What Your Faith Attests To

Thermostats and thermometers

On one side of my house, I have a thermostat. On the other end, I have a sensor that has a thermometer in it.

The thermostat cries out, “I want it to be 75 in here!”

The thermometer answers back, “This is Nigeria. It’s 82! Suck it up!”

The thermostat then turns on the a/c and the house begins to cool. The thermostat is in constant conversation with the thermometer, and the entire time the thermometer is saying, “Not yet…not yet…not yet…,” until finally, it calls out, “We’re there!”

Then the thermostat turns off the a/c for a while.

The faith thermometer

Many people don’t realise that we have a built-in faith thermometer as well.

Your mouth is a thermostat. You can say, “I am deeply devout. I believe in God and would do anything for him.” Or, if you’re not religious, but still a very good boy or girl, you might say, “I believe in humanity and kindness and goodness. I’m a loving person.”

Well and good.

But the thermometer is very nearby. It doesn’t take long at all for it to read whether or not the message has gotten from the thermostat to the engine that changes the temperature.

The thermometer is your wallet.

If you proclaim that you believe in this or that but never put a penny to it, your thermostat isn’t quite telling the truth. It might be pronouncing an intention, but it’s never actually effecting the change to prove itself. Something has gone wrong in the system.

Don’t get mad at me for saying it. This is the word of Jesus. “Wherever your treasure is, that’s where your heart is too.”

Hypocritical faith

It’s a hypocritical and dishonest faith that makes bold statements of belief and ideology and then doesn’t put its money where its mouth is.

I might say, “I believe in God (or just in human kindness), and it’s very important to me.”

But then my wallet might respond, “Who are we talking about here?” If so, the wallet is always right.

I can shush it and put it away and go back to my sermon. “I would give my life for God, and if it came to persecution, I would die for my faith.”

If my wallet says, “That would be strange, because you’ve never laid down a dime before,” then my wallet knows what it’s talking about.

This is true for the irreligious as well as the pious. If you don’t give, you don’t believe.

Atheists and charity

Never is this more clear than when you look at the charitable habits of atheists.

This plays out in the data. A 2014 Pew Research study showed that people who attend church were almost twice as likely to volunteer their free time to a charitable cause than people who don’t attend church. Because for those people, Jesus has his hand on the thermostat. They’re meditating on the life of someone who gave his life away in love and told us to do the same.

Research by the Lilly School at Indiana University (2012) showed that religious Americans gave away several times as much, about four times as much, to charity than non-religious people. Because Jesus has his hand on the thermostat. And people who attended church gave about twice as often.

Religious giving then influenced their giving elsewhere, as religious people were more likely to be charitable towards secular causes, like a college or the symphony or the zoo, than non-religious people. The average gift of a religious person to a secular charity is larger than the gift of a non-religious person to a secular charity.

Practicing Christians are more than twice as likely to adopt a child as the average US household. (Barna 2013)

The reason for all this is plain. Charitable activity is a result of a charitable heart, and conversely, visible activity is a good measure of the nature of an invisible commitment.

When we believe in something intensely, we give to it generously.

A challenge

Let me throw out a challenge to you, no matter what you believe in. Assess what you’re really giving to it. If the thermometer isn’t reading what the thermostat is saying, it’s up to you to make them sync