One physics teacher in high school would sign the students’ yearbooks with these words: “May your PE = your KE. ”Potential energy is your potential. Kinetic energy is the energy you are currently using through motion. Don’t just store your faith. Use it.
An example of this kinetic faith is George Müller. In 1836, he and his wife opened their home in Bristol to 30 orphaned girls. They had no steady income, no major donors, and no wealthy backing. Müller committed to a radical principle: he would never ask people for money. He would only ask God.
One famous story tells of a morning when the children sat at the breakfast table with empty plates. Müller led them in prayer, thanking God for what they were about to receive. Moments later, a baker knocked at the door. He couldn’t sleep the night before and felt led to bring them fresh bread. Soon after, a milk cart broke down right outside, offering them fresh milk before it spoiled. By his death in 1898, it is said that Müller had cared for 10,024 orphans and built five large orphan houses on Ashley Down. He didn't believe in coincidence. He believed in divine timing, and he believed in living out and exercising his faith, rather than just storing it.
To understand the faith we are called to have, we need to be clear on what the Kingdom of God is. It is not about a place. It is about who reigns. God leaves us with a choice: to convert potential faith into kinetic faith. We cannot be passive observers.
Kyle Idleman writes in Not a Fan that the biggest threat to the church is fans (passive observers?) who call themselves Christians but aren’t interested in following Christ. They want to be close enough to Jesus to get the benefits, but not so close that it requires anything from them.
A fan cheers from the stands. A follower carries a cross.
As Christ’s disciples, we are called to carry our cross, which means we are called to die!
Bonhoeffer wrote, “When Christ calls a man,he bids him come and die.”
Paul puts it this way: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). A dead man is never afraid. A dead man is never offended. A dead man cannot be hurt by anyone. Every time your will and God’s clash, just die. Every time you are stung by criticism, just die again.(Source)
This can sound frightening, and the word “extreme” makes many of us uneasy. But we believe in a God who did the most extreme thing ever! He died for us. His love for us is extreme, and it never fails. Our kinetic faith must move toward death to self, and toward His resurrection life.
Dying daily does not mean earning our security.
As Sinclair Ferguson puts it, “My security as a Christian does not reside in the strength of my faith but in the indestructibility of my Savior.”
We are secure because of the loving and gracious King we serve, and another thing we must never forget is that - unlike those in Jesus' time who had to carry their crosses on their own, we carry the cross together, not as individuals.
In their article about his book, The Cost of Discipleship, the United Evangelical Christian Fellowship Church(UECF) says:\
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Bonhoeffer treats ‘ye are the salt of the earth’ and ‘ye are the light of the world’ as statements of fact rather than exhortations to try harder. The disciples, precisely because they are poor, meek and despised by ordinary standards, are declared the thing the earth cannot survive without — not admired for their qualities, but simply indispensable, the way salt is indispensable to food that would otherwise spoil. The world's contempt for them, described in the previous chapter, and their necessity to the world's very existence, are two sides of the same fact.
This immediately rules out any picture of discipleship as private, interior devotion detached from visible life. A disciple community that tried to hide, to protect its faith from public view or dissolve back into ordinary respectable society, would be doing the one thing salt and light cannot do by definition — losing the very property that makes them what they are. Visibility, for Bonhoeffer, is not incidental to discipleship; it is constitutive of it.
And this faith cannot stay hidden. Jesus says, “Ye are the salt of the earth… Ye are the light of the world” (Matthew5:13-14). According to Bonhoeffer, salt and light are not goals we aim for. They are who we already are. So we live visibly, not to show how impressive we are, but so that people see Christ and the glory goes to God.
So which faith are we living? Is it potential or kinetic?
And if it is kinetic, is it moving toward dying to ourselves?
The Christian life is not a one-time decision followed by years of passive belief. Faith that is only stored is not enough. God calls us to a faith in motion, moving toward dying to ourselves and living in Christ’s resurrection life.
This week: What is one decision you can make this week to push your faith from a Potential/Stored Faith into an Action/Kinetic Faith?
May your PE = your KE. Potential becomes kinetic.
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