(Note: This blog entry is based on the text “The Meaning Faith”, originally shared on September 28, 2022. It was the 236th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Do you ever imagine that all your spiritual
struggles would be over if only you had more faith? They wouldn’t. Today, we’re
going to find out why.
I saw a meme the other day that said, “If I
was a Jedi there’s a 100% chance I would use the Force inappropriately.”
People
who commented agreed, talking about getting out of speeding tickets, turning
off the lights after being snug in bed and silencing their neighbor’s late
night-parties. I’m sure we could think of even more inappropriate uses for this
power.
Jesus’
disciples were called apostles after they had been sent on missionary journeys.
“Apostle” means “sent one”.
They
were close to Jesus for nearly three years. They that felt they could ask for
things.
If you
could ask Jesus for one thing, what would it be? The apostles knew. We see it
in Luke 17:5,
5The
apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”
What would you do if you had more faith? Use
it inappropriately? Throw mountains into the sea? Fling trees around your
neighborhood? Or, would you seek greater service?
The apostles did have the right idea. Faith
doesn’t come as an act of our will. It is a gift from God. It is the lived
relationship for which human beings were created now restored by the cross of
Jesus Christ and His resurrection.
They had the right idea, but they didn’t
know what they needed or what it would cost.
The people whose faith I most admired when I was growing up were people who had
a kind of luminous faith, and I wanted that. When I was able to see what they all
had in common, I realized that it was experiences of suffering through which they
had seen God’s faithfulness. They were faithful in the transformational power
of God’s gifts.
So, as I grew up, I prayed that God would give me just enough of that suffering.
Not enough to sink me, just enough to bring me through life’s trials with that
same kind of luminous faith. Then I grew up and found out what that suffering
involved, and I stopped praying for that. 😊
The good news of salvation through faith would
come through the suffering of Jesus, and He was preparing his disciples for
that.
He replies to the apostles’ request in verses
6-7,
6The
Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to
this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey
you.
I had a friend who was also a pastor who
said that on the first day of the second semester of his “Introduction to The
Bible” class, the professor looked over the room and said, “I don’t know why
any of you are here for the second semester. You aren’t applying half of what
you learned in the first semester.” 😊
Jesus asked the same question of the apostles.
He used a common rhetorical technique in the
Middle East of his day by using an extreme example in order to signal an
important point. If he meant it literally, there’d have been a lot of flying
trees from that time forward.
Instead, his point was that the apostles’
need for faith wasn’t a matter of quantity, but of quality.
Any faith is faith, and faith that comes as
a gift from God is what saves us. It comes in the living relationship with the
one true living God for which we were created.
This reality stood in contrast to the teaching
of the Pharisees who were lurking in the crowd, looking for something they
could use to bring Jesus down. The Pharisees believed and taught that keeping
the religious laws is what saves people. They were professionals at it. They
believed that they were already being blessed by God because of their good
works. Their status and respect in the eyes of the people proved it, and they
would be the ones receiving even greater rewards from God because they believed
that they were better than other people.
Jesus has an answer for them, and for his
followers, in verses 7-10,
7“Who
among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending
sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? 8Would
you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve
me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? 9Do you
thank the slave for doing what was commanded? 10So you also,
when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless
slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’”
These words startle us because we find
slavery so repugnant. In Jesus’ time it was as normal as going to the grocery
store. Slavery was later abolished largely by Christians, but at the time of
Christ it wasn’t chattel slavery, as it has been in much of modern world
history, but it was seen as a second-chance for prisoners of war who weren’t
killed in battle, or for people who sold their labor to pay a debt. Slaves were
given positions of prestige and trust and could work their way out of slavery.
Jesus wasn’t condoning slavery as normal, he
was using it as an example of how very little we have to claim before God.
The last words of Martin Luther, the 16th
century Church reformer, are said to have been, “We are beggars. This is true.”
We come before God with nothing but the blood of Jesus to put us right with
God.
We don’t expect the restaurant owner to
thank us for paying our bill.
We don’t expect the government to thank us
for paying our taxes.
We don’t expect God to save us. But He does.
Paul writes in Romans 5:6-8,
6 For
while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed,
rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person
someone might actually dare to die. 8 But God proves his love
for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
The religious laws were given for our
benefit. The Pharisees had turned them into a burden. But, either way, God
didn’t give us the 10 Suggestions. God gave them as a blessing for us to lead
good lives.
We can only expect punishment either by God
or as a consequence of our own foolish choices when we break God’s laws. And
that was the end of the story of life for the Pharisees. Punishments and
rewards earned by keeping or by breaking God’s laws.
Paul explains God’s answer in the next
chapter, in Romans 6:23,
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is
eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
What is the good news of Jesus Christ?
Paul writes this to the Church at Ephesus in
Ephesians 2:8-9,
8 For it is by
grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is
the gift of God—9 not by works, so that no one can
boast.
What if what we do and don’t do is not
what gets us into or keeps us out of heaven, what is this faith that saves us?
Faith is not
optimism, it is not blind, and it is not a feeling. It is not something we work
ourselves into, or something we all have to figure out for ourselves. If it is
any of those things: optimism, blind, a feeling, an accomplishment, or
something just for you, it is your faith. And because it comes
from you, it is not up to the task of Life and sooner or
later it will fail, and probably sooner rather than later.
What is
faith? Paul writes, in the 11th chapter of his letter to the
Hebrews, what many call the faith chapter, in Hebrews 11:1
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen.”
Faith is
knowing things we don’t know, believing in things we cannot see.
This makes
us vulnerable in our Post-enlightenment, Modern, and Post-modern culture. We
are challenged to prove that what we believe about God is true with only material
arguments. Or, more commonly, we are just blown off with the words of Jeffery
“The Dude” Lebowski, in The Big Lebowski, “Well,
that's just, like, your opinion, man”. Or people inflate every
bad experience they have ever had or heard about, every judgmental church lady
or man, or every boring worship service they ever sat through into evidence
that the church is not for them and they just form their personal religion,
spiritual but not religious.
Faith that
is from you will most definitely fail.
And when
it does, where can you turn? How can a person return to faith?
First,
if your faith was from you, don’t bother trying. If faith was something you
manufactured for yourself and your own needs, it wasn’t real to begin with.
Second,
God never abandons us, but we can move away from God. There was a bumper
sticker stuck to the inside of the door to the emergency food pantry of the
church I served in Compton that said, “If you feel far from God, guess who
moved.” Turn your life around, that is, “repent” and allow God to draw you to
God.
Third,
remember that it’s not about you. How many of us were confirmed after some
happy hours with Luther’s Small Catechism? Remember Luther’s explanation to the
Third Article of The Apostles Creed? Of course you do!
“I believe
that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my
Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel,
enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and kept me in true faith. In the
same way he calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian
church on earth, and keeps it united with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.”
(If you
don’t know it, and you don’t own a copy of the pamphlet you can buy it online,
or go to Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store and download the free version
from Concordia Publishing.)
Fourth,
spend time in the Bible, the primary way that God speaks to us in the Holy
Spirit. The Holy Spirit gives us faith. How does this happen?
Faith
comes by hearing. In Paul’s letter to the Romans he writes, in Romans 10:17,
“So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard
comes through the word of Christ.”
The word
of Christ is Christ’s living reality.
Are you
missing a sense of the living reality of God?
Are you
feeling dry as we come out of the pandemic? Do you know who else felt that,
well before the pandemic? Mother Theresa.
Mother
Teresa was an Albanian nun who established an order of nuns who cared for the
poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India. She left instructions that when she
died, her journals were to be burned. They were preserved and published,
nevertheless.
The world
was shocked when her innermost thoughts came to light. Her journal was filled
with a spiritual emptiness, a longing for something from God.
Some read
that and said, “See. She was a fake!”
Others
read that and said, “What a saint, to be obedient and faithful while getting
nothing in return!”
Some
people say that there is no such thing as altruism, of selfless service to
others. They say that when we do good, we feel good and that that feeling is
our reward and the reason we do the good that we do. Mother Theresa got nothing
while spending her life doing what is universally recognized as service to the
poor. We sometimes feel the same in our lives of service in the life of faith.
Sometimes
we just put our heads down and keep chugging ahead, only later, maybe,
realizing that the Holy Spirit was there within us all along. We just didn’t
have a word for it.
Fifth,
we can be the means of the Holy Spirit when we exercise our credible witness.
Study after study for decades has found that 80-85% of Christians come to faith
through the influence of a friend or relative, someone who is seen has having
nothing to gain, whose words are credible to them.
We are the
first Bible some people will ever read. God doesn’t see us that way. But people
do.
Sixth,
faith comes from God in community, and it can be restored there,
too. We are made for a living, personal relationship with God. We
live in the Christian community in relationship with one another in an expression
of that relationship.
That is
the nature of the Christian faith. It is not just a gift to us as individuals.
It is a gift to the whole community. Sometimes one of us is weak and others are
strong, but we are only strong for one another. You have to be a part of the
community to know that.
Seventh,
be real, be transparent, live from the inside out, live from the transformed
life within you. You are a new creation in Jesus Christ. Live from that.
Faith that
we generate for ourselves will fail. Faith that comes from a living
relationship with the one true living God never fails because it comes from a
place that is holy, pure, and transcendent. A place that is ultimately true.
It comes from God. That’s how we know it is
real, even when we struggle, even when we don’t feel anything.
As Philip
Dick, the science fiction writer, once said, “Reality is that which, when you
stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Turn to
God, turn to the Ultimate Reality of the Holy Spirit, to the ongoing personal
presence of God for good in the world. Open your heart to receive the streams
of living water, the metaphor for the Holy Spirit used in both the Old and New
Testament of the Bible, to the presence of God to nourish you, inspire you,
push you sometimes, and to make of you a new Creation. God will make you into
something that is real, something that defines everything about you, something
that makes you a credible witness to others because your faith has not come
from you. It is real because it comes from God.
That is the meaning of faith. Faith in
prayer is idolatry; faith in God is life as it was meant to be lived. Faith in
faith is false belief; faith in God is the life for which we were created.
We are starting
to emerge now from the pandemic. Let God make your New Normal a life of faith.
Get out of God’s way today and receive the singular quality of faith in God to live
within you.
See life as it was meant to be seen, live it
as it was meant to be lived.
It’s not the quantity of our faith that
matters, it’s the quality of faith itself because faith is the gift from
God that makes us whole forever.
That is the meaning of faith.
