Life Choices Led By Faith

The Christian Church Year consists of Feast days and Holy days. A Feast Day is a day set aside as a commemorative religious festival.

Primary Feast Days include Easter Day, Ascension Day, the Day of Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, All Saints Day, Christmas Day and The Epiphany (manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles – the Magi). Several primary Holy Days, which include The Transfiguration, are also celebrated.   

 There is also a long list of other Feast Days that are celebrated during the year. I am writing this article on November 30^th.  Every year the Church celebrates this day as the Feast Day for             St. Andrew the Apostle. St. Andrew’s life is a model that our faith can help us attain, as did Andrew’s faith help him.

First of all, Andrew, a fisherman, heard about Jesus through his disciple relationship with John the Baptist. Andrew immediately recognized Jesus as the Messiah and quickly told his brother, Simon Peter. As the story goes they ultimately gave up their fishing trade and followed Jesus as “fishers of men.”

This familiar story may not have played out the same if Andrew had not been seeking God through his relationship with John the Baptist. We sometimes take such stories for granted, even though a change or twist here or there may have kept great things from happening. Unfortunately, many sacrifices were made by the early apostles in their commitment to spread Christ’s Kingdom around the known world. Nonetheless, their faith made those efforts worthwhile, even to the point of their own crucifixion on a cross.

During Andrew’s mission work, that extended along the Black Sea and up into Greece, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, Thrace, and Byzantium among others areas, he was crucified in Patras, Greece. Legend is that Andrew requested not to be crucified on a cross similar to the one Jesus died on, as he proclaimed he was not worthy to so die.  Instead he was crucified on a cross that was in the shape of an X.  His hands and feet were bound, not nailed to the cross.  Today, this type of cross is known as a ‘St. Andrew’s Cross’.

How far does our faith take us in this life? Do we seek to strengthen our faith in our lives? Would we be willing to die for our faith? Like the young girl victim of the Columbine High School Massacre, would we die rather than deny God? Fortunately, we are rarely challenged like that in our country.

The sacrifices made by Andrew and the other early apostles are inspirational, but it is their seeking God and spreading Christ’s Kingdom that is their message to us. I belong to a chapter of The Brotherhood of St. Andrew at my church.  As we open and close each of our meetings, we state our mission “to spread Christ’s Kingdom to others.” We do Bible lessons at a Drug and Alcohol rehab facility, some of us are involved in prison ministry and others are involved in all sorts of outreach in our community.

While we don’t plan on having to make a life sacrifice in our ministry, like Andrew did in his, we use his example of his faithful focus on his ministry.