What Is Faith?
Hebrews 11:1-3
Have you ever had high hopes for something and then seen those hopes crumble to pieces? Well, it happened to one man in Pittsburgh. His story hit the news wires as one of those sadly humorous, stupid-thief stories.
He wanted money. Maybe he desperately needed money. Maybe he had a substance addiction or owed tens of thousands of dollars on a credit card. Regardless, somehow he got the idea to go into a grocery store, hand the checkout clerk counterfeit money, and ask for change. If it worked, he would get real money in exchange for fake money. Brilliant, right?
He was a big thinker. If he was going to risk attempting this fraud, he was going to do it in a way that would set him up for life. So he decided to try to pass off not a counterfeit $100 bill, not a counterfeit $1,000 bill, not even a counterfeit $10,000 bill, but a counterfeit $1,000,000 bill.
Again, you can pat this poor fellow on the back for thinking big, but you also have to pity him for his stupidity. There were three major problems with his plan. First, you have to know that the average checkout clerk doesn’t have a million dollars in the drawer. Second, you have to know that a one million dollar bill is going to attract some extra attention and might even draw the attention of the store manager. Most places won’t even work with a $100 bill unless you’ve checked with them first. Third – and this is the biggie – there is no such thing as a $1,000,000 bill! The largest currency printed in the U.S. is a $100 bill.
When the counterfeiter walked into the supermarket on that Saturday in Pittsburgh, holding that one million dollar bill in his sweaty hand, imagine his soaring hopes. Soon he would be able to pay his bills, buy a nice house and car, get all the things he had always wanted, never work another day in his life. This was going to be his day!
Of course, his high hopes were dashed. The checkout clerk refused to give him change for his bogus bill. The manager came and confiscated the forgery. His dreams went up in smoke. He got angry. He ripped the card reader off its base and smashed it on the counter. He tried to grab the scanning gun used to read product labels. Soon the police had him in custody.
It’s a sad, sad thing when a person’s high hopes come to nothing. How do you know when your hopes are resting on something true and legitimate and real, instead of on something bogus and stupid? Where do you place your hope?
As we return to our series of sermons from the New Testament book of Hebrews – which is really a sermon in written form – our loving pastor confronts us with that question. Where do you place your hope? We all place our hope in something. Or someone.
It’s been said that we can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air…but only for one second without hope. Dostoevsky said, “Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live.” We all place our hope in something. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t want to live. We’d be suicidal.
The question is, where do you place your hope? Like really. In a church, most people are going to say, “I place my hope in Christ.” But do we really? If our hope really does rest in Christ, why do we lose our minds if the economy takes a turn for the worse, or if an election doesn’t go in the direction we wanted it to go?
Outside the church, people will say they place their hope in a relationship and their ability to find love, or in their abilities, or their career, or financial security, or their family, or in living a good life. Many of us who follow Christ SAY that Christ is our hope, but we ACTUALLY put our hope in those things too. So let me ask you, “Where do you place your hope?” Turn with me to Hebrews 11:1-3.
Faith and hope are closely related. Faith is the source of hope. They’re so closely related that our pastor actually uses hope in his or her definition of faith. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for.” When the lottery prize gets really big, and everyone runs out and buys lottery tickets, they all say “I hope I win.” But no one EXPECTS to win. That’s why the winners are always pictured standing there with a dumbfounded look on their face. They knew the odds were stacked way against them. They didn’t EXPECT to win.
No one becomes despondent when they don’t win. We just toss the losing tickets in the trash and go about our day. We SAY “I hope I win.” But what we mean is, “I WISH I’d win.” That’s what hope has come to mean for us. “I hope …” means “I wish …” But hope, in the Bible, is much firmer and more solid than that. If I really placed my hope in winning, based on the Biblical conception of hope, I’d buy my ticket and then start pricing nice cars and looking at nice houses, and setting up investment accounts, or whatever I planned to do with my winnings. And I wouldn’t be shocked when I won, because I’d be expecting to win. Now, I am not saying just believe, and you’ll win the lottery. That’s the heresy of health and wealth gospel, not the real gospel of a cross and an empty tomb. I’m using playing the lottery as an analogy for faith.
“Now faith is the ASSURANCE of things hoped for.” The word translated as assurance is a strong word. It’s the word we get our word “sure” from. As in “I will for sure be there.” It means, hold my spot, I’m on my way. It means foundation, that which supports, substance, confidence, and firmness. That isn’t wishful or wishy washy, is it?
The Greeks used the word for a financial guarantee or a title deed. Someone whose deep pockets back the business venture of an entrepreneur who doesn’t have those deep pockets yet. The bank will loan the young entrepreneur money because someone with substantial resources will pay back the loan if the business fails and the entrepreneur can’t pay it back. The wealthy backer already has the resources to pay it.
Faith is living confidently in the power of God now with full assurance in his promises that remain yet unfulfilled will be fulfilled – that Christ WILL return one day, not on my schedule but when the Father says “go.” That his blood covers me and my redemption in Christ will one day be completely fulfilled and I will spend eternity with him. Faith is focused both on God’s power and presence in my life now, and in the future fulfillment of the remaining promises.
Those are the “things not seen.” The promises that are still outstanding. That haven’t yet been fulfilled. Faith is focused both on the still-in-the-future concrete, tangible realization of God’s promises in full, AND on the present unseen reality of God’s presence, providence, power, and faithfulness. The reality that in Christ God is at work in my life and in the world around me, in me and through me, whether I can sense it or not. But it isn’t a wish. It’s sure. It’s secure. It’s a firm and very real thing. Just as real as the unseen protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up the atoms of the chair you are sitting in right now. You can’t see them, but you see and feel the evidence of them as you sit in the chair. But those unseen things are what’s actually holding you up right now.
There have been times when God pulled back the veil that keeps us from seeing the spiritual reality of his presence around us. As Jacob, who was also known as Israel, Abraham’s grandson, slept, God allowed him to see a ladder or staircase ascending into heaven, with angels ascending and descending, moving between heaven and earth. God at work around us in ways we cannot see, but we know he is there. In dire circumstances, Elisha’s servant was permitted to see what the prophet Elisha knew was there, that he did not … the armies of God prepared to do battle on behalf of the people of God.
Now, look at V. 2. Faith is not just thinking. Or believing. It is acting. Faith drives us to action. The “people of old,” all of the people we are going to encounter in the rest of this chapter, people like Noah, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Sarah and Moses – they weren’t superheroes. They were normal people who were moved to live differently because of their faith in God. The evidence of future things hoped for and the conviction of present things that are very real but presently unseen.
Faith is living in the reality of God’s kingdom here and now, knowing that God is present in power and faithfulness now, and that he will finish what he has started – in me, in us, and in the universe he has created. Faith isn’t faith until we do something based on it. Until then, its just a thought. Faith becomes real faith when I begin to act on the promises of God, following God’s leading in my life and doing what God wants done in and through my life, regardless of what is happening around me or the cost I must pay. You see, faith isn’t dependent on my circumstances. It’s dependent on the faithfulness of God. It’s the future reality that I know is mine based on God’s power and presence and redemption in my life today.
The “people of old” received God’s reward for them because they lived in faith. Not because they thought certain things or agreed with God about something, but because they actually trusted God and lived in this world as if they were already living in the kingdom of God. And the were. They were living in the kingdom of God in this world.
They actually did things simply because God asked them to do them, no matter how dumb it looked to others. They carried themselves in a certain way, handled their households and finances in a certain way, even if the world around them told them it was dumb. Faith is actually living differently based on God’s current faithfulness and promises for the future.
Now, look at V. 3. Our pastor takes us back to the very beginning … to God’s work creating all that is. By his voice. It was the word of God that spoke the universe into existence. But in that moment it wasn’t a still small voice, or a quiet voice. It was an explosive voice. God spoke and boom!, the universe started moving outward from a single point and it is still going, still expanding. We’ve counted 10 octillion stars in the part of the cosmos that we can see. The universe came to be from a very real but unseen force, the voice of God.
In the ancient world, they believed there were four basic elements in the universe – earth, air, water, and fire. We now have 118 confirmed chemical elements, and those elements are made up of much smaller, even more elemental, basic structures. Structures that we cannot see. We used to thing it was molecules. But then we looked inside molecules and found atoms. And then we went inside atoms and found sub atomic particles. And now we’ve gone even further inside and found even smaller, more elemental structures. Quantum physics now describes matter as being made up, at the most basic level, inside the sub-sub atomic particles, of tiny vibrations. Like the vibrations a cosmic voice would make.
The voice of God. The Word of God. St. John calls Jesus “the Word” of God. Jesus is the voice of God in skin and bone, flesh and blood. Jesus is the voice of God stepping into our world. The universe was created by the voice, by the Word, of God. The universe is sustained by the Word of God. And we are redeemed by the Word of God, made flesh in Jesus.
Faith leads to hope. And hope leads to perseverance. Hanging in there regardless of our circumstance. No matter how blessed or dire our lives seem right now. Faith in Jesus. Not in our bank accounts or our personalities or our relationships or our talents. Faith in Christ. The one by who and for whom the cosmos was made.
The nearest star to earth, outside of our sun, is Alpha Centauri, 25 trillion miles away, four light years. That is just the closest of those 10 octillion stars that we’ve counted so far. Our own sun is just a speck on the outskirts of our own galaxy, and current estimates are that there are more than 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. The massive star Betelgeuse is 700-900 times larger in diameter than our sun. Millions of our sun could fit inside that one star. One single trip around the diameter of Betelgeuse would cover as much distance as going to Alpha Centauri and back, four light years away, 14 times. It would take 56 light years for us to travel around Betelgeuse in a space ship once.
This image will blow your mind. That’s not the universe, by the way. That’s just the Milky Way, our little galaxy. One of over 2 trillion other galaxies that we know of so far. The Milky Way is home to somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars, most of which are infinitely larger than our own little star, which we call the sun. And you can see that earth is on the outskirts of the Milky Way there. We aren’t even the center of our own galaxy, much less the universe.
Now, check this out. In 1977, NASA launched the space probe voyager to explore our own little solar system, and it has now entered interstellar space. It has been traveling away from earth for almost 50 years now. That little red line represents not how far Voyager has traveled. No! We can’t even make a dot on that graphic to represent it’s distance yet. That red line is how far Voyager would travel in a million years!
The God who by his Word spoke all of that into existence is the one in whom we place our faith, and therefore, our hope. The one who holds all of this together is the one in whom we place our trust. But many refuse to trust him. Including many of us, who claim that we DO trust him.
Pastor R. Kent Hughes tells the story of the piano mice who lived their whole lives inside a concert grand piano. The music of the great instrument came to them in their little “piano world,” filling the dark spaces with beautiful music. At first the mice were impressed by the music. They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was someone who made the music, though invisible to them. Someone close to them, and yet above them. They loved to think of the great player they could not see.
Then one day a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful. He had found out how the music was made. Wires were the secret. Tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths that trembled and vibrated. They must rethink all their old beliefs. None but the most religious among them would continue to believe in an unseen great player. Later, another brave mouse carried the explanation further. Hammers were now the secret. Great numbers of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires. This was a more complicated and sophisticated theory, but it all showed that they lived in a purely mechanical and mathematically explainable piano world. The unseen great player of music came to be thought of as a myth. All the while, the unseen but very real great player continued to play.
Where do you place your hope? Where does our faith really reside? In the one who spoke, and there was … everything? And who then entered our tiny speck of a world so that we could know him not just in his majesty, but intimately and in love? That majestic one, who spoke it all into existence by the power of his Word, wants us to know him, the way he knows us. And in Christ, he has made that possible. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” But very real. Let’s pray.
