Reflections on Faith

Faith.
What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word?
-Heb. 11?
-A synonym for religion?

Have you ever thought to associate the word “faith” with “waiting” and “hope”? It’s a connection I’ve only been recently making in my own mind. I want to have us listen to some Scripture passages and unpack those a bit and see if we can’t wrap our minds around this concept anew this morning.

Scripture:
-Heb. 1:1 “Faith” and “Hope”
-Heb. 11:13; 39-40; 12:1-4
-Hab. 1:12-2:1
-James 2:14-17

Hebrews 11 is the hallmark of faith. It unravels the concept for us, it is unrivaled by any other passage of Scripture. From the first verse, we see a connection between faith and hope. “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain for what we do not see.” So let’s first approach this idea of hope, since it seems according to this verse, that you can’t have faith without having hope. Hope at its core is waiting for something that you do not yet possess. It is a desire not yet fulfilled. “I hope you feel better.” “I hope I get married some day.” “I hope I’ve passed this exam.” Once you have that desire fulfilled, hope is no longer needed. This is not to say that there is not more to hope than a good dose of unfulfillment juxtaposed with one’s desires, but it is an important element.

Isn’t that interesting in light of faith? Faith is what sustains hope – “being sure of what we hope for”.

As the author of Hebrews goes on, the majority of the chapter is devoted to real-life examples of faith. Verse 4 gives the impression that faith is present in an act of obedience. “By faith, Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did.” Later on, in verse 7, Noah obeys God’s revelation, despite disparaging circumstances, and built an ark, believing that what God told him would come true. Obedience – an action taken as a response to God’s revelation. Seems to be consistent with James 2:14-17, doesn’t it?

Where do all these saints end up with their acts of faith? Listen to verse 13: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised.” Abraham never saw his descendants more numerous than the grains of sand. Moses never even got to live in the Promised Land!

The Hebrew concept for faith includes an idea of commitment. Faithfulness is consistency, steadfastness. In order to be seen as steadfast, or consistent, it must be something proved over the passing of time. Faith, in essence, is actively living out obedience to God’s revelation over a passing of time. That is why suffering produces faith. “In this, you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith…may be proved genuine…” (1 Peter 1:6-7).

I don’t know what suffering you are having to endure right now. For me, my greatest cause of suffering at this present time is waiting. My deepest desires are remaining unfulfilled: a lifetime companion, freedom from sin, observing freedom from sin in the lives of those I care about, longing for rest from the mundane, a yearning to be known and to know…the list goes on. Where do I end up with these desires? Hoping for heaven, where all things will be made right and as they should be. But heaven is so far away. Christ’s return – it seems so distant, so unreal. Why can’t God just sweep us up to heaven right now, if it’s where I long to be? Well, if He did, there’d be no need for faith. I must hold fast to the truth that even though everything around me circumstantially doesn’t testify to God’s goodness, that He is still with me and working out His very good, assuredly good, plan for my life here on earth while I wait for heaven.

“Faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.” Heb. 11:1 Faith is waiting, and faith is being obedient when doing what God wants doesn’t look like the right thing.

But there is more to faith than simply hoping. “Faith is being sure of what we hope for.” The key to true, lasting faith, is that we’re hoping for the right things. What is the content of our hope? What is it that we’re waiting for?

For me personally, my current suffering is that my deepest desires are ones that remain unfulfilled. Thus I find myself looking to the hope of heaven – of the day when my desires will be what they're supposed to be, when God will generously satisify those desires. When evil, suffering, pain, unfulfilled desire, sorrow, will be gone, and joy will be ours for all of eternity. I can’t answer for you what you are waiting for, hoping for, right now in your life. But I can offer this final reflection:

Suffering causes us to question God’s goodness. We ascent intellectually, mentally, to the revealed truth that God is unquestionably good, but it is a lot harder to understand and believe that truth when you are experiencing life’s difficulties. God’s answer to Job’s grief wasn’t a revelation of His reasonings for putting Job through unbearable suffering. Instead, God takes him on a tour of creation: “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb…have you entered the storehouses of snow or seen the storehouse of the hail…who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain and a path for the thunderstorm…can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons…do you know when the mountain goats give birth…who let the wild donkey go free…”? God took Job's gaze from his circumstances and back to a physical, tangible manifestation of God’s character, as revealed in His creation. Have you ever gone to the beach, or the mountains, and just got a sense of how good our God is – how there’s no practical reason why when He created the sea, it had to be so beautiful or diverse? He just did. Because He is good. This divine response to Job’s sufferings implies that at the very heart of Job’s sufferings was an attempt to understand how God was still good in the midst of all that had happened to him. It also suggests that sometimes there will be times in our life that we won’t know the reason behind our suffering and we have to trust in God’s goodness regardless.

For whatever it is that you are hoping for, and waiting on God for, have faith! Do not doubt that God will bring it to pass, in time. But more than an assurance that He’ll fulfill all your desires is the need to be faithful even if He doesn’t. Because if He doesn’t fulfill those desires in your lifetime, then you can rest assured that if you remain faithful and obedient to Him regardless, holding out that He doesn’t ever break His promises, you’ll join the rest of the “surrounding clouds of witnesses” in Hebrew’s hallmark of faith as those “who never received what was promised” and you'll have a entire crowd cheering you on along the way!

What are the implications of this reflection of faith? Tenfold. Here’s just a few:

1) Obedience to God’s commandments, even when obedience looks ridiculuous in light of the circumstances you are in – such as loving someone who is unloveable, simply because God desires us to love one another.
2) Staying in a difficult circumstance, despite its difficulties, because you know its where God wants you to be.
3) Encouraging others with God’s Word, His promises, testimonies of Him, so that we do “not lose heart” in this long life of faith we’re required to live.
4) Praising God in the midst of a difficult circumstance is a great example of faith: it is a heart choosing to continue to believe in God’s goodness, and that which makes Him praiseworthy, despite circumstances that would suggest otherwise (Hab. 3:17-19).
5) Spending a lifetime with unfulfilled desires, like being single, being childless, etc.