[Transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube[1], December 2020]
If faith is being 100% certain of something, I think I may have a problem, because I struggle to be that sure, and my life is full of ways in which I demonstrate a lack of faith. Am I condemned by this?
I don’t know what you have 100 percent confidence in, you are completely sure, you have full faith in it. See, I don’t think there’s anything I’m completely 100 percent confident and assured about, and even if maybe for a period I am, I know that possibly in the future I won’t be. So what about God, what about our faith in Jesus? Are you 100 percent confident and assured about that?
[00:56] See, in Hebrews chapter 11 the writer of Hebrews defines what faith is. He says it is confidence in what we hope for, an assurance of what we do not see, and during this advent period, we’re looking at each week at a different topic. Last week we looked at hope and this week we’re looking at faith. Hope last week was this idea that we hope, we have a sure and certain hope that Jesus Christ will come again, this time not as a baby but as a king, as a conqueror, as a lord of all who will put all things right.
[01:36] But it seems that the writer of Hebrews is saying that faith is the confidence that we have in that hope, the confidence we have in Jesus Christ that despite all outward appearances, despite things to the contrary, despite the things that we can see or not see, we have 100 percent confidence and assurance in Jesus Christ that God is at work moving in our midst even when we don’t see it. So do you have that sort of faith, that 100 percent assurance in Jesus and God working in your life because I’m not convinced that I have. Sometimes I wonder if God is in control, sometimes I wonder if God is there at all and so often I live my life as a practical atheist, living and making decisions as if God isn’t even involved or interested. So with that in mind, I find this verse in Hebrews really quite condemning because I don’t think I’ve got a faith like that.
[02:49] Now the writer of Hebrews then goes on to list a whole load of heroes of the faith, people who demonstrated in their actions and the way they lived their life the faith that they had, the trust that they had, that assurance, that confidence in God. But it’s really interesting because when I look at the list of characters, when I look at their stories in more detail, when I read about them in the Old Testament, I realized that actually they’re not quite as 100 assured as the writer of Hebrews would suggest.
[03:30] I mean, Abraham and Sarah they were promised a son in their advanced years and Sarah laughed at the idea and then she managed to persuade her husband Abraham to get the slave girl pregnant, and Moses, I mean he was asked by God to rescue the nation of Israel from slavery in Egypt and Moses did it but he said ‘No!’ so many times so God ended up getting angry with him, putting his foot down. Rahab, I mean she was a prostitute who just looked kindly upon a couple of clients. Samson, I mean he gave up his birthright by sleeping with the enemy. I mean when you put these real people under the microscope they’re hardly enormously inspiring heroes of the faith.
[04:26] When we look at the small aspects of their life, they’re not heroes of faith at all, and yet maybe what the writer of the Hebrews is doing is panning back, looking at their life in its entirety, looking at how their actions and their efforts and the way they trusted God made an enormous difference. It meant that things were done that were virtually impossible and that their life fitted into God’s bigger picture.
[05:01] So perhaps we should be a little more forgiving when we look at our life in detail, when we look at all those different little ways in which we let God down, the ways in which our faith is not 100 percent because actually what we want to do, like the author of Hebrews, is pan back. We want to live a life that overall is a journey of faith, that overall we have been able to do things for God that we could never have done in our own strength, that our life is full of little steps and big steps in the right direction, steps of faith where God uses us as part of his bigger plan even when we don’t see it.
[1] YouTube link: Advent 2, Faith: What am I Certain of?
Bible references: Hebrews ch 11
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Contributed by Martin Shorey; © Martin Shorey