The good thing about theology is that it's more than heady intellectualism or pragmatic principles. The best thing about it is that unless you don't really believe it, you can be assured that it's going to weasel its way into the deepest nooks of your personhood. It changes you. It has to change you. It has to change everything about you and how you do everything and how you see everything and how you believe and practice and have faith and hope.

It has to.

Otherwise it's just pretense. And we know from Philippians chapter one that pretense can tell the truth too, that the gospel can come through, but wouldn't we rather every display of the gospel be deeply rooted in just truth?

Full disclosure: over the past few years I've panicked too many times, afraid that my faith is a sham and my future a gamble. I've called friends, sobbing into the phone: is this it? Is this what it feels like to be a fraud? And they console me, ask me hard questions, demand that I grab hold of the certain things, even if that is only One. And so I do. And every time my theology goes deeper in, more sure, more certain. Is this it? Is this what if feels like to have faith?

I say to a friend a few days ago that there are things I've never questioned, partly because the most healthy Christians I knew practiced them and so why wouldn't I parrot their faith? Why wouldn't I follow the trail they've marked? It works, right? These are things I've never questioned because questioning is not cool; certainty is cool and certainty is what moves you forward.

But these days I am less certain and more confident, if such a thing is possible. The more I say to Theology that it is just a cloak over a Christ who cannot be explained by five points and a good concordance, the more positive I am that the gospel is built of faith in Jesus alone and hope for everything else: healing, life, restoration, understanding, redemption, sanctification, heaven.

Faith in Jesus changes you, every particle of you, if you let it.