sicknesses; moreover, a person is not always healed just because they say, “I want to be healed!” There are procedures and conditions. There is a way to be healed. So first, faith needed to be planted in that child, and he needed to be taught about faith. But, as I mentioned earlier, faith is not what people generally think it is. I observed faith entering that child and a change taking place. I also provided help.

But his mother couldn’t accept the changes in her child. She wanted him to be healed and yet couldn’t accept the changes in him. She had a repulsion towards faith. In her eyes, her child was suddenly saying things like “Jesus! Jesus!” and that he had received the Holy Spirit and speaking strangely. He was actually speaking in tongues. Since he was saying something that was incomprehensible, she thought her child had gone insane and even took him to a mental hospital.

He was in the mental hospital for a while and was discharged. He didn’t let go of his faith still and wanted to lead his faith life. He came to church and learned, but because he had such a strong encounter and experience with God, his mother just couldn’t accept it so she later locked him up so that he couldn’t go to church. And the child’s condition then worsened severely. I endeavored hard to persuade his mother, but she didn’t want any of it. “Just fix my child at once! Just make him normal so that he doesn’t suffer from cerebral palsy!” That’s all she wanted. She rejected the faith God wanted of her. Hence, God couldn’t heal that child even if He wanted to.

You came to church seeking what you want, and you might be poking around and making your own comparisons. However, God has His own situation. Faith is to listen to God’s word and acknowledge that. God has His interests, and to have an interest in His interests and align myself to them, it is faith.

Think about it. Did you create God, or did God create you? Are you able to add or take away even one strand of your hair? Can you make them white or black? Yes, you could dye them. But our God even numbers the hair on our heads.

Who is God? There are many gods in the world. Some people misunderstand the verse “You shall have no other gods before Me” and think there aren’t any gods in the world except God. But that’s definitely a misunderstanding. There are many gods in the world. There are many people in the world, aren’t there? But the gods outnumber people. People think that if they are good, blessings will follow, but that will not happen. Why? Those gods will interfere. You think that if you work hard, you will achieve anything. But it doesn’t work like that. There are gods that hinder you, harass you, and make you fail.

Among those countless gods, there is a certain god who is different from all other gods. That god is the one who created all things. He is the god who can do anything, with whom nothing is impossible. Unlike the other gods, this god has self-existed since eternity past and will be forever. The movement of this world is all by the power of that god. That god created the earth and the universe, even you and me. He is the One whom we call God.

If we are currently wanting to be in contact with other gods and meet them, we can go elsewhere. We can turn to Buddhism, Lamaism, or others. In India, it is said that there are millions of religions and gods’ names. If we are seeking to be close to those gods and receive help from them, we can call on their names and worship them.

However, as I mentioned, the God whom we are serving now is the One who created heaven and earth, the Almighty and All-knowing, the One who will judge all things and determine everything in the end. He is the One we believe in. How do we know that this God is so strong and powerful? It is because we know this that we believe in Him, and you need to gradually come to know this too.

That God has something to do with all of us. The fact that our hearts are beating right now is due to this God’s power. The very purpose of our faith is to meet this God and share in all the glory and every good thing that this God has.

To put it simply, what is the most fundamental and greatest yet essential thing that this God can give us? It is eternal life. Everlasting life. Without eternal life, everything else means nothing. What use is money when you haven’t got a life? We need to have life eternally in order for everything else to be ours forever. Hence, obtaining eternal life is our goal.

Yet even though humans were made by God, they neither know Him, let alone have eternal life. Although they are living because of God, they are ignorant of this and ungrateful towards God. That is why man is doomed to perish. Since he has already left God and betrayed Him, man has been doomed to perish from long ago. Thus, if God were to treat us the way we deserve, we should go to hell and perish forever. This unbelievable fate is waiting for us. However, God did not leave us that way; instead, He wants to save us. He wants to save us from curses and punishment so that we have eternal life. And that is what we are trying to gain right now.

In order to gain that, the pre-requirement is faith. Faith, which I mentioned earlier. This faith is not just a vague notion that “if I do good, everything will go well for me.” This is not the kind of belief where I think, “If I practice in my mind shooting the ball into the basketball net, I will definitely improve!” We need to have the faith that God has given.

Thus, from now on in our church, you need to endeavor to know this: “What is the faith that God has given, that we might have eternal life and not be cursed, punished, and go to hell?” If I were to put that simply, it means “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.” Jesus Christ the Son of God is the object of our faith.

God’s Son, whom God sent to do God’s work as Christ, is Jesus. And Jesus was baptized and came out of the water. Even at our church, people are baptized. But 2000 years ago, Jesus came as a man and was baptized. At that moment a voice came from heaven saying, “This is My Son whom I love; with Him, I am well pleased!” God Himself testified of two things—as I said before, that Jesus is God’s Son and Christ. God testified of these two things through His own lips. “This is My beloved Son! He is the One I am pleased with!” Because He said that, we believe it.

So when we hear how God said that, we are not going to say, “How come?” Instead, we should agree enthusiastically acknowledging it. For example, if I say something to which another person responds, “Hey, that’s a lie! You’re lying!” I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with that person anymore. God is the same. God opened His mouth and said, “That man is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased!” To that, we should pay a great deal of interest and respond, “Oh, really? Why? What did He do that God is so pleading with Him? How is that man the Son of God? How is He equal to God?” Yet people are not even interested, and they even deny it. Despite God saying He was pleased with Him, people instead accused Him as a sinner, crucified Him, and didn’t accept Him. Such a person despises God.

However, we need to be those who respond with agreement when we hear God’s voice. “Yes! That’s right!” We should clap our hands together in agreement. “Yes! You are right!” Since God said, “He is My beloved Son!” we should also agree and say, “Yes! Jesus is God’s Son!” Furthermore, since God said, “With Him, I am well pleased,” how should we respond agreeably? “Yes! That’s right! He is Christ sent by God who fulfills everything God commanded Him.”

There were a few people who acknowledged this. Out of them, the first one to realize this through inspiration was the disciple, Peter. When the Lord asked, “Who do you say I am?” The disciple Peter answered, “Lord, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” In saying that, he was fully acknowledging agreeably what God had said. That was why Jesus was also very pleased.

In this way, our faith was not passed on to us by somebody else, nor did we come up with it ourselves. It wasn’t Peter who first taught this. Who was it that first revealed this to us? God first revealed it, and to answer in agreement with that is our faith. Such a person will be pleasing to God and be loved by God. That’s how he gains eternal life too.

As you start your church life, the attitude you need to have is this: “Since I came to church to know about God, I should agree enthusiastically with God from now on!” You must be determined. Don’t try to tackle God. Don’t ignore what God said. Rather, determine in your heart that you will not ignore what God says but will absolutely be in agreement with God. I bless you in Jesus’ name!

Then God will help you too. You have to make an effort to meet God, and God will also help you. Only then will you be able to meet God? Otherwise, you can’t. Unless you make that effort, you cannot meet God. If you don’t make yourself ready in a certain way, you won’t be able to meet God regardless of your hard efforts. As a result, you may conclude, thinking, “There is nothing much in the church!” and leave. But that’s not because there is something wrong with the church. It means you haven’t come to understand God. It means you haven’t met God. In Jesus’ name, I bless you all to meet God without going through such failures. I’ll pray.

Father God, help us to be those who are grateful, interested in, and attentive to Your secret, which You have spoken about before man, and be able to agree enthusiastically with You. Help us to have the faith that You want of us. In Jesus’ name! Amen.