Warning! I’m Under Construction - How God Builds Faith - September 7, 2014
Today we’re on the 2nd in a series that’s called: “Warning! I’m Under Construction.
Last week we looked at how God builds, how He constructs our character so that we become more and more like Jesus, more and more free, more and more loving, more and more committed to God’s Kingdom purposes and more and more faithful.
If you missed that one, you can check it out on our podcast page on our web site.
Today we’re looking at the question: “How does God build faith? How does God construct our faith?” Let’s begin.
One day, Jesus is asked a question by a person who has dedicated his life to learning, a Pharisee, a Teacher of the Law. This fellow had overheard Jesus in a debate with Sadducees.
He was impressed with Jesus, with His speaking skills, with his parables or stories, with His ability to respond to tricky questions that were designed to trip Him up.
He was impressed with Jesus’ depth of
knowledge of the Scriptures and His commitment to searching the Scriptures for the ultimate answers to life.
And so this fellow, this Teacher of the Law, asked Jesus: ‘Of all the commandments, of everything we have ever heard from God about what it means to really live, about what it means to have a full, rich life, a life that pleases and honours God - what is the most important thing?’ That’s my paraphrase of his question.
The Teacher is looking for one commandment to wrap everything together, one big idea to weave everything together. and Jesus gives him 2.
Two commandments that together are the most critical piece, that highest truth.
Jesus said what matters the most is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind. St. Mark in his gospel adds “and all your strength”, which expresses Jesus complete thought on the matter.
AND he said that the second command is like the first: “Love your neighbour as you love yourself”
We’re talking today about how God builds faith in us.
And I want to suggest that we can answer this question in good measure by considering that question through the lens of this passage, called the Great Commandment.
Jesus highlights 4 things: the heart, the soul, the mind and then our strength. I want to look at the first 3 and then the 4th.
For the sake of understanding how it is that God builds faith in us, let’s look at the first 3 in reverse. I want to thank Pastor Timothy Keller for some of the following ideas and some direct quotes as well.
Jesus says to love the Lord our God with our mind. Now it’s true in some circles, that are quite hostile to faith and particularly to Christian faith, that the assumption is made that people who become Christians, people who follow classical, orthodox Christian beliefs, do that because they just want to believe.
They would rather not ask a lot of questions. They don’t want to think.
It’s believed in some circles that thinking is almost opposite to faith, that critical contemplation is the polar opposite to believing. Faith, in the popular mindset is put over against thinking.
Like most assumptions, it is quite a mistaken one. “I want to say that faith consists of, requires and stimulates the profoundest thinking, reasoning and rationality. You can’t be a Christian without using your brain to the uttermost.
“The reason there’s not much faith today is because there’s not much thinking today. Norman Cousins, an American political journalist and professor, puts it this way.
“He says: “Our age is not the age of the meditative man. It’s a sprinting, shoving age.
“Daily new antidotes for contemplation spring into being a leap out from store counters”, and nowadays spring at us from our Facebook feed and Yahoo news feed, I would add.
“Immanual Kant, a great philosopher, said that there are 3 questions all thinking people have to wrestle through and come up with a working answer for if you're going to live a thoughtful life, an examined life.
“How can I know what’s real? What ought I to do that’s right? What can I hope for, what can I live for?
“Our culture says that those questions are for the philosophers.
The important things are your standard of living, your career, your appearance, your psychological needs. And therefore religion, philosophy, all that stuff - ‘how do I know?, how do I decide right and wrong? “What is meaning?’
We’re taught to say “that’s not important.” That is not doubt on the basis of thinking. That is doubt based on an absence of thinking. A refusal to think.
If we look in Matthew chapter 6, where Jesus is teaching and comforting his disciples and likely a crowd that had gathered. To this nervous, oppressed, worried group of people who are wondering about life and about God, Jesus says:
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?”
Keller continues: “Jesus is saying If there’s a God look at how He takes care of the grass, the lillies of the field, look how he takes care of the bird. Now if you are more valuable than they, why in the world would God take more care of the lilly than you?
What is Jesus saying. He says: “Just believe!!!”. No. What does He say: If you want to have faith, think. Consider. Deduce”. To “consider” means in the original Koine Greek: “to learn thoroughly, examine carefully, consider well”
So a key way that God builds our faith is by calling us to use our minds, to love Him with our minds, with our reason, with our rationality. “Love the Lord your God with all your mind”.
If you have come to a genuine faith in God and in Jesus Christ His Son, you have done so because you have considered well the love of God, the testimony of Jesus, the beauty and reliability of the Bible, as the best way to live, and as the source of understand that has the most explanatory power. What do I mean?
When scientists are looking for the best way to understand something, anything, the way they decide what theory really is right and true, they look for the theory with the greatest explanatory power.
The way you understand something is that you start with a premise, a theory. You say: “Let me try that theory”, and then you look at the phenomenon and then you try another one on, and then the theory with the greatest explanatory power, is the one you say “this is the only one that explains what I see.
This is the only one that accounts for it. Materialism, chance, random or otherwise doesn’t account for all we see and experience.
I don’t have time to go further into this but it’s important to say that once we’re convinced in our minds that God and the Christian faith in particular has superior explanatory power over these theories, this understanding, this conviction isn’t something that stays stuck in our heads, if we want to move forward in our relationship with God.
There is a heart experience of God, and indeed Jesus calls us to love God with all of our hearts.
When our minds are satisfied that God is the best explanation for the existence of the universe, for its complexity, interwovenness and beauty, we start to move closer to God.
But there is a heart-love for God that is part of how God builds our faith. We actually, in a sense, and this may be the best way to explain something quite profound...in a real sense we come to love God so deeply, some describe it as being ‘in love’ with God.
Others are less comfortable with that notion, but the point is that, since we’re not ONLY brains, we’re not only intellectual intelligence, but because we have an inner life, because we have emotions, because as C.S. Lewis said there is a God-shaped vacuum inside each of us, we have the capacity to love God, to give God our love.
How does God use our human capacity to love, how does He use our hearts in the formation of our faith? I think that one way that God does this is through the practice of gratitude. When we pause to reflect on the good gifts in our lives, when we consider everything from things that are most basic, like the fact that we all woke up alive this morning.
Anyone here that didn't wake up alive this morning? You have something to be grateful for! The Scriptures call us to gratitude for the simple things, and also for the much bigger things. Hebrews 12:28 says: “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe”.
And the more our minds take in the extraordinary lengths to which God in Jesus Christ went both to prove His love for us, and to rescue us, to save us from our selves, from our sin, and to save us for eternity...the more we do that the more we grasp that we are the recipients of a GREAT love.
Here we appreciate the mind and the heart working together in the building of our faith, the formation of our trust in God.
It is difficult to reject love. It is fundamentally against our nature to put up walls against those who have our best interests at heart, against a person who demonstrates by their actions that they are truly for us and not against us.
An important window into who God is and into what His view of us us, what His view of you is, is found in a passage of Scripture that is familiar to many of us here today.
It was originally spoken to a community of people thousands of years ago, but it is a principal of who God is. It's found in the book of the prophet Jeremiah.
"For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 29:11-143 ESV)
With those kind of promises for the future, and, looking back in history, with such a track record of loving faithfulness as was demonstrated when Jesus died to reconcile us to God, the heart is lifted.
The heart is prompted toward gratitude, toward worship even, ideally. God builds our faith through the way He demonstrates His faithfulness, and that, despite all of our faults, He wants us near.
Despite the fact that even when we love God with all our hearts, we can be prone to wander away from Him, despite that God stands always as the father in the story of the Prodigal Son.
He stands with arms open wide. More than than, as the father in the story does, He runs to us when we show signs of inching toward Him. He swiftly approaches us even as we hedge toward Him.
Another way that God builds our faith is directly in and through our soul. The Hebrew word for soul (nephesh), refers to the entire life of a person—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life. Perhaps, the best way to understand it is that your soul is both who and what you are.
If someone were to ask you who you are, you might give them your name. But that’s not very descriptive.
If I wanted to be more specific, I might say, “I’m a father, a husband, a pastor, a musician. Most importantly, I’m a follower of Jesus.” Loving God with all your soul means allowing God to define who and what you are.
The word soul also means something that differs from the body and is not dissolved by death. It is our whole eternal selves. The love we give God with our soul is a love that happens profoundly in the right now, the immediate present.
It’s a love that happens in the future of your life, and it’s one that will be gloriously intact and vibrant a million years from now. The soul is where what is eternal in us touches the eternal God. Our soul’s yearning for God is perhaps what creates that initial openness to questions of life, questions of faith.
Now the last way that God works to build our faith is described as Jesus speaks of loving God with all our strength. Now strength here means your ability, your might and force.
This way in which God constructs our faith rounds out the totality of the human ability to grow in faith, to be nurtured and brought along in our faith.
Here we see how faith, truly, is multidimensional: heart, soul, mind AND strength.
With our strength we demonstrate our faith. Here we build upon contemplating God existence as the best explanation for everything we know of life. Here we build upon our hearts response to being the object of God’s great love and compassion. Here we build upon our soul’s yearning to connect and be in relationship with the One Who made us.
Each of those is a critical aspect of the way God builds us. But loving God with all our strength, through our actions, is the way the reality of our faith, our trust in God becomes, I want to suggest, MOST real to us.
Your strength in this context represents what you do with you day, what you do with the time you’ve been granted on this planet. James, the brother of Jesus, wrote this in his letter to the early church in Jerusalem:
“What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food,16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? 17 So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead”.
That’s why Jesus doesn’t stop at loving God with our hearts, our souls and our minds. If our faith, as it grows, does not find expression through our hands, the work of our hands...our faith is, as James says, dead. There is no life to it if it stays just a private matter between us and God.
Hopefully, as we contemplate, as we consider God’s care and provision and love for us, for the way He cares for the whole world, our hearts respond then with compassion, with a desire to enter into the struggle that another person, likewise made in God’s image, may be facing.
So we don’t turn a blind eye to the need that we see.
We don’t see a person destitute and simply throw words of comfort at them; if, as the Message paraphrase of this passage says, we see “an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, “Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!” and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?”
Sadly, what may be a partly accurate criticism of Christians by those looking in from the outside, is that, Yeah, they see a lot of God-talk without seeing a lot of God-acts. And so they don’t take us seriously.
As someone from the inside, as someone who has a good idea of how Christians, including the members of this church, live, I know that part of the problem there is that most of the things we do to demonstrate our faith are done in secret. We don’t advertise it.
Even with the Yonge Street Mission, right here, that has over 100 ministries to mega-thousands of people, the vast majority of what we do as Christian believers, as staff members in this mission, is virutally unknown by all, but a few. So that’s part of the problem and a part-answer to those who critique Christians as low on demonstrating our faith.
The other part…is that we can always do better. Some of you may remember when I became senior pastor here.
I said back then that my vision was that this community would be swarming with people, with Christ-followers, who were doing good, who were living lives that blessed and encouraged and strengthened other. And for those who chose to ask why, that we would be ready with an answer, ready to lead people to Jesus Christ.
That the fruit of this ministry, the ministry of Church at the Mission, Yonge Street Mission, would be transformed lives, actively engaging on a regular basis with all kinds of people, and being a rich blessing to this community.
The reason is twofold. First, there are a lot of needs in this community. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, single or married. People have real needs, real hindrances to them experiencing a good life.
God calls us to address those needs, to be in relationship with people who have those needs. It’s not about throwing money at people. It’s about caring for them, knowing and being known. People need people to show them the love of God.
The second reason, I believe, that we need to demonstrate our faith in word AND action, is that living out our faith in loving ways, caring practically for the needs of others, is how we grow.
It’s a critical way in which God forms us, constructs our faith, builds our trust in Him.
So...we’re all under construction. God builds our character. He builds our faith. Next week Pastor Jan will continue in this vein and help us to understand how God goes about building our relationships.
The week after that, we consider what the building will look like once God is finished. That should be fascinating.
I hope you’ll join us next week, and please, bring a friend. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; may the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.”’ Amen
