The Three Examinations of Faith On the Sanctuary, the City, and the Road

The Three Examinations of Faith

On the Sanctuary, the City, and the Road

There are moments when faith must examine the world.
But there are also moments when faith must allow itself to be examined.

Scripture brings us to three such places:

the sanctuary,
the city,
and the road.

At each place, a question waits.

Isaiah asks:
What has entered the faith?

Paul asks:
What does the city worship?

Jesus asks:
Did you come near?

These are not three unrelated questions.
They move deeper and deeper into the life of faith.

The first examines what we have absorbed.
The second examines what we worship.
The third examines what we become.
And perhaps the third is the hardest, because eventually every doctrine must meet a neighbor.

I. The Sanctuary: What Has Entered the Faith?

Isaiah looks at the people of God and sees a land that is full.
Full of silver.
Full of gold.
Full of horses.
Full of chariots.
Full of idols.
The tragedy is not that Judah possesses nothing.

The tragedy is that Judah possesses so much that something else has quietly occupied the center.

This is the danger facing religion in every generation.
Faith does not always disappear through open rejection.
Sometimes faith remains while something else enters it.

The language remains Christian.
The building remains.
The worship remains.
The Bible remains.
The cross remains above the sanctuary.
But beneath the cross another altar can quietly be constructed.

An altar to success.
An altar to wealth.
An altar to political power.
An altar to nationalism.
An altar to celebrity.
An altar to technology.
An altar to institutional survival.
An altar to ourselves.

This is why Isaiah's question must come
before our criticism of the surrounding world.

Before we ask what is wrong with the culture, we must ask:
What has the culture taught us to worship?
Before we examine Athens, Isaiah must examine us.

II. The City: What Does the City Worship?

Then Paul walks into Athens.
Acts tells us that the city is full of idols.
But Paul does not begin by shouting at the city from a distance.

He walks through it.
He observes.
He listens.
He encounters its philosophers.
He notices its altars.
And among them he finds one inscription:

TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.

Paul understands something essential about mission:
You cannot truly address a city you refuse to encounter.

Athens becomes his classroom
before the Areopagus becomes his pulpit.

The Gospel walks before it speaks.
Our cities also contain altars.
They may no longer be carved from stone.
But ask what receives our deepest trust.

Ask what receives our time.
Ask what receives our sacrifices.
Ask what we are most afraid to lose.
Ask what promises to save us.
There you will begin to find the gods of the city.

Money can become an altar.
Power can become an altar.
Nation can become an altar.
Markets can become an altar.
Technology can become an altar.
Human intelligence can become an altar.

Even religion can become an altar when preserving the institution becomes more important than serving God and neighbor.

The idol does not need to say:
Bow before me.
It merely needs to become something we believe we cannot live without.

But Paul teaches us another lesson.
He does not enter Athens with contempt.

He listens without surrendering conviction.
He understands without abandoning truth.
He finds a point of contact without bowing before the altar.

That is discernment.
The Gospel may enter every culture
without worshiping every god it encounters.

III. The Road: Did You Come Near?

Then Jesus takes us somewhere very different.
Away from the sanctuary.
Away from the philosophical marketplace.
Away from the great city.

He takes us to a road.
And beside that road lies a wounded man.
A priest sees him.
A Levite sees him.
A Samaritan sees him.

All three see.
That is important.

The priest cannot say:
I did not know.
The Levite cannot say:
I did not see.

The difference comes after seeing.

One passes by.
Another passes by.
But the Samaritan comes where the wounded man is.

That movement may contain one of the shortest definitions
of mercy in Scripture:

He came near.
Before the bandage, there was proximity.
Before the oil and wine, there was proximity.
Before the inn, there was proximity.
Before the money, there was proximity.
Mercy began when somebody changed direction.

> The Failure After Seeing

This may be one of the most important spiritual questions of our time. Humanity has acquired an extraordinary capacity to see suffering from afar.

We see war.
We see hunger.
We see displacement.
We see tents beneath highways.

We see families losing homes.
We see refugees.
We see prisoners.
We see loneliness.
We see wounded people across the world almost instantly.

Technology has shortened the distance
between the eye and the suffering.
But it has not necessarily shortened the distance
between the heart and the neighbor.

Therefore the question has changed.

It is no longer only:
Did you know?

It is:
What did you do after you knew?

Seeing is not yet mercy.
Knowing is not yet love.
Compassion becomes visible
when suffering changes our direction.

> The Modern Idol May Be Distance

Perhaps one of the most sophisticated idols of modern religion is distance. Distance allows us to speak about people without knowing them. We can discuss poverty without sitting with the poor.

We can debate homelessness without knowing someone sleeping outside. We can discuss immigration without hearing an immigrant's story. We can discuss prisoners without visiting them.

We can discuss neighborhoods without walking through them.
We can speak endlessly about humanity while avoiding the human being standing before us.

Distance protects abstraction.
Proximity interrupts it.

From far away we say:
the homeless.

Up close there is a name.
A history.
A family.
A disappointment.
A memory.
A hope.
A human being.
The category acquires a face.
And the stranger begins becoming a neighbor.

> The Cross Is Divine Proximity

This is why the Cross stands at the center of all three examinations.
Christianity does not proclaim a God
who loved humanity from a safe distance.

The Word became flesh.
God came where we were.
Christ entered hunger.

He entered rejection.
He entered suffering.
He entered death.
The Cross is divine proximity.

God did not shout love across the distance.

He crossed it.
And therefore Christians cannot worship the God who came near while continually choosing the other side of the road.

The movement of Christ must become the movement of discipleship.
God came near to us.

We move toward one another.
Christ entered our wound.

We approach the wounded.
Christ became servant.

We serve.
Christ crossed the distance.
We cross the road.

> The Church Must Recover Its Feet

The modern church has developed extraordinary microphones.
Our sermons can cross oceans.
Our worship can be streamed globally.
Our words can reach thousands in seconds.
Our technology can multiply messages farther than previous generations could imagine.

But perhaps the church must recover something
much older than the microphone.

Its feet.
Feet that walk toward the hospital.
Feet that walk toward the prison.
Feet that walk toward the encampment.
Feet that walk toward the nursing home.
Feet that walk toward the lonely apartment.
Feet that walk toward the neighborhood everyone else avoids.

Feet that cross the street.
Because the Gospel is not merely something spoken.

The Gospel moves.
The Word became flesh.

Jesus walked among villages.
The Samaritan crossed the road.
Paul walked through Athens.
The Gospel has always had feet.

> The Street Is the Final Classroom

Something happens when theology reaches the street.
Theories acquire faces.
Statistics acquire names.
Arguments acquire biographies.
And sometimes the person we thought needed our teaching becomes the person who teaches us.

The street asks questions the sanctuary can postpone.

Does your doctrine produce mercy?
Does your worship produce service?
Does your theology know how to listen?
Does your faith recognize Christ in the wounded?
Does the Cross above your church produce movement
toward the person outside it?

This is why the street can become a final classroom of discipleship.
No one graduates from becoming a neighbor.

> How Large Is the Church?

We often ask:
How many people attend?

How large is the building?
How many programs operate?

How large is the budget?
How influential is the ministry?

These questions may tell us something about an institution.
But the Gospel asks another question:

How far does your mercy travel?
A congregation can fill a sanctuary while scarcely touching the suffering surrounding it.

Another congregation may possess little property, little money, and little prestige, yet feed the hungry, visit the sick, accompany the lonely, shelter the displaced, listen to the forgotten, and stand beside those society has abandoned.

The size of the church is not finally the number of people it gathers.
The size of the church is also the number of people it serves.
The church's true footprint is not merely architectural.

It is relational.
It is measured along the roads its mercy is willing to cross.

> Three Places, Three Questions

And now we return to the beginning.
The sanctuary.
The city.
The road.

Isaiah stands in the sanctuary and asks:
What has entered your faith?

Paul walks through the city and asks:
What does your city worship?

Jesus stands beside the wounded neighbor and asks:
Did you come near?

The sanctuary examines our discernment.
The city examines our allegiance.
The road examines our mercy.

What entered us?
What rules us?
Where did our feet go?

These three examinations belong together.
Because what enters our faith eventually shapes what we worship.

What we worship eventually shapes what we love.
And what direction we travel when another person's suffering enters our path.

> The Road Speaks Last

Perhaps the road must have the final word.
Because after the sermon ends,

after the worship music becomes silent,
after the theological argument concludes,
after the conference closes,
after the sanctuary empties,
there remains a world of wounded neighbors.
And then faith must leave the building.

There theology acquires feet.
There worship becomes mercy.
There compassion becomes proximity.

There the Cross becomes movement.
And there the final examination begins.

Not merely:
What did you believe?

Not merely:
What did you know?

Not even merely:
What did you see?

But:
What did you do after you knew?

You saw the wound.
Did you cross the road?

You heard the cry.
Did you change direction?

You preached the Cross.
Did the Cross teach you to come near?

For the Gospel does not end at the altar.
It walks out the door.

It enters the city.
It crosses the road.

It approaches the wound.
It learns the name.
It becomes neighbor.
And perhaps that is where the three examinations of faith
finally become one:

What entered your faith?
What received your worship?
And when you saw me wounded beside the road—
did you come near?

For the Cross is divine proximity.
And discipleship is learning to travel in the same direction.

Christ came where we were.
Now the Gospel sends us toward where our neighbor is.

Go, and do thou likewise.

Pastor Steven G. Lee
Street GMC Corps
September 19, 2026