Essential Versus Important and the Target Illustration for Faith
- Define how essential beliefs relate to salvation, important beliefs support orthodoxy, and personal convictions shape preferences.
- Use the target exercise to map your convictions and identify which beliefs belong in the bullseye of your faith.
- Focus on core gospel truths when answering skeptics so peripheral debates do not drain your time and energy.
So what is the difference between an essential belief, an important belief, and a personal conviction? Well, an essential belief is exactly what it sounds like. An essential belief is a belief that is essential for our salvation. Without these beliefs, a person is not saved.
An important belief is a belief, again, that’s very important, but it doesn’t rise to the level of being essential for our salvation. I like to call these beliefs essential for orthodoxy. They are essential if we want to follow Jesus faithfully, if we want to apply Scripture faithfully to our lives, and understand Scripture faithfully. These beliefs are important, but again, they’re not essential for our salvation.
Then thirdly, we have personal preferences, which oftentimes are convictions that are born out of perhaps the way that we apply certain passages or the way that our particular group might apply certain convictions. But these are personal preferences in regard to what we believe. So the question is, how do we discern the difference between what is essential, what is important, and what is just a personal conviction?
“How do we discern the difference?”
For years, I’ve been having one of my classes do an exercise near the beginning of the semester. It’s actually an apologetics class, a class on defending our faith. One of the things in apologetics that I try to emphasize to my students is that when you’re answering questions that skeptics ask, what’s most important is that we deal with the core elements of our faith. We don’t want to spend all of our time and all of our energy trying to answer questions that are not necessarily essential to what it is to be a Christian and to be a follower of Jesus.
I want to try to get my students to discern and distinguish between that which is essential and that which is not essential to our faith. What skeptics tend to do is they want to chip away out at the periphery of your faith with all sorts of questions about dinosaurs and stuff like that. It ends up spending a lot of our time and energy. So we want to be able to identify what is essential so we can talk about that.
I draw a target up on the board, and the target is representative of everything that we believe as individuals, as followers of Jesus. This is the sum total of everything that we believe. I have them map out certain beliefs on the target. Everything is up there. Dinosaurs are up on the target, but what you believe about dinosaurs, just to use that example, is not anywhere near the bull’s-eye of the target.
“What skeptics tend to do is they want to chip away out at the periphery of your faith with all sorts of questions about dinosaurs and stuff like that.”
It’s somewhere on the target, but it’s somewhere kind of on the margins. It’s somewhere on the periphery. But then you have a belief like the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus is, I believe, a bull’s-eye belief. It’s at the very center of the target.
A bull’s-eye, as you know, is necessarily small. There’s not a lot that fits on the bull’s-eye of a target. These bull’s-eye beliefs are few in number, but these beliefs are so important that if your convictions in regard to these things were to change, your entire life would change as a result. That’s how important and essential these beliefs are. Everything hangs on and hinges upon these particular beliefs.
I would encourage you to get out a piece of paper and do this exercise yourself. Draw a target and then map out the convictions that you have. Where would they fall on the target? Some are actually really close to maybe the center of the target. They come close, but they’re not exactly at the middle of the target.
Map out your convictions. Where would they fall on the target? Then, importantly, what would occupy the bull’s-eye of your target?
