Sales were stagnant at the insurance company where Daniel P. Amos worked as the chief executive. So, he decided to take a huge risk with a novel ad campaign that poked fun at the company’s name. Take a look (show Aflac—Barra at the Barber, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS83HdpzxDU).
This was one of Aflac’s early TV commercials, which featured an obnoxious white duck quaking “Aflaaaac” several times throughout the commercial. The little-known business soon became a household name. Aflac’s stagnant US sales doubled between 1999 and 2003.
Recently (March 2022), Amos told The Wall Street Journal that leading a company always involves taking risks. He said, “I like to manage risks [since] everything we do is risk related. [If you avoid risks] you are really not taking a broad enough perspective for a company to succeed.”
But, he said, “Never risk a lot for a little.” Now over 70, Amos says this is a principle by which he lives every day of his life—Never risk a lot for a little (Joann Lublin, “The Aflac CEO Who Ruffled Feathers With His Duck Ads,” The Wall Street Journal, 3-19-22; www.PreachingToday.com).
Life is full of risks, which require a certain amount of faith. It certainly takes faith to serve and follow Jesus, especially these days when our culture has become more hostile to Christian values. However, with Jesus you never have to worry about risking a lot for a little, because He always gives back more than you put in.
The question is How do you gain enough faith to risk following Jesus? How do you acquire enough confidence to take a chance on Christ? Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to John 4, John 4, where we see how a government official came to trust Jesus also in a culture that was hostile to Him.
John 4:43-45 After the two days he departed for Galilee. (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.) So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast (ESV).
Jesus has just returned to his hometown area from the Passover feast in Jerusalem. There, he drove out the merchants in the temple, which turned the Jewish leaders against Him. Then He passed through Samaria and spent two days in a place filled with people the Jewish people despised. As a result, His own countrymen loathed Him, except for some vulgar Galileans. They saw what Jesus had done at the festival in Jerusalem and they liked it, so they welcomed Him home.
These Galileans had a show-me faith. They believed what they saw. And if that’s where you have to start in your faith, then start there.
BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE.
Trust in tangible realities. Depend on what you observe to be true. Just make sure you really see what’s there, not just what you want to see.
Kevin Ashton, in his book How to Fly a Horse, describes a study in which researchers put a clown on a unicycle in the path of pedestrians. Then the researchers asked people who walked past the clown if they had noticed anything unusual. Everybody saw him unless they were on their cell phone. Three out of every four people who had been using their phone did not see the clown. They looked back in astonishment, unable to believe they had missed him. They had looked straight at him but had not registered his presence (Kevin Ashton, How to Fly a Horse, Doubleday, 2015, page 97; www.PreachingToday.com).
It’s like my mom used to say: You can’t see for looking.
Please, don’t be so locked into your naturalistic assumptions that you completely miss the supernatural. See the supernatural in a beautiful sunset. See the supernatural in a pretty flower. See the supernatural in the changed lives of those who put their trust in Christ.
H. G. Wells, who wrote The War of the Worlds, once wrote a short story called The Country of the Blind. It's about an inaccessible, luxurious valley in Ecuador where, due to a strange disease, everyone is blind. After 15 generations of this blindness there was no recollection of sight or color or the outside world at all. Finally, a man from the outside—a man who could see—literally fell into their midst. He had fallen off a high cliff and survived, only to stumble into their forgotten country.
When he realized that everyone else was blind, he remembered the old adage: “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Wells writes:
He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. “Look you here, you people,” he said. “There are things you do not understand in me.” Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to tell them what it was to see.
But they never believed him. They thought he was crazy. The man fell in love with a girl there and the girl's father, Yacob, went to talk to a doctor about him. A conversation ensued:
[The doctor said]: “I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him complete, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation—namely, to remove these irritant bodies [his eyes!].”
“And then he will be sane?” [Yacob asked].
“Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen,” replied the doctor.
“Thank Heaven for science!” said old Yacob.
Wells goes on to point out that the man would not be allowed to marry Yacob's daughter unless he submitted to an operation that would blind him. So what would the man do? Wells writes:
He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his sacrifice should come, but as he walked, he lifted up his eyes and saw the morning, the morning like an angel in golden armor, marching down the steeps…
It seemed to him that before this splendor, he and this blind world in the valley, and his love and all, were no more than a pit of sin. And the man who could see escaped the country of the blind with his life (www.online-literature.com/wellshg/3; www.PreadingToday.com).
That’s the kind of world we live in. It’s like the Country of the Blind, whose citizens are proud of their science and knowledge and even their own spirituality. But they are oblivious to the truth. They truly cannot see. And when someone tries to tell them the truth, they think that person is crazy. Please, before it’s too late, escape the country of the blind and stop ignoring the truth any longer.
If you have to, examine the irrefutable evidence for the Designer in creation. If you have to, examine the irrefutable evidence for the historical accuracy of the Bible. If you have to, examine the irrefutable evidence for the death and resurrection of Christ.
If you do not yet believe, I challenge you to study the evidence readily available and come to believe what you see. That’s what many former atheists have done. These include people like Josh McDowell, who wrote Evidence that Demands a Verdict; or Frank Morrison, who wrote the book Who Moved the Stone—a Skeptic Looks at the Death and Resurrection of Christ; or Lee Strobel, who wrote The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. All these were atheists that dared to see! They dared to look at the evidence and it led them to faith in Christ.
You do the same if that’s what you have to do. Examine the evidence and believe what you see. Or if you’re in a crisis…
BELIEVE HOPING TO SEE.
Cry out to Jesus and look for His help. Come to the Lord eager for a miracle. That’s what a government official did.
John 4:46-49 So [Jesus] came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. So Jesus said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies” (ESV).
The official was desperate, so he pleads with Jesus to “come” before his child dies. He is not interested in generic signs and wonders. He just wants His son to live. This is what I call a “crisis faith.” It’s hoping against hope that God will do a miracle.
Edwin A. Blum says, “Undoubtedly, he had exhausted all the local means at his disposal. Failure of position and money to solve his problem drove him from Capernaum to the village of Cana, 20 to 25 miles away, hoping that the Healer would save his son from death” (E. A. Blum, The Bible Knowledge Commentary, Vol. 2, p. 288).
That official sounds like some of people I know. They find themselves in a crisis: a child gets sick; a doctor discovers cancer; or they face an insurmountable problem. So they go into crisis mode, exhausting every resource they have to solve the problem. Then, when nothing they try works, they call on the Lord for help.
Vance Havner used to tell the story about an elderly lady who had many troubles both real and imaginary. Finally, her family told her in a kindly way, “Grandma, we’ve done all we can do for you. You’ll have to trust God for the rest.” A look of utter despair spread over her face as she replied, “Oh dear, has it come to that?” Havner commented, “It always comes to that, so we might as well begin with that.” You might as well begin with faith and see where it leads you.
In his book Waiting: Finding Hope Where God Seems Silent, Ben Patterson tells a story from his personal life. He writes:
“In the summer of 1988, three friends and I climbed Mount Lyell, the highest peak in Yosemite National Park. Two of us were experienced mountaineers; two of us were not. I was not one of the experienced two… The climb to the top and back was to take the better part of a day due, in large part, to the difficulty of the glacier that one must cross to get to the top… As the hours passed, and we trudged up the glacier, the two mountaineers opened up a wide gap between me and my less-experienced companion. Being competitive by nature, I began to look for short cuts I might be able to take to beat them to the top. I thought I saw one to the right of an outcropping of rock—so I went up, deaf to the protests of my companions…
“Thirty minutes later I was trapped in a cul-de-sac of rock atop the Lyell Glacier, looking down several hundred feet of a sheer slope of ice, pitched at a forty-five degree angle… I was only ten feet from the safety of a rock. But one little slip and I wouldn't stop sliding until I had landed in the valley floor about fifty miles away! … I was stuck and I was scared” (pp. 100-101).
Is that where you find yourself today? You thought you had life under control. You thought you knew better than your friends, so you took a short cut; and now, you find yourself stuck and scared like Patterson.
He goes on to say, “It took an hour for my experienced climbing friends to find me. Standing on the rock I wanted to reach, one of them leaned out and used an ice axe to chip two little footsteps in the glacier. Then he gave me the following instructions: ‘Ben, you must step out from where you are and put your foot where the first foothold is… Without a moment's hesitation swing your other foot across and land it in the next step. [Then]… reach out and I will take your hand, and I will pull you to safety… But listen carefully: As you step across, don't lean into the mountain! If anything, lean out a bit. Otherwise, your feet could fly out from under you, and you will start sliding down.’”
Patterson says, “When I'm on the edge of a cliff, my instinct is to lie down and hug the mountain, to become one with it, not lean away from it! But that was what my good friend was telling me to do as I stood trembling on that glacier. I looked at him real hard… For a moment, based solely on what I believed to be true about the good will and good sense of my friend, I decided to say no to what I felt… to lean out, step out, and [cross] the ice to safety. It took less than two seconds to find out if my faith was well founded. It was” (Ben Patterson, Waiting: Finding Hope Where God Seems Silent, pp. 101-102; www.PreachingToday.com).
When you put your faith in Christ, you too will find that your faith is well founded even in a crisis. If you want to gain enough faith to follow Christ, then start where you need to. Believe what you see or believe hoping to see. Then soon, you will…
BELIEVE BEFORE YOU SEE.
Your crisis faith will become a confident faith as you act on Jesus’ word. So, by faith, just do what Jesus tells you to do. That’s what the government official did.
John 4:50-52 Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way. As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was recovering. So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him” (ESV).
I.e., one o’clock the previous afternoon. Now, walking at a brisk pace, he could have returned home in four or five hours at five or six o’clock that evening, but he waited until the next day to get home! He took his time, because his crisis faith had become a confident faith. Christ said it. He believed it. That settled it.
Michael Horton, in his book The Gospel-Driven Life, talks about the time when he and his wife anxiously awaited the premature delivery of their triplets. He says, “I will never forget the moment that the doctor looked at me and announced, ‘They're all alive!’”
You see, it was not a foregone conclusion (at least for one of them); and until that report, Michael Horton and his wife were in suspense. All of the wishful thinking—even from certified medical professionals—could not alleviate that suspense, turning possibility into actuality. Michael says, “I could believe all I wanted in a successful delivery, but I had no promise to rely on, either from God or the doctors, and the intensity of my believing it had nothing to do with the state of affairs. My confidence developed entirely on the words that the doctor uttered. [In the same way], the gospel is news because it reports a completed event. Faith does not make something true; it embraces the truth. (Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life: Being Good News People in a Bad News World, Baker Books, 2009, pp. 123-124; www. PreachingToday.com)
My dear friends, when I talk about faith in Christ, I am not talking about wishful thinking. I am not trying to make something true that isn’t. I am talking about embracing the truth God’s Word.
The good news is that Christ died for your sins and rose again. It is a completed event, and God has announced it in His Word. All that’s left for you to do is embrace that truth. Accept it as reality and act upon it. Just trust what God has said in His Word.
If you want to gain enough faith to follow Christ, then start where you need to. Believe what you see or believe hoping to see. Then believe before you see until you…
SEE WHAT YOU BELIEVE.
Let your faith become sight, and move from a crisis and confident faith to a confirmed faith. That’s what happened to the government official.
John 4:53-54 The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” And he himself believed, and all his household. This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee (ESV).
The first sign was to turn water into wine (John 2). The second sign was to heal the official’s son (John 4). These signs were designed to produce faith in Christ, which is what happened to the official and his family. They all believed. The official’s crisis and confident faith became a confirmed faith. He finally saw what he believed. And the same thing can happen to you. In fact, people tend to see what they believe all the time.
Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, presented some very interesting research on the way scientists do science. In that research, he discovered that scientists fail to see data that falls outside the realm of their belief system (i.e., their paradigm).
They are literally unable to see that data, or they just ignore that data, and sometimes they distort that data to make it fit what they already believe. Data that fits their belief system, they see very clearly and very well. But data that’s outside their belief system, they refuse to see.
Did you ever wonder how some scientists could look through a microscope, see the intricate detail and design of a single cell, and fail to see evidence of a Designer? It’s because the idea of a Creator is outside of their belief system. They don’t believe in a Creator; and because they don’t believe, they literally cannot see.
Do you want to truly see the world as it really is? Then put your faith in the Lord, and He will help you see eternal realities you never could before.
Mark Batterson, in his book Wild Goose Chase, put it this way. He said:
“In my experience, signs follow decisions. The way you overcome spiritual inertia and produce spiritual momentum is by making tough decisions. And the tougher the decision, the more potential momentum it will produce. The primary reason most of us don't see God moving is simply because we aren't moving. If you want to see God move, you need to make a move!”
Mark said, “I learned this lesson in dramatic fashion during the first year at National Community Church. We had been praying for a drummer to join our worship team for months, but I felt like I needed to put some feet on my faith, so I went out and bought a four-hundred-dollar drum set. It was a Field of Dreams moment: if you buy it, they will come. I bought the drum set on a Thursday. Our first drummer showed up the next Sunday. And he was good. He was actually part of the United States Marine Drum and Bugle Corps.
“Rock and roll.”
Then Mark went on to say, “I cannot promise that signs will follow your faith in three minutes or three hours or three days. But when you take a step of faith, signs will follow. God will sanctify your expectations, and you will begin to live your life with holy anticipation. You won't be able to wait to see what God is going to do next” (Mark Batterson, Wild Goose Chase, Multnomah, 2008, pp. 32-33; www.PreachingToday.com).
So take that first step of faith and see what God will do for you. Then keep on stepping out in faith until you are living your life in holy anticipation of what God will do next.
That’s what following Christ is all about. It’s a life of faith lived in holy anticipation. If that’s the kind of life you want, then start where you need to. Believe what you see or believe hoping to see. Then believe before you see until you see what you believe.
Think of the FedEx logo, where the space between the E and X creates an arrow pointing forward. Do you want to see what is not visible? Look at what is visible. Pay attention to where it stops short, runs out, dries up. Trace the limits of what you can see, the transient things always passing away, and there you will start to see the shape of the invisible glory still to come (Matthew McCullough, Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope, Crossway, 2018, pages 153-154; www.PreachingToday.com).
By faith, look beyond the visible to see the way forward.
