Faith
Hebrews 11:1-12
By James Galbraith
Bethel First Baptist Church
June 17, 2001
A small congregation in the foothills of the Great Smokies built a new sanctuary on a piece of land willed to them by a church member.
Ten days before the new church was to open, the local building inspector informed the pastor that the parking lot was inadequate for the size of the building.
Until the church doubled the size of the parking lot, they would not be able to use the new sanctuary. Unfortunately, the church with its undersized lot had used every inch of their land except for the mountain against which it had been built.
In order to build more parking spaces, they would have to move the mountain out of the back yard.
Undaunted, the pastor announced the next Sunday morning that he would meet that evening with all members who had "mountain moving faith." They would hold a prayer session asking God to remove the mountain from the back yard and to somehow provide enough money to have it paved and painted before the scheduled opening dedication service the following week.
At the appointed time, 24 of the congregation’s 300 members assembled for prayer. They prayed for nearly three hours. At ten o’clock the pastor said the final "Amen".
"We’ll open next Sunday as scheduled," he assured everyone. "God has never let us down before, and I believe He will be faithful this time too."
The next morning as he was working in his study there came a loud knock at his door. When he called "come in", a rough looking construction foreman appeared, removing his hard hat as he entered.
"Excuse me, Reverend. I’m from Acme Construction Company over in the next county. We’re building a huge shopping mall. We need some fill dirt. Would you be willing to sell us a chunk of that mountain behind the church? We’ll pay you for the dirt we remove and pave all the exposed area free of charge, if we can have it right away. We can’t do anything else until we get the dirt in and allow it to settle properly."
The little church was dedicated the next Sunday as originally planned and there were far more members with "mountain moving faith" on opening Sunday than there had been the previous week!
Would you have shown up for that prayer meeting?
***
Now, the details of this story are not verifiable, so I’m not going to stand up here and say that this actually happened. I simply do not know one way or the other.
If it did, then great - it is a great example of what can happen when a church takes faith seriously and asks God to do great things.
If it isn’t true, that’s okay, because I know that God can do things like this, and that he does do things like this for hundreds of churches and millions of Christians across the world every day.
My faith is not in the story, but in the God behind it.
REVIEW
In our series of the seven virtues, we have looked at the first four,
wisdom, courage, justice and temperance.
These four have been regarded as ‘natural virtues’, and they enjoy a history longer than the church itself. The Greeks and other societies of antiquity held these virtues in high esteem, before the coming of Christ.
They considered them to be an answer to life in and of themselves - be wise, be just, be courageous, be temperate, and you will live well. In their thinking, these virtues from within, not form outside sources.
When the church came into being, it embraced these virtues, and added three "theological virtues" - faith, hope and love. They are called theological virtues because they come from the very character of God himself , and to truly appreciate them we need to receive them for God himself.
In other words, it was though that while the first four could be generated form within, and so they are considered natural virtues, the last three could only truly be received from God, so they’ve been called theological virtues.
The line between the two groups grows pretty fuzzy in real life, so in this series I have chosen to conclude that all the virtues, in their truest form, come from God, who builds them up within us ands we take him more and more seriously.
We don’t earn our way to God’s salvation by being wise - we become wise as we take his input seriously in our lives. And it is much the same with the other virtues.
They will indeed help us to live well, but they are in no way a replacement for the God we are to live well for! They are not the path to God - Jesus Christ is, and the virtues are one of the products of a life which takes him seriously.
Faith defined
Faith is one of the few virtues that actually gets a definition in the Bible. We are treated to this definition in the first verse of our chapter -
1 Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.
Sure of what we hope for…
Being sure of what we hope for is faith in the future tense. It is looking forward to our eventual arrival in Heaven even though we’ve never been there.
We live with future tense faith in small and large ways everyday.
Let’s make an example out of our day’s special theme - Father’s day.
Fathers (and mothers, too!) raise their children with future tense faith, looking forward to the days when they will thrive as adults in their own rights.
Sometimes we get scared that they may not succeed, or that they may be hurt along the way, and we all know that in some tragic cases a father’s son or daughter may be lost before they reach adulthood.
But we dare not drop our future tense faith in raising our children, regardless of all the possible things that might interfere with their development. They need that sense of sureness from us that they will learn, they will grow, and they will thrive as adults.
There’s no room for argument with this - it’s part of being Dad.
There are other ways I could describe faith in a future tense
- loading up on freezer bags before a fishing trip because you know you’ll be packing salmon in the freezer before the day is done.
- buying Christmas presents in July because you know Dec. 25th comes sooner than you think,
- reserving a room in the city you’re flying into because you know you’ll be landing there
All of these are examples, for better or worse, of the part of faith that is being sure of what we hope for - faith future tense.
But faith is not just looking ahead - it is looking around right now, and that is why we read that faith is being…
Certain of what we do not see…
Being certain of what we do not see is faith in the present tense. We do not see God, but we are certain that he is there.
We do not see most of the world that we live - I’ve been in three countries, all on the same continent, in my entire life. Many people in this world travel no farther than a dozen or so miles form where they are born.
To accept that the rest of the world is there is a step of faith.
It may be an easy step of faith -after all -
I can look at maps,
I can hear stories from others who have traveled on the other five continents,
I can listen to the news and hear about what’s going on in those other places,
I can even go on line and see the world in satellite images,
and make the conclusion, pretty securely, that the rest of the world is indeed there.
We make assumptions about our everyday world all the time that demonstrate present tense faith.
We go to work everyday trusting that there will be a job waiting for us - we don’t "see" our jobs - we just know that they are there.
We use whatever tools we use, be they power tools, kitchen utensils, laptop computers, chalk or stethoscopes or whatever, trusting that they will do what they are made to do. We don’t usually see all the parts, but we trust that they are doing what they should.
We drive our cares trusting that a thousand parts are working in unison to keep us on the road. We don’t see them all working together - we just trust that they are and drive on.
We send the kids to school trusting the school is open, the teachers are ready and the kids are healthy enough to attend class. We don’t see how it all works to educate our kids, but we trust that it will.
So faith is being sure of what we hope for - future tense
and being certain of what we do not see - present tense.
So what about the past?
Our defining verse does not include the past, but the rest of the chapter gives examples of people who demonstrated great faith in the past.
And I’m sharing some of them, hoping that you’ll accept them as truth - that you’ll put faith in them - and grow closer to God as a result.
I have a present tense faith that you will accept these stories as accurate, and a future tense faith that it will benefit you spiritually, but how do we explain putting faith in something that is already occurred?
Like the world being formed at God’s command. so that what is seen was not made out of what is not visible?
This is the primary stumbling block to the evolutionist - something from nothing.
They can go on about fossil trees that have so many flaws that they end up kindling for the fire,
they can go on about natural selection just to find out that nature doesn’t always select according to their rules.
But they can’t get past something form nothing.
God can - but can you put faith in that?
Like Abel - the first baby born and raised on planet Earth - growing up to be a man who offered a sacrifice that was more pleasing to God then the offering his younger brother can prepared.
Like Enoch being the first person to live without experiencing death, because god came and simply took him into heaven
Like Noah building the floating zoo,
Like Abraham traveling form a life of comfort to begin a life of destiny
How do we know all this happened? How do we TRUST these accounts?
There’s the word that hasn’t com up yet in our definition.
In faith we are sure of our hope, because God keeps his promises
certain of our present, because God is always here for us
and we TRUST in the past, because God has proven himself trustworthy again and again.
Trust is based on past experience - we learn to trust people as we interact with them, and we evaluate our trust based on our experience with them.
If they prove themselves to do what they promise, to do what they should to do what they can for us, we trust them more and more.
If they break their promises, try to harm us or just neglect us, we trust them less and less.
The trust that is built on past experience will affect how certain we can be that they will hold true for the present, and that affects how sure we can be for the future.
Now what does all that have to do with our faith,
right here and now?
Do you trust that
God is who he says he is,
that his word is what is claims to be,
and that Jesus is all that he said he was?
If you can answer this affirmatively,
than you will find that
it is easier to be certain that what God will help us with the present
and that is easier to be sure that what he encourages us to hope for will one day be provided.
You will grow to have a mature faith, which has been described by a study as the following -
Characteristics of Mature Faith
In a national study of Protestant churches done in 1990, Peter Benson and Carolyn Eklin surveyed hundreds of people and distilled seven characteristics of a mature faith. You may not agree with everything on their list, but it’s still instructive to look at their conclusions.
1. Trusts in God’s saving grace and believes firmly in the humanity and divinity of Jesus.
2. Experiences a sense of personal well-being, security, and peace.
3. Integrates faith and life, seeing work, family, social relationships, and political choices as part of one’s religious life.
4. Seeks spiritual growth through study, reflection, prayer, discussion with others.
5. Seeks to be part of a community of believers who give witness to their faith and support and nourish one another.
6. Holds life-affirming values, including commitment to racial and gender equality, affirmation of cultural diversity, and a personal sense of responsibility for the welfare of others.
7. Serves humanity, consistently and passionately, through acts of love and justice.
If you cannot answer this in the affirmative,
then to understand and grow in faith
you need to take a closer look at who God is,
you need to learn the essential message that his word says to us,
and you need to see Jesus Christ for who he is
They do stand up to scrutiny and they are worthy of our faith. If you want to know more, you’ll just have to come back to church learn more about them!
Honestly - each one of those topics is another sermon or more in and of itself, but I would love to talk with anyone who has questions about them, anytime.
I’d like to close today with another story - one that’s intended to build our faith. It’s one of those stories that you see on the Internet form time to time, and I’m sure I’ve read it before here.
Unlike many of those stories, this one has been checked out and found to be true, and if you’’ like to know about it I’ve posted some info on the bulletin board, or you can log on to truthorfiction.com and look up the "hot water bottle" story.
***
A Little Girl’s Prayer
One night I had worked hard to help a mother in the labor ward; but in spite of all we could do she died leaving us with a tiny premature baby and a crying two-year-old daughter. We would have difficulty keeping the baby alive, as we had no incubator. (We had no electricity to run an incubator.) We also had no special feeding facilities.
Although we lived on the equator, nights were often chilly with treacherous drafts. One student midwife went for the box we had for such babies and the cotton wool the baby would be wrapped in. Another went to stoke up the fire and fill a hot water bottle.
She came back shortly in distress to tell me that in filling the bottle, it had burst. Rubber perishes easily in tropical climates. "And it is our last hot water bottle!" she exclaimed.
As in the West it is no good crying over spilled milk, so in Central Africa it might be considered no good crying over burst water bottles. They do not grow on trees, and there are no drugstores down forest pathways.
"All right," I said, "put the baby as near the fire as you safely can, and sleep between the baby and the door to keep it free from drafts. "Your job is to keep the baby warm."
The following noon, as I did most days, I went to have prayers with any of the orphanage children who chose to gather with me. I gave the youngsters various suggestions of things to pray about and told them about the tiny baby. I explained our problem about keeping the baby warm enough, mentioning the hot water bottle. The baby could so easily die if it got chills. I also told them of the two-year-old sister, crying because her mother had died.
During the prayer time, one ten-year-old girl, Ruth, prayed with the usual blunt conciseness of our African children. "Please, God," she prayed, "Send us a water bottle. It’ll be no good tomorrow, God, as the baby will be dead, so please send it this afternoon."
While I gasped inwardly at the audacity of the prayer, she added by way of a corollary, "And while You are about it, would You please send a dolly for the little girl so she’ll know You really love her?"
As often with children’s prayers, I was put on the spot. Could I honestly say, "Amen?" I just did not believe that God could do this. Oh, yes, I know that He can do everything. The Bible says so. But there are limits, aren’t there? The only way God could answer this particular prayer would be by sending me a parcel from the homeland. I had been in Africa for almost four years at that time, and I had never, ever received a parcel from home. Anyway, if anyone did send me a parcel, who would put in a hot water bottle? I lived on the equator!
Halfway through the afternoon, while I was teaching in the nurses’ training school, a message was sent that there was a car at my front door. By the time I reached home, the car had gone, but there, on the verandah, was a large twenty-two pound parcel.
I felt tears pricking my eyes. I could not open the parcel alone, so I sent for the orphanage children. Together we pulled off the string, carefully undoing each knot. We folded the paper, taking care not to tear it unduly. Excitement was mounting. Some thirty or forty pairs of eyes were focused on the large cardboard box.
From the top, I lifted out brightly colored, knitted jerseys. Eyes sparkled as I gave them out. Then there were the knitted bandages for the leprosy patients, and the children looked a little bored.
Then came a box of mixed raisins and sultanas-that would make a nice batch of buns for the weekend. Then, as I put my hand in again, I felt the . . . could it really be? I grasped it and pulled it out-yes, a brand-new, rubber hot water bottle!
I cried. I had not asked God to send it. I had not truly believed that He could. Ruth was in the front row of the children. She rushed forward, crying out, "If God has sent the bottle, He must have sent the dolly, too!"
Rummaging down to the bottom of the box, she pulled out the small, beautifully dressed dolly. Her eyes shone! She had never doubted. Looking up at me, she asked: "Can I go over with you, Mummy, and give this dolly to that little girl, so she’ll know that Jesus really loves her?"
That parcel had been on the way for five whole months, packed up by my former Sunday school class, whose leader had heard and obeyed God’s prompting to send a hot water bottle, even to the equator. And one of the girls had put in a dolly for an African child--five months before—in answer to the believing prayer of a ten-year-old to bring it "that afternoon."
