Introduction
By Faith
You’ve probably heard it a hundred times. It’s one of the oldest preacher stories around. But it still provides a powerful illustration of the personal nature of faith. One day long ago, a world-renowned tightrope walker came to Niagara Falls and stretched his rope across the thunderous currents from the United States to Canada. Right before the eyes of the breathless crowds, he walked, ran, even tiptoed across the chasm. He did the same blindfold. Then, still blindfolded, he pushed a wheelbarrow across the falls.
The crowd went wild when the aerialist shouted, “Who believes I can push a man in this wheelbarrow across these falls?”
One rather enthusiastic gentleman in the front of the crowd waved his hand in the air, shouting, “I do! I believe!”
“Then,” said the tightrope walker, “climb on in!” Needless to say, the once eager spectator dropped his hand and slinked back into the crowd. His intellectual assent didn’t quite translate into personal faith.
Faith. What is faith really? Ask five different people and you’ll probably get five different answers. Critics claim that faith is simply believing in something you know in your heart isn’t true. Skeptics suggest that faith means believing in something despite the lack of any real evidence. The dictionary defines faith as “belief and trust in and loyalty to God; belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion; or firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” Quite honestly, none of these provide an absolutely adequate answer as to what faith really is.
Still, the Bible says, “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6 NIV). So, for that reason—because faith is so very essential to a personal relationship with God—it’s vital for us to have a good handle on the full meaning of biblical faith. So, let me invite you to explore this all-important concept with me.
1. First, the Bible tells us that faith means believing in God. The writer of Hebrews says, “Anyone who wants to come to God must believe that there is a God and that he rewards those who sincerely look for him” (vs. 6 TLB). Let me assure you, though—faith in the existence of God is not blind faith! It’s not belief in something for which there is no proof. All throughout the world, and even the universe, we see the fingerprints of God—the evidence of his omniscient mind at work. Take for instance the planet on which we live.
There is no other planet in the universe that is anything like the planet earth. Our planet is privileged; it’s designed specifically to support human life. For example, the earth revolves around the sun at a distance of 93 million miles. If it were as close as Venus or Mercury, then it would be several hundred degrees too hot to sustain life. Mars, our closest neighbor, has an atmosphere that is too thin, with no liquid water, and an average temperature of 40 degrees below zero. The other five planets are hundreds of degrees below zero. If the earth deviated from its course around the sun by even a fraction of an inch the development of life on earth would progress from simply improbable to statistically impossible.
The rest of the universe is no less a witness to God’s existence. Take gravity for instance. Gravity is just one of many attractive forces in the cosmos and, in a universe governed purely by random chance, it would be reasonable to assume that the pull of gravity could have been more or less powerful than it actually is. “Imagine a ruler, or one of those old-fashioned linear radio dials, that goes all the way across the universe,” says physicist and author Robin Collins. “The entire dial represents the range of force strengths in nature, with gravity being the weakest force and the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutron together...being the strongest, a whopping ten thousand billion billion billion billion times stronger than gravity.” To move that dial just one inch would increase the pull of gravity a billion fold—causing complete solar systems and galaxies to collapse in on themselves. To increase the force of gravity just a thousand fold would cause life on any planet to be completely impossible. Yet, gravity, like many other physical laws governing our universe, is precisely set so as to produce life—to make life possible. That kind of “fine-tuning” is not accidental. A universe so specifically suited for life, implies a heavenly hand at work! Such intelligent design necessitates an intelligent Designer.
Sir Isaac Newton was a very famous mathematician and scientist who strongly believed in God. The story is told that he had an atheist friend who did not believe in God, so Sir Isaac devised a plan to try to convince his friend that God did exist and had created the Universe. One day, he went to a carpentry shop and asked the owner to make a model of our solar system. This model was to be made to scale, intricately painted, and designed to resemble, as closely as possible, the actual solar system.
After several weeks, Isaac picked up the model, paid for it, and placed it in the center of a table in his house. Sometime later, his atheist friend came over for a visit. When the friend arrived at Dr. Newton’s house, the model of the solar system caught his eye, and he asked Sir Isaac if he could inspect the model more closely. As the atheist inspected that model, he was in awe of the fine craftsmanship and beauty of the pieces. After a while, the atheistic friend asked Isaac who had crafted this wonderful model. Sir Isaac promptly replied that no one had made the model; it just appeared on his table by accident. Confused, the friend repeated the question, and yet Newton stubbornly clung to his answer that the model had just appeared out of thin air. Finally, the friend became upset, and Isaac explained the purpose of his answer. If he could not convince his friend that this crude replica of the solar system had just happened by accident, how could the friend believe that the real solar system, with all it’s complexity and design, could have appeared just by time and chance.
At a news conference following his 1998 shuttle flight, astronaut John Glenn said, “To look up out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible. It just strengthens my faith.”
You see, as John Glenn realized, God’s fingerprints are everywhere—even within your body. When it comes right down to it, the most incredible creation in the universe is you—with your fantastic senses and strengths, your ingenious nervous system, and mental capabilities so great that you may never use them to the fullest. Your body is a structural masterpiece more amazing than anything in science fiction. The very idea that even one single cell from your body could form by random chance apart from divine influence would be equivalent to a tornado ripping though an airplane junk yard and manufacturing a Boeing 747—it’s just ridiculous.
No, the Hebrew writer was right when he said, “By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command” (vs. 3 NLT). And with the confirmation of cosmology, physics, and microbiology available to us today, God has transformed what might have been a giant leap of faith into a very small step.
2. Furthermore, faith means not only believing in God, but believing God. Again, the Bible says, “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see” (vs. 1 NLT). In other words, faith means trusting God—trusting that he means what he says, that he keeps his promises, and that he is in control of every situation. This aspect of faith is a bit more difficult because we can’t see God—we can’t touch him or hear his voice in an audible way. But if you stop and think about it, we actually have faith in a lot of things that we can’t see or even understand.
Just think about the amount of faith it takes to drive a car built by Ford or GM—or any other car company for that matter. When you’re driving down the road at fifty-five miles an hour and you come to a busy intersection, you have faith that pressing down on the brake pedal will actually bring your two-thousand-pound vehicle to a stop. When you get in your car in the morning, you have faith that when you turn the key the engine will start. Of course, you’ve learned by experience that under normal circumstances (at least, if you have a reliable car) you can trust your car to start and stop when you want it to. But our faith in God is not altogether different. By experience we learn that our faith in God is well placed.
We live in a world of broken promises. We make commitments and don’t follow through. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. Young couples experience broken hearts and broken engagements. We make plans and promises that we never even intended to keep. Yet, the Bible records over seven thousand promises from God to his people; he has kept every single one of them. God will never call us up at the last minute to cancel. He’ll never change his mind or find someone else. God is faithful and deserving of our trust.
One Sunday afternoon, Mark Twain and his friend William Howells stepped out of church just as a heavy downpour began. Not wanting to get rained on, they waited under the cover of the church’s porch. Howells remarked, “I wonder if it will stop?” And Mark Twain retorted, “Well, it always has before!” And he was right. Why? Because, long ago God made a promise and every time we see a rainbow in the sky it reminds us that God will always keep his promises.
It’s easy, I think, once the sky has cleared and we see those prismatic colors appear in the blue above our heads to know that God is here and that he is in control. The hard part is trusting in God in midst of life’s thunderstorms—when you can’t see clear skies ahead.
Have you heard about the Chinese bamboo tree? The Chinese plant the seed; they water and fertilize it, but the first year nothing happens. The second year they water and fertilize it, and still nothing happens. The third and fourth years they water and fertilize it, and nothing happens. Then the fifth year they water and fertilize it, and sometime during the course of the fifth year, in a period of approximately six weeks, the Chinese bamboo trees grow roughly ninety feet tall.
The question is—did it grow ninety feet in six weeks or did it grow ninety feet in five years? I think the answer is that it grew ninety feet in five years, because had they not applied the water and fertilizer each year there would have been no growth at all. We all have these “Chinese bamboo tree” experiences. There are times in our lives when God’s plan is a mystery to us—when you’re in the valley and you can’t see what’s on the other side of the mountain. But it’s at those times that we’ve got to trust in God—we’ve got to have faith. The point is—we may not know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future.
3. Finally, faith means acting on that which we believe. The hand-flailing fellow in the front of the crowd may have intellectually accepted that the tightrope-walker could push a man in a wheelbarrow across Niagara Falls, but he didn’t believe it enough to act on it. Genuine faith requires us to take action. While the Bible is clear that we are saved by faith and not by works, it is equally clear that real faith works! Listen to what James, the brother of Jesus, wrote about faith:
My brothers and sisters, if people say they have faith, but do nothing, their faith is worth nothing. Can faith like that save them? A brother or sister in Christ might need clothes or food. If you say to that person, “God be with you! I hope you stay warm and get plenty to eat,” but you do not give what that person needs, your words are worth nothing. In the same way, faith that is alone—that does nothing—is dead. (James 2:14-17 NCV).
There is a vast difference, in other words, between a said faith and a saving faith. Simply thinking or speaking words of faith isn’t enough. Genuine faith must always manifest itself through action. Remember the woman who was suffering from chronic bleeding? The Bible says that she believed that if she could only touch the hem of Jesus’ clothes, then she would be healed—and she was right. The moment she touched him, she was instantly healed from her condition. Jesus then told her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you” (Mark 5:34 NIV). The word translated healed here is the same Greek word often translated saved. You see, it was her faith that saved her, but it took an act of faith—actually touching the hem of Jesus’ coat—to ignite God’s healing power within her.
We see the same thing in the Old Testament. Think back to the story of Naaman. Naaman was the commander of the armies of Aram and was a mighty warrior, but he suffered from leprosy. So, Naaman sought out the prophet Elisha who told him, “Go and wash yourself seven times in the Jordan River. Then your skin will be restored, and you will be healed of your leprosy” (2 Kings 5:10 NLT). At first, Naaman was disappointed. He expected Elisha to wave his hand over the leprosy and call on the name of God, or something more elaborate. But, after some prompting from his servant, Naaman determined to trust and obey. He did just as Elisha instructed, plunging beneath the rust colored river that was the life-blood of Jerusalem. Once. Twice. Three times. No change. Four times. Five times. Six. Still, no change. Not until the seventh time did any change take place. But the moment Naaman rose up from the water the seventh time, with a splash the disease was gone—not a trace of it left. So, were there some sort of magical properties in the water? Of course, not. There was nothing special about the Jordan River. Rather, Naaman was cured because he trusted in the words of God’s prophet. But it wasn’t until his faith expressed itself through action that he was rewarded by God.
You see, the only thing that can defeat the faith God has given you…is you. Until you engage your faith, your faith is useless. Until you exercise your faith, your faith is dead. Until you actualize your faith, your faith is just potential. Again it isn’t that we are saved by works, but that we are saved for works! The Bible says that “by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God,” but you have been “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:8-10 NIV). In other words, faith works!
Because faith plays such a vital role in our relationships with God, it’s important that we each exercise and engage our faith to develop a deeper, stronger, more active faith in the God we love. Warren Wiersbe has aptly said, “The best way to grow in faith is to walk with the faithful.” So, for the next several weeks, we will explore—as the does the author of Hebrews—the life and works of some of the most inspiring men and women of faith. And perhaps, through their influence and example, we can each find the faith we need to climb into the wheelbarrow.
Invitation:
When a prison guard from Philippi asked the apostle Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” Paul replied, “Believe (have faith) in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, you and your whole family.” And that prison guard put his faith into action by being baptized that very night. The answer to that question hasn’t changed. If you want to put your faith in Jesus Christ today, let us help...
