Faith: What Lies Beneath

sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 02/06/2011

What then is faith? It is what gives assurance to our hopes; it is what gives us conviction about things we can’t see. It is what the men and women of old were famous for. It is by faith that we understand that the worlds were formed by God’s word; in other words, that the visible world was not made from visible things.

Hebrews 11v1-3 (N.T. Wright)

To the author of Hebrews, Jesus is at the center of God’s forward movement in the world, and there is one thing we need to join with God in that forward movement. That one thing is faith.

Faith. Such a simple word. And such a simple thing, really. But what is it exactly? And why is it so important? And what is our relationship to it? How does it fit in to this whole idea of a stage 4 relationship with God that we talked about last week?

[Jack story…he’s never seen the water, but he knows that it’s there because of the trust he has in what his dad has told him…this is faith in action...the assurance he has, the conviction he has comes from something itself invisible but real – faith in his dad.]

We, like the Hebrews to whom this letter was originally written, are in a world of hurt. To set out and continue on the adventure with Jesus in seeing healing and repair and restoration come to this broken world, and into our broken lives means entering, with him, even more deeply into that world of hurt. It means, sometimes, diving into relationships with people who are hurting, or into situations that are uncomfortable, or risky, or even dangerous… It means, sometimes, embarking on projects that might be met with frustration or opposition or only small amounts of progress after large amounts of investment… It means, sometimes, mining into the darkness within our own hearts and lives and families, unearthing the ugly stuff for Jesus to shine his light on it and redeem it, knowing that it might be really painful along the way to peace. There is always the temptation to play it safe, to go back into whatever seems like a less risky way of life. Even if it is ultimately less powerful and potent than plunging forward. As we’ve talked about, the author of Hebrews is encouraging us to resist that temptation, set aside those fears, and dive into the forward movement of God that brings salvation.

We just need one primary tool for the adventure. Faith. Because, remember,

The medium is the message now. Jesus himself is the message. How do we receive a message that is a person? By faith in that person. The message is not a set of rules that we can diligently follow. The message is a person we must follow. And that person is taking us into only vaguely charted territory. The only way forward is faith in him.

Because, remember,

The forward movement of God is into deeper relationship and greater risk. That is where the power of love that overcomes death is unleashed. And the only way into deeper relationship and greater risk is faith. Which is why John Wimber always used to say, faith is spelled R.I.S.K.

Because, remember,

The forward movement of God is from a rules-based relationship with God to a mystical one where it’s all about a personal relationship with him, where the message of God, Jesus himself, dwells in us through his Holy Spirit. And what is at the center of every life-giving relationship? Faith. (Have a little faith in me…)

So let’s talk about what Hebrews 11 begins to teach us about faith.

What then is faith? It is what gives assurance to our hopes; it is what gives us conviction about things we can’t see.

The word for assurance is “hypostasis” – the thing put under, the substructure, the foundation. Faith what lies beneath our hopes to hold them up, to keep them from collapsing.

Not all hopes have such a foundation, do they?

Let’s take, for example, a hope that before the service is over, $1,000,000 will fall out of the sky. That hope, in me, has no foundation. Which doesn’t mean it can’t happen. But it does mean I’m not likely to take any action based on that hope.

But some hopes have something strong underneath them, something called faith. Sometimes they have a little of it, sometimes a lot. The more there is, the more you can push off of it into God’s good future.

Take a hope like my hope that I won’t get injured playing basketball. That’s a relatively unfounded hope. I wouldn’t bet anyone a million dollars on that hope being fulfilled. In fact, my history tells me the opposite, my present doesn’t provide any encouragement, and I have no personal assurances from God on that score. You’d be wise to take a short position on that hope. But I do have enough faith in my body, and in the good purposes of God in my life, to step out on the court every Saturday without debilitating fear. Just enough faith, and joy comes – even though it’s sometimes mixed with pain.

Take my hope to catch these quarters off my elbow…[catch quarters off elbow]. I didn’t just try to believe really hard that I would, and then I did. That faith in my ability to do that came from my 40 year relationship with my body, and with my specific experiences of seeing my body do that very thing. Was it a lock? No. My body could have failed me. Was it enough of a foundation to risk looking a fool and losing money? Yes.

Or take something a little more “spiritual.” I’ve had a headache for many years now. I have a hope that it will be healed. Underneath that hope is faith. Faith that God made me, that God loves me, that God desires freedom for me, that God has the power to do it when the time is right. That faith is a very mystical thing, though, isn’t it? You may or may not share it with me. You may or may not think it a wise thing to have. And where does it come from? A wide variety of sources that may or may not be convincing to you, but for me have conspired to deposit faith as a gift in me, a faith that I have decided to persevere in. The witness of the scriptures about God’s goodness and the promise of the resurrection of Jesus. Personal encounters with Jesus in prayer that have served to increase my faith. The encouragement of others who love me out of their own personal encounters with Jesus and understanding of the world informed by the God revealed in scripture. A gut feeling I’ve had from time to time that felt “right.” Faith. Will it happen today or tomorrow? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t have any specific faith for that. Will it happen before I die? I have a growing faith about that. A foundation that seems to be getting stronger, that seems to bear the weight of my hope. Will it happen one day – at the very least, in my resurrection body? Yes, I would bet my life and any number of millions on that. In fact, if any healing does invade my present before that day comes, I know the day of resurrection is the day in which that healing was born.

Faith is that strong thing that lies underneath our hopes – all of our hopes that revolve around Jesus and his promises about God’s kingdom. It comes from our relationship with him, our history with him, the witness of others, gut feelings, a whole set of sources. But when we embrace it, receive it, walk in it, look for it, it’s what we find at the bottom of all of our true hopes. It’s the thing, that when it’s there, empowers us to take risks on it.

It is also, according to Hebrews, what gives us conviction [elenchos: the proof, the evidence] about things we can’t see.

We spend money and energy serving those in need with food, and clothing, and time and relationship and love. We forgive those who wrong us. We love our enemies. We bear one another’s burdens. We pray for the sick. We generously give money. We do everything we do as Jesus’ followers not being able to see right here and right now exactly what will come of it. We do it all in hopes that it will be part of what God is doing to set things right in the world.

If anyone were to press us, or doubts were to assail us - as to whether or not any of it is worth it - what proof would we have that it will be? In the moment before any of those actions, all we have is faith. Something inside of us (a gift, deposited by God, that we decide to embrace) that bears witness to the future reality on which we are basing our present actions. The very existence of faith is the primary evidence that tells us that the future coming kingdom of God is coming. [someone tithing for 15 years – a year and a half worth of salary: has it paid off? Should you continue…?]

[Crisis of faith – “Why don’t you talk to me about it?” God was speaking to the faith that was in me.]

Yes, this is mystical stuff. It’s O.K. Like it or not, we are mystically wired. Why do we ever trust anyone? Usually because we discover that we already trust them. And usually we trust them because at some point we decided to trust them. Yet every time we act on that trust, it’s never without risk. And this is what opens the door to the life of God in our world.

It’s what the men and women of old were famous for.

(root is martyr…)

Faith is the part of their lives that keeps speaking to us, getting our attention. Next week we will look at some of their lives, and the faith on display that provides encouragement to us to persevere in our faith. But for today, just notice this: Faith is the thing that gets all the press in a person’s life over time; faith is the thing that speaks words we need to hear. Not accomplishments. Not failures. Not sins. Not victories. Not wealth or success. Not even great writings or speeches. Faith.

What will your life say to your children or grandchildren or great grandchildren, to your neighbors, your friends, your classmates, your co-workers? Your faith is what will make you famous. Everything else is vapor and will blow away. But your faith is the part of you that is connected in eternity to the kingdom of God that will not pass away. Your faith is the thing that opens a channel between the present and the future coming kingdom of God. The thing that will carry you on into eternal life in the future, and the thing that carries eternal life into you today.

It is by faith we understand [perceive] that the worlds were prepared by God’s word; in other words, that the visible world was not made from visible things.

Faith is the thing that lets us perceive something true about the world we see around us, that cannot be perceived otherwise. (not speaking about a primitive understanding of natural phenomena, but rather this strong thing underneath our hopes that this isn’t all an accident – not the natural world, not our experiences…)

The author is taking us deep down the rabbit hole here. If our faith tells us there is something we can’t see (God’s word) that gave rise to everything we can see around us, then it follows that another thing we can’t see (faith itself) cooperates with God’s word to bring into being that which is coming. [making some sense of all of Jesus’ statements about “your faith has made you well…”]

The author of Hebrews knows that by inviting us to join in the forward movement of God’s kingdom through personal faith in Jesus, he or she is inviting us into something that seems so unsolid, so uncertain, so hard to get our arms around that we might be terrified to take the next step. So it’s important for us to know that we don’t need to be unsure about our footing in this adventure. The firm ground beneath our feet was given its very substance by the invisible voice of God. So we can have confidence to plunge into God’s good future with invisible faith as our only firm foundation.

There is one other reason, I believe, that the author of Hebrews brings up this idea of our universe being God’s creation. And that is that our faith in the future coming Kingdom, our faith that God is in the process of setting everything right, comes from our confidence that God loves his creation. That he made our world, and he made us, and so he’s invested in us. That he will go to any length to fix what has gone wrong, and make his creation new again because this isn’t all an accident. We are here because he spoke us into being, and he will with his word set things right again and also with his word make us new again, just as he has with Jesus.

Hebrews will bring us back to Jesus again in the next chapter, but for now it wants to remind us of the very thing Jesus based his life on: this invisible faith. Jesus healed through faith, cast out demons through faith, loved the marginalized and outcast through faith, faced death through faith. No one else could see what Jesus was seeing by faith. No one else knew the strong thing underneath Jesus’ hope of the kingdom of God. Jesus faced opposition from all sides, the most withering kind of opposition. Yet his faith prevailed against it all, even against death. This faith, Hebrews tells us, is the same faith we share in as we press into the forward movement of God. The same faith being offered to us as a gift. Let us embrace it, choose it, persevere in it. It will not fail us, as it did not fail Jesus, as it has not failed all those famous men and women of old, whom we will speak more of next week.

Practical tips…

1. Do a 1 day faith inventory to see how much of your life is already based on faith of one variety or another… You may say, most of those are just calculated risks. Bingo. So is faith in God. It’s just that sometimes the stakes are higher, and the evidence less visible.

2. Ask God for more faith. (Way better than trying to have more faith.) His answer may not come in the form of a feeling (strike that / probably won’t). He will probably ask you to do something that requires you to trust him. And then you will have to find out if he answered your prayer or not by deciding to trust him or not. My bet? You’ll be able to trust him in a way that previously you weren’t able to. Because he gave you the faith you needed. (example: faith to heal…)

3. Use it or lose it. Give expression (voice, action) to the faith you discover in you. It seems to be like a muscle; exercise will make it grow. And it will be like a barking dog at night – it gets all the other dogs barking. Why does this work? Faith seems to multiply like rabbits. (caution: don’t fake your faith to impress others or to try to get some kind of result – that will only multiply other fake faith, and that can come crashing down and smother the real thing under it’s weight.)