How to Have Faith (sermon manuscript)
December 29, 2019
The modern Christmas is built around stories–magical stories, mythical stories. A reindeer with a glowing red nose. A green furry microcardial humanoid in a cave. A greedy miser who is changed by encounters with three ghosts on Christmas Eve night. A talking snowman who outsmarts an evil magician. A couple of feuding brothers who make sure Michigan stays cold and Florida stays hot. And many more.
All great and wonderful stories, but none of them true. Except one. That’s the story of the birth of a baby in a manger in the town of Bethlehem, a baby who was not merely human, but also God in the flesh. The Word of God. The Son of God. God’s expression of himself to us in a way that we could understand, as a human being. He would grow up to show us the character of God, teach the wisdom of God, and ultimately die a horrible death on a cross to “save us from our sins” (Matthew 1:21), to restore our broken relationship with our Creator, and to rise from the dead so we, like him, can have eternal life, if we put our faith in him–if we put our faith in God. That’s what Jesus himself said: I tell you for certain that everyone who hears my message and has faith in the one who sent me [God] has eternal life and will never be condemned. They have already gone from death to life. (John 5:24, CEV) And as his follower Paul wrote in a letter to the church in Rome, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9, ESV)
That is not a mythical story. It’s a world-altering, life-changing reality. Not doing enough good deeds, not performing the right rituals, not being part of the right group, but belief/faith in God, and faith in the Son of God, Jesus, can change everything.
That’s what Jesus claimed. And that’s what his followers claimed as well. And if there’s any possibility that that’s true–that Jesus saves us and directs and guides our lives and infuses them with objective purpose and meaning and gives us eternal life–and that the way we attain that is by faith in him, then we owe it to ourselves and to those around us and to God to look into it.
What does it mean to “have faith,” to “believe”? Faith seems like such a simple word, but people think of it in radically different ways. Some would say that faith in Jesus is no different than a child’s faith in any of those Christmas stories. That it’s all just believing a story you’re told as a child, not asking for proof, not asking hard questions, until you grow up and realize that magic doesn’t exist. Faith, some say, is just believing without proof, even believing without evidence. Some say that faith is what you appeal to when you have no actual good reason to believe. Or others might say, it’s okay to have faith, but at best, faith is inferior to evidence-based knowledge. That you should never be as confident or assured of what you believe by faith as you are in your knowledge of what’s right in front of you. So if that’s what the Bible means when it talks about faith, then faith (some say) is not worth having.
Fortunately, that’s not what the Bible means when it talks about faith. And if, as the Bible says, our lives and our eternity depend on faith in Jesus, then we need to know two very important things. First, we need to know: What is faith? And how do you have faith?
So there’s a letter in the Bible that was written to a church of Hebrew Christians. And they were undergoing some intense trials as a result of their faith. Christians were not well-liked in the 1st century, and they were often mistreated by the authorities, and that was evidently what was happening to them. Some of them were being put in jail, some of them were having their property confiscated, being shunned and ostracized from their families and friends, and many of them were tempted to just do the easy thing and walk away from Christ. And so an anonymous writer wrote this letter to them that’s preserved in our Bibles as the Book of Hebrews, and in it he devotes an entire chapter to these important questions of what faith is and how you have faith and what difference it makes. And he starts like this:
Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (ESV)
So what does that mean? These two underlined words are the key, and they’re not easy to translate from the original Greek into English and capture the full meaning. So they need a bit of examination. So by this word “assurance,” the writer uses a word that literally means “something that stands under.” (In case anyone cares, the word is hypostasis.) It’s like what holds everything else up. Without it, everything else collapses. Without faith, there is nothing else; there is nothing to hope for. And then, he uses this word “conviction.” Sometimes, we use the word “convicted” to mean feeling really strongly about something, such as your personal moral convictions, but the writer means something more like the sort of “convicted” you would use in a courtroom. A decisive and confident verdict based on eyewitness testimony and other proofs and evidence strong enough to convince you that something is true, to move from feeling to knowing.
So, for starters, faith is what gives us hope, what provides the foundation, the basis, for our hope–and when the Bible speaks of hope, it doesn’t mean a wish, like you hope Santa gets you an iPad for Christmas, but it means a confident expectation of the future. And faith is also what convicts, or convinces us that the unseen is real. And so the result of faith is this confident knowledge–knowing with confidence. Not knowing with certainty, but with confidence.
And what exactly is it that we’re supposed to know with confidence? The writer gets at it in verse 6: And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe [which, in Greek, is just the verb form of “faith”] that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
So if you want a relationship with God, you need to know with confidence these two things: 1) that he exists; and 2) he rewards those who seek him. Not because God is imposing a list of demands on people, as if he’ll only accept you if you meet these requirements, but because if you don’t even believe God exists or that he has anything good in store for you, how are you going to trust him enough to let him take charge of your life?
But still, for some, that seems impossible. How can you know something with confidence that you can’t prove? How can you have that kind of faith?
Well, you do it all the time. Like when you did your Christmas shopping this year. Like most people, you probably did some of your shopping on a site like Amazon. And if so, you probably made your choices based on one of two things: You either bought a product you were familiar with, or you looked at the reviews. You relied on your personal experience or other people talking about their personal experience, and based on that, you had enough faith to get the product for someone else.
Or, if maybe you don’t trust online shopping very much, there are tons of other ways you exercise faith every day. For example, you have faith that your house won’t collapse on you tonight. You can’t prove it. But you know it with enough confidence to go to sleep in your house tonight, based on your personal experience in your house and the testimony of the last person who inspected it.
Now, it’s true that you can’t produce the same kind of proof for faith in God as you can for something like the boiling point of water. But you also can’t produce that kind of proof for many of the most basic facts of life that we all know, facts that must be true in order for us to believe anything. You can’t prove that the past is real, that the world wasn’t created last Thursday with the appearance of age and false memories implanted. You can’t prove that other minds exist, that everyone around you isn’t just an advanced computer program. You can’t prove that free will exists, that you actually make your own choices and it’s not just chemical and electrical reactions in your brain obeying the laws of physics that cannot be changed and that you have no control over. You can’t prove that it’s good to love your neighbor, or that it’s evil to murder your neighbor for fun, because good and evil are not things you can detect or measure physically. You can’t prove that you’re not a brain in a vat being stimulated by a mad scientist to think that everything around you is real. There is no scientific or observation-based proof that you or anyone else in the world can give for any of those things. No matter what experiment you designed or proof you produced, someone could always say, “That’s just what the mad scientist is stimulating your brain to believe.” And yet, without anything to prove it, you know that you’re perfectly rational in knowing with confidence that the external world is real. And to believe any of what your five senses tell you, to believe anything about reality at all–including scientific proofs–you have to know with confidence that those things are true, even though you can’t prove it.
And you don’t need to prove it, because you’ve lived it. If you’re married, you know that your memory of your wedding day is real, because you were there. So was your spouse, and so were plenty of other people. You’ve got a marriage license and photos and videos. You know it was real.
You’ve experienced that other stuff too. You’ve seen evil up close and personal. You’ve experienced the agony of making a hard choice. You’ve experienced the powerful good of love. You’ve communicated heart to heart with another person. Or you’ve heard other people tell about how they’ve experienced those very things. And you are perfectly justified, perfectly rational, to believe that those things are real.
So, in the same way, you are perfectly justified in believing that God is real without objective, scientific proof. Because it is on the same basis we put our faith in these things—which is personal experience and/or the testimony of others—that God asks us to put our faith in him. If you’ve personally experienced God in your life, or if you’ve heard the stories of reliable and trustworthy people about the ways God is involved in their life–such as the stories of the people who wrote the Bible itself–then unless there’s overriding evidence to suggest they’re untrue, you have plenty of reason to believe. You are just as rational and justified to have faith in God as you are to have faith in your own free will, in the reality of the past, and in the reality of the world around you.
But many people stop there. As though faith were simply believing in the correct set of truths that the Bible tells us. But it would be a mistake to stop here. Because in the rest of this chapter, the writer doesn’t go on to give us some philosophical treatise on the nature of faith. He tells a bunch of stories of faith in action.
By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God gave approval to his gifts. And by faith he still speaks, even though he is dead. (11:4)
By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in godly fear built an ark to save his family. (11:7)
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, without knowing where he was going. (11:8)
By faith Sarah [Abraham’s wife], even though she was barren and beyond the proper age, was enabled to conceive a child, because she considered Him faithful who had promised. (11:11)
And it goes on and on. The stories of Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses’ parents, Moses himself, the Israelites, the prostitute Rahab, so many stories that the writer eventually says, Time will not allow me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the raging fire, and escaped the edge of the sword; who gained strength from weakness, became mighty in battle, and put foreign armies to flight. (11:32-34)
Even if you have no idea who some of these people are or what they did, this much is clear: These are not descriptions about what people believed. They’re not stories of the discovery of philosophical truth. They are personal stories about people’s faith in God, their relationships with God, and what that relationship enabled them to do. They didn’t just intellectually believe God would reward them. They did some crazy stuff that just made no sense on the surface. Abraham went to a foreign country 1,000 miles away because God told him his descendants would inherit it, and that took 400 years. Gideon brought an army of 300 against an army of thousands. David, the shepherd boy, fought a giant. And so on. That’s not explained by mere intellectual belief. That takes trust. That takes some kind of experiential knowledge that God is faithful, strong enough to inspire an enduring personal trust.
Because that’s what faith is: It is personal. It is fundamentally personal. Faith is not just the correct set of true beliefs. It’s relational and experiential. And that’s far more life-changing than a set of facts.
So that brings us to our second question: How do you have faith? On the one hand, it’s so simple that a three-year-old can exercise it. But it’s so complex that even the wisest person in the world can’t master it. But based on how the Bible describes it, it seems that there are three elements of faith. (And we’ve actually talked about these in youth group over the last semester.) They’re in no particular order, and they’re all necessary to have a real, living, effective faith. And the first one is this:
1…Know God
You need to know God. One of the reasons Jesus came is so you could have a relationship with God. That means he communicates with you, and you with him, he is closely involved in your life, he takes the primary place in your life, and you get to experience the different ways he works in your life and the lives of those around you. It’s a friendship, a father-child bond.
So if someone wants to have a relationship with you, they have to know you, right? That means knowing you personally, and that’s unavoidably going to involve knowing some things about you.
We need to know God in the same way. We need to know who God personally, and that first means knowing some things about God. This is especially important because there are so many different ideas out there about who God is. Many people today say it doesn’t really matter what you believe about God as long as you try to be a good person and believe in some higher power. But that’s not true.
Take my wife. Her name is Michele (with one L), she has brown hair, and has celiac disease. So if I say I know my wife, but then I truly believe her name is Sally (with two Ls), she has red hair, and she eats gluten, do I really know my wife? No, of course not. Because even the most basic things I believe about her are not true. If I told you that, you’d probably tell me, “I think you’re thinking of someone else.” If I really want to know Michele, then I need to know who she is. I need to know at least the basics about who she is, and if I want any kind of close relationship with her, I need to know a lot more than that.
It’s the same with God. If we are going to put our faith in the God who can save us, we need to know who that is. And God has communicated to us what we need to know about him through the Bible. The Bible tells us what we need to know about God in order to know him. It tells us that God is the Creator. It tells us that God became a human being, Jesus — that Jesus is God in the flesh. It tells us Jesus died and rose from the dead. If we want to know God for who he is, those are some things we need to know.
He is not the god of Islam, which says that God has no son and Jesus is just a prophet and that God spoke through the Qu’ran instead of the Bible. He is not the god of Mormonism, which says that God is a former humanoid being who worked to earn his godhood, and Jesus is another god who did the same thing, and we can all become gods too. He is not a god of Hinduism, which says that Jesus is just one of many gods. You cannot know God through any of these other faiths, because the most basic things they believe about God aren’t true. And none of those gods can save us.
Jesus offers to save us from our sins. He offers to give us eternal life. He offers to connect with us, to let us know him. If we want any of that, then we need to know Jesus. None of these other gods can do that for us. It matters who you put your faith in, and Jesus is the only one worth putting our faith in. If you put your faith in a god who cannot save you, who cannot meet your needs, and reject the God who can save you and meet your needs, then you’ll be lost.
And like any relationship—and those who are married may know this the best—once you stop getting to know one another, the relationship gets weaker. So we need to be constantly engaging in this act of getting to know God better. We can’t ever think we know our Bible well enough. We can’t ever think we’ve heard the pastor preach enough sermons. We can’t ever think we’ve learned too many -ologies and -isms and other big words people have invented to try to explain who God is. We can’t ever think we’ve spent too much time praying or listening to too much worship music or connecting with God in any other way. And we should try different ways of connecting with God. Maybe God will communicate with us, impress something on our heart, through a song, through a passage of the Bible, through listening closely to a sermon, even if we’ve heard one like it a hundred times before. The better we know who God is, the more that knowledge will change us.
That brings us to the second element of faith:
2…Trust God
This is definitely harder than the first. This goes from head-level to heart-level. It’s not always hard to get to know someone, but it’s certainly harder to trust them.
When it comes to God, it’s one thing to know and believe what the Bible says about God. And that is part of faith. But if you don’t trust him, your belief isn’t going to help you. So Paul writes to the church at Ephesus, “You are God’s workmanship,” God’s work of art, God’s masterpiece, “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us as our way of life.” Are you willing to trust that’s true? Even when you feel you’re ugly, even when you feel worthless, even when you feel like you’re aimless and what you do doesn’t matter?
When the Bible tells us that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are! Are you willing to trust that’s true? Are you willing to trust that your identity, who you are, is not wrapped up in your socioeconomic class, or gender, or race, or sexual attractions, or who you’re in a relationship with, how much money your make, what kinds of grades you get, or how many friends you have, but as God’s beloved child?
Or as Paul writes to the Romans, “And we know that God works all things together for the good of those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose.” Are you willing to trust that when God’s word says that, he means it? That even when terrible things happen, even when life feels hopeless, even when nothing seems to be going right, God will keep that promise — to bring something good out of it?
If you really trust God when he says those things, it will radically change the way you think about yourself. It will radically change the way you look at the future, the way you respond to bad things happening. You can believe true things about God, and that’ll give you knowledge. But when you trust what God says, that’ll change your life.
So how do we do this? First, listen. Hear what God has to say to you. He communicates to us through this collection of books we learn from every Sunday. Learn this. Take it to heart. Memorize it. Embed it deep inside of you. Learn to think of yourself and your situations the way God does. Because when you commit these things deeply to your heart, then you will see when God demonstrates them to you. When you’re constantly looking for how God will bring good out of bad, you’ll see it when he does it. And you can be reminded of that next time. When God’s declaration that you’re made in his image is always in the back of your mind, then it will always be there to combat your feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, your frustrations over the stuff you just can’t seem to fix about yourself.
Also, remember the times God was there for you. When God answers a prayer of yours, write it down or record it in some way. Tell people about it. Because when you know God has been there for you in the past, then you can be more confident that he will be again. That’s the personal-experience aspect of faith. And listen to other people’s stories about what God has done in their lives. Then you can know that if God worked in their life, he can work in yours too. And then, when God commands from us a difficult act of obedience, or allows us to go through something we don’t understand, we can trust him and let him lead us in the life he designed us for.
And finally, that leads us into…
3…Act
So action isn’t faith itself. But it’s the inevitable result of real faith.
Real faith will always lead to action. James, Jesus’s brother, says, “So also faith by itself, if it is not complemented by action, is dead.” And it’s true. In youth group, we use the analogy of a pilot. If you’re getting on a plane, and you say you have faith in the pilot, you know that he’s got his license, he’s a skilled flyer, all that, but you won’t get on the plane, then you probably don’t really have faith in the pilot, do you? And if you do, and the real cause is something else, then your faith in the pilot is rather useless.
Faith without action is useless. You can believe in God, you can trust God, but if you don’t ever try to hear from him or communicate with him, or if you never tell anyone about this God who saved you, that’s not much of a faith at all. In fact, it would call into question how much you really knew God or trusted him in the first place.
The way you can tell your faith is real and genuine and powerful is when you do something about it. What you do doesn’t get you a relationship with God or earn you a spot in heaven, but what you do shows that you already have a relationship with God and eternal life.
So it’s each of our responsibilities to find out what Jesus wants us to do with our lives. Ephesians 2:10, as mentioned a moment ago, says he created us for good works. Well, what are the works he’s called you to? What opportunities is God putting before you to do good works, to do the kinds of things Jesus did? What opportunities is God giving you to be friends to those without friends, to give to people in need, to encourage people who are discouraged, to love people who are unloved? What gifts has God given you, what talents, what resources, to help you do that in special and unique ways?
This is probably the hardest part of faith for most people, and certainly for me, is to actually get up and do something about it. It’s much easier for me to get up here and talk about God than it is for me to go out and actually love someone like Jesus did. And in general, God didn’t intend for us to do that alone. That’s why he tells us: Let us not neglect meeting together, as some have made a habit. But let us encourage one another daily, and all the more as you see the Day approaching. That’s not a suggestion. It’s a command.
So the way to strengthen this element of faith is to do it. Live as God commands. God wants to change your life. So live a changed life.
But most importantly, as we try to strengthen our faith, we need to remember this:
It’s not about our faith, but the One our faith is in
Ultimately, it does not depend on us. It’s not about our faith and how strong it is. We absolutely need to strengthen our faith. But your faith is not ultimately what saves you. If you step out onto a frozen pond, you can have all the faith in the world that that ice is going to hold you up, but if that ice is in fact only an inch thick, then you’ll fall right through. But if that ice is a foot thick, then no matter how scared you are, no matter how much you doubt, no matter how much you hesitate, no matter how weak your faith is, the ice will hold you up. It’s not your faith that saves you; it’s the ice, because you have faith to step out on it. And in the same way, it’s not your faith and how strong it is that saves you; it’s God who saves you, because you have faith to give your life to him.
Faith sometimes fails. We doubt, we hesitate, we mistrust, we are afraid. But no matter how weak your faith in God is, no matter how much you doubt or how hesitant you are, if your faith is in the unfailing God of creation, in Jesus who died to save you, then he will save you. And perhaps our plea could be like the one a man made to Jesus: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”
