You’ve heard it said: What got you here won’t get you there.
It’s one of those phrases that gets repeated in leadership circles until it loses its edges. And there’s truth in it. There are seasons that demand course corrections. Moments when we have to shed old patterns and learn new ways of thinking and leading. Nobody reaches a new level by insisting nothing needs to change.
But here’s what I’ve been sitting with: there are also things that were put into our lives — convictions, patterns, principles, practices — that if we stay faithful to them, will get us to where God wants us to go. Not everything that brought us here needs to be left behind.
Which brings me to what I want to talk about.
Think about something that was given to you. Not bought. Not earned. Handed over by someone who loved you.
Maybe it was your grandfather’s watch — worn and scratched, but it still ticks. Or your grandmother’s recipe, her handwriting on a card slightly faded, folded and unfolded so many times the creases are nearly worn through. Or a piece of furniture with a story attached: This was your great-great-aunt’s, brought over from Ireland.
What makes those things valuable? It isn’t novelty. Nobody says, “This watch is amazing — it’s brand new.” What makes them valuable is provenance. Proven worth. The fact that it survived. The fact that it was trusted to you.
The Christian faith is exactly that kind of inheritance.
Not something we invented. Not something every generation gets to redesign from scratch. Something handed to us — carefully, at great cost — by people who sometimes died to make sure it arrived intact.
The Pressure to Revise Everything
We live in a world that treats faith like a streaming service. Constantly updating. Algorithmically adjusted to what you prefer. Curated to your tastes. If you don’t like this version, there’s a new one loading.
And the pressure doesn’t always come from outside the church. Progressive voices say: Orthodoxy is just power dressed up as truth. Pragmatic voices say: What matters is what works, not what’s always been believed. Therapeutic voices say: As long as people feel accepted, does doctrine really matter?
I want to take those voices seriously, because they’re not always entirely wrong. There have been times when the church clung to tradition out of fear rather than faith — when what was called “orthodoxy” was actually just the dead weight of preference.
So let me give you a distinction that I think cuts through the confusion.
Jaroslav Pelikan, the great church historian, put it like this:
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”
Read that again slowly. Tradition — the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism — the dead faith of the living.
We are not traditionalists. We are not clinging to forms out of familiarity, protecting our comfort zones, resisting the Spirit’s movement because we’re afraid. But we are orthodox. We believe that what has been entrusted to the church is not ours to rewrite. We receive it. We guard it. We live it forward.
Jude’s Urgent Letter
Jude is one of the shortest books in the New Testament — 25 verses, easy to skip. But don’t let its size fool you. This is one of the most direct, urgent, uncompromising letters in the entire canon.
Jude had a letter planned. He was ready to write about the joy of salvation. Then something happened — false teachers had crept into the community, twisting grace into licence, distorting the very character of Jesus. Jude couldn’t ignore it.
So he picks up his pen and writes a different letter. A rallying cry. And right at the heart of it — verse 3 — is one of the most important statements in the entire New Testament:
“Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.” — Jude 1:3
Three words matter enormously here.
Once for all. The Greek is ephapax — done, settled, complete. Not provisional. Not ongoing. Not subject to further revision. The foundation is fixed.
Entrusted. This is inheritance language. Gift language. The faith wasn’t discovered — it was delivered. It came from outside us, through the apostles, through eyewitness testimony, through the movement of the Spirit across history. We received something we didn’t build. Something many gave their lives to protect.
Contend. The Greek word carries the image of a wrestler straining for position, a soldier holding ground. Jude isn’t inviting gentle reflection. He’s calling for courageous, active engagement. As John Piper once wrote: “There is a body of doctrine worth contending for. There is truth worth dying for. That is hard for our relativistic culture to understand.”
The Baton We’re Carrying
Think about a relay race.
When a runner receives the baton, their one job is to carry it faithfully to the next person. They didn’t design it. They didn’t choose its shape or weight. Their job isn’t to redesign it on the way round the track. Their job is to run well and hand it over intact.
That’s us.
We are somewhere in the middle of a very long relay. The apostles ran first. The church fathers ran. The reformers ran. The missionaries ran. The martyrs who died in Roman arenas and African fields and Asian prisons — they ran. And they handed it to us.
The question isn’t: What do we want the faith to be?
The question is: Are we carrying it well?
This faith has a name. In the second century, as the church faced pressure from false teachers pulling it in every direction, ordinary believers began reciting together:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord…
The Apostles’ Creed. Not a piece of liturgical furniture. A battle cry. A statement of non-negotiables. A summary of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. People kneeled in Roman arenas, given the choice to renounce or die, and recited these words. That is what has been passed to us.
Scripture: Our Compass, Not Our Weather Vane
Paul wrote to Timothy: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16–17)
Here’s an image that helps me. You’re navigating somewhere new. You could use a compass — always pointing north, steady, reliable. Or a weather vane — spinning with every shift in the wind, pointing wherever the current blows.
Culture is a weather vane. Understanding culture matters enormously. But it cannot be our compass. Scripture is our compass.
One of the great temptations of every era — including ours — is to use the parts of Scripture we like and quietly ignore the parts that make us uncomfortable. The moment we start editing the Bible based on what the culture finds palatable, we’ve stopped navigating by compass. We’re spinning with the weather vane.
Erwin McManus puts it simply: “The Bible is not an antiquated text. The Scriptures are the text that will lead us into the future.”
What got us here will get us there.
A Living Inheritance, Not a Museum Piece
Here’s where I want to finish.
Look at the fruit.
The faith delivered through the apostles has, over two thousand years, abolished child sacrifice, abolished gladiatorial combat, created the first hospitals, founded universities, given dignity to the poor, given freedom to enslaved people, carried hope into every continent on earth. This is not a perfect record — the church has failed and sinned and we must own that honestly. But the fruit of genuine, rooted orthodoxy across history is undeniable.
Luke 7:35: “Wisdom is proved right by all her children.”
Two thousand years of children. That’s the evidence.
John Stott wrote that the Christian is not someone who has found a new truth, but someone who has found the Truth — and that Truth is a Person. The faith we guard is not a philosophical system. It is the story of Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever.
The changelessness of Jesus is not the problem in a changing world. It is the solution.
We are not revisionists who rewrite the faith because it feels archaic or offends us. We are orthodox believers with a fully alive faith that has been transforming lives for two thousand years. A faith that got us here — and will get us there.
How to Respond
Three anchors to return to this week.
Anchor in Scripture — not as a rulebook, but as the living Word. Read it. Wrestle with it. Let it correct you. Let it be your compass when the culture is telling you to spin.
Anchor in the Creed — not as empty recitation, but as joyful declaration. Speak it aloud this week and mean it. This is the deposit. This is what people died for.
Anchor in community — the faith was not delivered to isolated individuals. It was delivered to God’s holy people. Your small group, your church, the people around you — this is where you work it out together.
We carry the deposit. We carry the baton. We stand on the shoulders of the apostles.
The question for each of us is simply this: Will we carry it well?
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Paul Benger 