Is Your Faith Active or Just on Autopilot?
By Pastor Ben Workentine, Discipleship Pastor at St. Mark Ministries
Another one bites the dust.
News broke last week of another prominent Christian author, influencer, and speaker who admitted that during his 55-year marriage, he had engaged in an 8-year affair with a married woman. He wasn’t the first, and unfortunately, he won’t be the last.
What stood out about this particular instance was his quote: “My conduct went against everything I ever believed about marriage.”
Can that happen? Can conduct and belief be so far apart?
Of course it can. We have a word for it: Hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is the gap between belief and conduct. Left unchecked, the gap between these two things only grows. As it grows, there’s increasing pressure inside the person where that hypocrisy exists.
That pressure? We don’t usually know how to deal with it. So we give it an outlet, and it’s usually directed at others. The wider the gap in our inner world, the more likely we are to say that “they” are the problem. “They” need to do something about it. “They” need to fix the problem.
Hypocrisy doesn’t just make us inconsistent. It makes us passive. This gets to something core to the Christian faith: The Word of God does not allow for belief and conduct to continuously drift apart.
Think of the consequences of living like that. What you believe, the things that bother you, the things you value – if you’re always able to push responsibility for those things onto someone else, if you’re always able to separate your conduct from whatever that belief might be, then nothing really bothers you. You don’t really believe anything because it’s always somebody else’s responsibility to do something about that belief.
That’s not much of a way to live.
God’s Blueprint for Active Faith
Our passage today, Deuteronomy chapter 6, offers a much better alternative. Let’s look at Deuteronomy 6:4 (NIV): “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
This is the central pillar of the whole Christian faith: That God is one, indivisible, transcendent, that He is almighty and powerful, that there is no other God beside Him.
Do you believe that?
If you do, it will manifest in everyday life. It might look like this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5 (NIV)). He is worthy of everything you have – every thought, every emotion, every ambition, every desire.
Believing that the Lord our God is one demands a complete reorientation of the desires of our hearts. It’s a brand-new set of priorities and purpose!
The author continues, “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts” (Deuteronomy 6:6 (NIV)) – not written down in some book that sits on a shelf collecting dust, not noted in an app on your phone that you never actually open. They’re meant to be written on your heart, so they affect not only what you believe but how that belief comes into reality. They’re not just for you.
Notice what he says next: “Impress them on your children” (Deuteronomy 6:7 (NIV)). Not just you, but the next generation.
That might be your kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews. Even if you look around and you’re at a stage of life where there aren’t any kids in your family, there are kids in our family here at St. Mark Ministries – hundreds of them with parents asking for help to impress these truths on their children.
They ask by bringing their kids to Children’s Church, Little Lambs, Cross Training, Pathfinders, and Rise; to our school – all of our children’s ministries. There are many people asking for help. Even if there aren’t children in your family, even if you’re not responsible for impressing these truths on your children, you might be the person who comes alongside parents and helps them carry out this job.
Taking Responsibility for Your Family’s Faith
I want to pause on this section longer because there are two ditches that I see many parents fall into that are exposed by this command to “impress them on your children.” Both have to do with passivity.
The first ditch delegates spiritual responsibility to children.
It says, “they’ll make the decision when they’re ready, when they want to, they’ll decide what they want to believe.” What that fails to acknowledge is that each of us is being discipled in a direction every moment of every day. Every video you watch, every conversation you have, every joke you laugh at, every book you read, every song you listen to is telling a story.
Either you will impress this on your children, or the world will impress something very different on them.
Our kids are not blank slates that remain blank for long. I’m reminded of that every time I cringe when I hear something come out of my three-year-old’s mouth that I know came from my mouth first – something I really wish he wouldn’t repeat. But maybe a better pursuit would be to ensure he doesn’t hear it in the first place.
The second ditch also relates to passivity but looks different. This ditch outsources the role of faith. It says, “they will impress these truths on my children.”
The “they” might be something as vague as the church, might be Cross Training volunteers, might be a pastor, teacher, or staff minister, but “they” is always someone else.
I understand that something as personal and mysterious as faith can quickly make you feel out of your depth discussing it with someone else. And it’s true, those other resources – pastors, teachers, volunteers, staff ministers – exist to come alongside and help.
But the keyword is help, not replace. The truth is that by the time our kids become adults, they will have caught far more than they were ever taught.
So what are they catching from you? What do they catch when baseball and church can’t coexist in the same space, and you have to make a choice?
What are they catching? What do they catch when God can be contained in a 60-65 minute box that happens some weekends but doesn’t impact or emerge in any other context or situation?
What do they catch when you come to worship? And dads, this is especially true for you. What do they catch during the worship songs? Are you singing out – even if it’s off-key – singing with all your heart because it’s not about what the people next to you think? It’s about praising your God. Are your hands raised up or stuck in your pockets as you stand stiff as a statue? What are they catching?
I understand no parent is perfect. I certainly am not.
If you ask my kids (please don’t) they would tell you many stories. But we can be purposeful.
Making God’s Word Part of Your Daily Routine
That purposeful living, that life of integrity, is not a mountain we need to climb. It consists of ordinary, regular, everyday things. That’s what this next section discusses. It says, “talk about them when you sit at home” (Deuteronomy 6:7 (NIV)).
You sit at home. I do. When you walk on the road, go places. When you lie down and when you get up. If you aren’t immersing yourself in these words, you are missing out. Is it any wonder that you float through life not making an impact on anyone? The uncooked tofu of the world if you’re not marinating in these words.
They were designed to be the first thing you put into your brain, into your heart, in the morning.
They were designed to be the last thought as you close out the day.
They were designed to fill every moment from breaking your fast in the morning to prayers at night and everything in between.
These words were meant to be the breathing in of hope and joy and peace.
As you breathe out worry, fear, anxiety, disappointment, and desperation, he continues, “Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates” (Deuteronomy 6:8-9 (NIV)).
Have these words everywhere you are going to look. Can you put something on your mirror where you brush your teeth, comb your hair, and put on your makeup that says, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14 (NIV))?
Can you put something on your refrigerator so that every time you open it for a midnight snack, you see: “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing” (Psalm 145:15-16 (NIV))?
Can you put something on your dashboard so that every time you go anywhere, even if it’s just down the block, you see “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways” (Psalm 91:11 (NIV))?
These words are meant to be the ordinary staple of your spiritual diet. It may not seem fancy or gourmet, but this is the bread of life. This is the key to sustaining you from day to day. This is God’s hope for you.
You don’t need to have it all at once. Take the next thing. And it starts by taking responsibility for your own faith and its actions.
Do Not Outsource Your Faith
Look again at Deuteronomy 6 (NIV). Who is it talking to? Who does it say should love the Lord your God? Love your neighbor, impress them on your children, talk about them?
Is it the priests?
No.
Is it Moses?
No.
Is it someone else?
No.
It’s everyone who hears these words.
Everyone in that first audience in Deuteronomy. That’s no different today than it was back then. 2026 cannot be the year when you say, “This thing bothers me. I’m going to wait for church to start a program, and then I’ll jump on board. I’m just waiting for an invitation. Someone else should do something about that. I’m not being fed.”
That’s outsourcing your own faith.
That passivity is the very definition of a gap between conduct and belief. And if that’s you, repent. Turn away from it and look again at the One you believe in.
God Always Keeps His Word
Notice His name here in Deuteronomy 6:4 (NIV): He calls Himself “the Lord our God.”
Anyone who heard that for the first time in Deuteronomy would have thought about the definition God gave for this name, this title. It’s in Exodus 34:6-7 (NIV) where we read, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.”
In other words, to summarize these verses is to say that the Lord is covenantal. We don’t use that word much, but it’s a Bible word that means the Lord makes promises and keeps them. We don’t really have a modern analogy for covenant. Maybe the closest are vows or contracts, but even those aren’t quite the same as what we’re talking about here.
A husband could possibly divorce his wife. He’d stop being a husband, but he wouldn’t stop being himself. A child in an extreme circumstance could emancipate themselves from their parents. They might stop being a son or daughter, but they wouldn’t stop being themselves. If the Lord were to not keep one of His promises, He would stop being God.
What the Lord says He will do, He does.
So if the Lord says He has made you family, He won’t go back on that. He can’t go back on that. It would be against His nature. He would stop being God.
So what He says about you is the truest thing about you. Let anyone say whatever they want. It will never be truer than what God says about you.
So if He calls you friend, sister, brother, beloved, chosen, that’s who you really are. Because the Lord is not unpredictable, unknowable, or shifting. He can’t help but be compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in love. This is the faithful God who calls us to live this way, to live with integrity.
The people who first heard these words would have thought of a definition. They also would have thought of an expression, a demonstration. They would have thought of their parents and grandparents who came at the tail end of 400 years of slavery in Egypt under the oppressive thumb of a foreign nation.
They would have thought of the anguish, the suffering, until God moved, until God brought ten superpower-crushing plagues at the end of which this whole nation that was enslaved for four centuries walked out of the country as a free nation. Until they got to the shores of the Red Sea – an impassably wide sea, with nowhere to go because in front of them, this near ocean, behind the,m the armies of Egypt. They were stuck until God moved. Confusion in the army behind, a splitting of the sea in front, wide enough that two million people could walk through on dry ground in one night.
When they heard “the Lord our God,” they would have thought of a miracle worker, a rescuer.
What do you think of? Do you hear the title “Lord our God” and think back to your childhood when someone told you that God was a bully whose only job was to make your life more difficult? Do you hear “the Lord our God” and think of a traffic cop who makes up rules to keep you in line? Do you hear “the Lord our God” and think of someone distant, disconnected, disinterested in your day-to-day life?
Many people do.
How Do We Know That God Is Still Watching Out for Us?
I was having a conversation with one of my kids this past week when he asked a really good question. He said, “Dad, how do we know? How do we know that God is still watching out for us?” Maybe you’ve asked a question like that.
My first inclination was to go to some of God’s promises, like: “Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5 (NIV)). Or his promise to not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smoldering wick (Isaiah 42:3 (NIV)). Those are true.
But then I also thought of the times when I have seen God keep those promises here among us.
- Marriages that I’ve seen that should, for every good reason, have been crushed under the weight of sin and betrayal have somehow miraculously found a way to hope and healing.
- The people in our midst who have received a terminal diagnosis – months, maybe years to live – and somehow miraculously have beaten that prognosis.
- The number of people here who have fallen on hard times, who aren’t sure where dinner will come from today, who found that, somehow, miraculously, God provides daily bread.
- The number of you who have gone through unimaginable loss, who are in the darkest places of grief and sorrow, who have somehow miraculously found that God was already there. And He walks beside those who are grieving.
This is our God. This is the Lord our God, still to this day keeping His promises, faithful to every one of them.
And He’s the one who meets us in the moment when our conduct and our beliefs have drifted apart. He’s the one who meets us there. Still faithful, still forgiving, but also still just and holy, which means that He can’t sweep our hypocrisy and passivity under the rug and pretend like it never happened.
What He does instead is choose to bear the cost of that sin Himself instead of making us pay the price. He chooses instead to forgive you because His one and only Son took your place, numbered among the hypocrites and the passive.
Our God is still saving even to this day. Our hypocrisy cannot undo His integrity. Yet, miraculously, His integrity pulls us to want to look a little bit more like our Father in heaven.
It’s Time to Act on Your Faith
Since the Packers ended their playoff run early this year, we can talk about the Texans. I noticed this past week that the Houston Texans’ quarterback CJ Stroud said this remarkable quote in an interview: “I can’t love God and have a wild mouth.”
It’s remarkable integrity for a 24-year-old millionaire. This is the kind of integrity that our Lord invites us into – to take humble responsibility for our faith and for its actions.
It can start small.
Maybe for you, it looks like following that prompt – you get an internal prompting to reach out to somebody, to send a word of encouragement. Pull out your phone and send the message before the moment passes.
Maybe for you, it looks like making a decision to take action that might be a little bit painful, might cost you something, but is in line with what you believe.
Maybe it’s asking questions – finally asking them to actually get answers instead of using questions as a smoke screen to avoid a difficult conversation.
Following Jesus cannot look like “this thing bothers me, someone else should do something about it.” What bothers you? It’s time to take action; to walk this way, because the Lord is who He says He is.