What is faith? Some words can appear to be “religious” – distanced from every day life in the “real world” One such word is FAITH. People talk about a “leap of faith”, and living “by faith not by sight”. It is so easy to be misunderstood. Some people even think that “faith is believing things you know aren’t true”
I want to answer a simple question this morning. What is faith? What does it mean to have Christian faith? What does faith really mean?
Some people think that faith is a “religious” word – that only religious people have “faith”. But faith isn’t a religious word. Faith is an EVERYDAY word. In everyday life we believe things, believe people, trust people. Faith simply means trusting! Trusting somebody. Putting our trust in something or somebody.
Faith is central to the whole of ordinary life. You are feeling poorly so you go to your doctor. He gives you a prescription in handwriting you cannot read. You take it to a pharmacist you have never seen before. He gives you a chemical compound you do not understand. Then you go home and take the pill according to the instructions on the bottle. All of that is trust, it’s faith!
We press the light switch without checking to see if the wiring in the house is still safe – we just trust it is all OK. We drop an important letter in the letter box but never wait around to see if any postman picks it up. We trust it will be delivered. We get on to a bus or a train plane without ever asking whether the driver knows where he is going. When I get in a car and turn the ignition key, I have faith that my car will start. The kind of faith Christians have is simply an expression of the same kind of trust. But trust directed towards God.
We trust the news when we hear it on television, most of the time anyway. We trust a SatNav is going to take us where we want to go. We trust all kinds of people all of the time. Faith in God is the just same kind of trust.
Christian faith is a relationship with GOD – EXACTLY like other relationships with people. That’s why faith, hope and love go together – they are all things which make up relationships with people! Abraham was called a FRIEND of God – because he believed God, he trusted God.
The action of Christian faith is EXACTLY like action of trusting anybody else
Some people think is must be different because “we can’t see God”. But I spend lots of time writing emails to people I can’t hear or see. Young people seem to spend half their lives texting or chatting on Facebook, often with people on the other side of the world who they will never ever meet face to face. We’ve had telephones for decades and letters for centuries. Every week all of us communicate with all kinds of people who we will never see. The taxman! The person I booked our holiday with. Family and friends hundreds of miles away. God is not the only person we trust without seeing them face to face. MOST of our trusting is like that.
Most of life is built on trust in one form or another. One of my hobbies is “mending other people’s computers”. Over the years that is something that lots of people and churches and schools have asked me to do. Somebody who might not know me very well, sometimes a person I have never even met before, comes and says, “my computer is broken, can you fix it? I want to upgrade my computer, can you do it for me?” I explain the risks. I warn them that things might go wrong and that they might end up having to buy a new machine if I break it even more than it is already! But they always agree to take the risk. So far they have always decided to trust me. And so far things have never gone wrong.
People trust me that I am not going to deliberately wreck their machine, or steal bits out of it, or get them to buy new parts which they don’t need and I don’t use but slip into my own computers instead. People trust me that I actually do know what I am doing, and that I wont take risks but will do my best to help them.
I don’t know why people trust me in those ways. Perhaps they think I’ve got an honest face. But life is full of examples of people trusting each other. And trusting God is just the same kind of thing. The only difference between trusting God and trusting people lies in the character of God!!!!! God is more reliable, more trustWORTHY, than ANYbody else!
So how does faith in God work? What does trusting God involve?
When I left teaching science a long long time ago to become a minister, a few colleagues very kindly said things like, “I admire your faith.” Or “I wish I had faith like yours”. I tried to explain to them that they DO have faith. Everybody has faith. And then I explained what it involved to have faith in God.
Christian faith involves at least three things
Trusting the Bible –
Somebody once said that we should start off treating the Bible like any other book – after a while we will realise that the Bible is unlike any other book!
Trusting what Christians say –
When Christians talk about God answering their prayers, some people assume they are just making up stories. How much better to assume that when Christian friends talk about the difference Jesus makes in their lives, the peace he gives them, the help and the guidance, assume that they are telling the truth.
Trusting your own experience –
We can all discover for ourselves God is real, that God is there, that God will help anybody who sincerely searches for him! Try reading the Bible. Try praying.
My family never went to church when I was growing up. I grew up thinking that God didn’t exist. I was studying science and I thought that science had proved the Bible was wrong, that science had proved that God didn’t exist. I was sixteen when God surprised me and showed me that he does exist, that he is real! So I began to see the world in a very different way.
6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Faith in God begins by making the assumption that God exists and deciding to live our lives to please the God we believe in. Other people may live lives based on possessions or money and things in the here and now which they can touch and feel. But Christian believers base our lives on the God of the Bible. We trust in His acts of salvation. We believe His Word the Bible as God’s word to us even today. We claim God’s promises. So we depend on God.
(C. S. Lewis) who wrote the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe once said, “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
Hebrews chapter 11 is full of the examples of men and women who trusted God.
NOAH
7 By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
Even if nobody else hears God’s voice, if we believe then we hear, and we trust, and we obey. It may make us look foolish to everybody else. But we still rely on God!
ABRAHAM
8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
11 By faith Abraham, even though he was past age- and Sarah herself was barren- was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. 12 And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.
Faith means clinging on to God’s promises, even when they seem impossible.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) “Faith is not believing that God can, but that God will!”
It was that great theologian Cliff Richard who said, “The more we depend on God, the more dependable we find he is.”
Some people seem to think that trusting God is irrational. I would argue that putting faith in God is just as rational, just as sensible as trusting anything or anybody else.
“Faith is a reasoning trust, a trust which reckons thoughtfully and confidently upon the trustworthiness of God”. (the preacher John Stott)
It is rational to put our trust in God because of His character. When we trust other people, there is always the risk that they might lie to us, or cheat us. But God will never do that! Because God is infinitely Good –
God is good and just: He will never deceive us – so it should be EASIER to trust Him than it is to trust other people. We should be able to trust God MORE than we do other people!
Then when we trust other people there is also the risk that they will hurt us in some way. But that will never happen with God because God is all loving. God IS love. “I have loved you with an everlasting love!” God says. Oswald Chambers wrote, “Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God.”
God is all-loving: He will never let us down: it should be EASIER to trust God than to trust anybody else. We should trust God MORE than we do anybody else.
Then when we trust other people there is always the risk that they will mess up. That however much they try, they might fail to do what they have promised. But there is no risk of that happening with God. Because
God is all-powerful – God is Almighty. God can do whatever He chooses to do!
God is all-powerful – He CAN keep His promises: it should be EASIER to trust God than it is to trust other people. We should trust God MORE than we do anybody else!
We trust other people – put our confidence in them, have faith in them, believe in them –
Then people are fickle and fallible – But God is GOOD;
Human love is partial, limited – But God is ALL LOVING;
People can fail because of their limitations – But God is ALL-POWERFUL:
So we should trust Him most of all!
The Bible given us many examples of heroes of faith, but there are many modern examples of heroes of faith too.
Corrie Ten Boom was a dutch Christian during the second world war who with other members of her family helped many Jews escape persecution but was herself put into Ravensbruck concentration camp. Corrie Ten Boom said these things about Faith.
“You don’t need great faith, but faith in a great God.”
“If all things are possible with God, then all things are possible to him who believes in him.”
“Faith sees the invisible, believes the unbelievable, and receives the impossible.”
“Faith is a Fantastic Adventure in Trusting Him.”
Faith isn’t something religious which only religious people have. We all have faith. We all exercise faith all the time. We all put our trust in things and people. The important question is – what do we put our faith in? What do we trust? Who do we trust?
I am fan of science fiction. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. Star Trek and Star Wars and of course Doctor Who. By far the best television science fiction series in the last decade was called Babylon 5 and its sequel called Crusade. Each episode of Crusade introduces the plotline and the main character by asking five questions. And those five questions are so good that they are worth everybody stopping to think about them sometimes.
WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
WHO DO YOU SERVE and WHO DO YOU TRUST?
What is faith? Putting our trust in God is just like trusting anybody or anything else. Questions well worth thinking about. WHO DO YOU SERVE and WHO DO YOU TRUST?
