What is Faith

What is Faith and Why Ought we Cultivate it?

Ephesians 2:8-9

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.[1]

2 Thessalonians 1:3

We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing.[2]

I. Introduction

A few weeks ago, we sat here as youth leaders discerning what youth group should be like this year. Many things have changed since we last sat together in this space and yet, some things haven’t changed. It feels familiar to be here and our God has not changed. He is the same as he was 2000 years ago and 8 months ago. As we discussed we desired to have a few things change and few things remain the same. We wanted youth group to feel the same. As much as that is possible. We wanted to hang out, play games, learn and grow, and spend time discussing scripture, or life, or life and scripture in our small groups together. However, we wanted some things to change, maybe the way we learn together. Over the past 2 years we have used bible study curriculum that well put together but didn’t quite jive with us as leaders or as students. Also, I am in seminary now and part of my education is teaching. So, with those things in mind we thought let’s shift from a video thing, to a teacher thing. Over the course of the year, I will be up here a lot, learning along with you all and sometimes we hope to bring in some guests to teach or others to share testimony.

Sidebar: it’s been a minute since I shared my testimony with you all, so I think that will come up this year. Some of you haven’t heard it and it’s a story about God and its worthwhile for all of you to know who I am a little better.

Back to what we we’re doing. We are doing a You Asked for It! series at youth group. However, I have been around long enough to know that it is not easy to start listing out questions. So, before we ask or answer any, I am going to do a bit of an intro to the topic tonight and in our small groups we will create a list of questions that we can use for the season. I have planned to do this until Christmas, but if there are lots of questions, we can just keep going into January and beyond.

With that, let’s pray together and ask for open minds and hearts, and then get into it.

Dear Lord….

II. What is Faith?

Before we start discussing anything, it is good practice to define our terms, so we are all confident that we are discussing the same thing. So, faith. What is it?

Another before, before we define it as Christians, it would be good practice to ensure our definition of faith does not hinge on scripture. That will help us have a better understanding of it and give us some real-world examples. After that then we will have a look at what Christian Faith is.

Faith: a constant outlook of trust and dependance.

That makes good sense, but in case we are struggling, maybe someone can give an example before I give you mine.

1. Sunrise – we know, each night when we crawl into our princess canopy beds, that the sun will rise the next day. It always has and there is no reason to believe that it will just stop all of a sudden. That is faith, trusting that the sun will rise.

2. Car brakes – some of you have your Ls or your Ns! (woot) and you know this well. You know that when press down on the brake pedal in your car, the car will slow down and come to a stop. You are putting your faith in that mechanism that transfers the force from your foot to the brake rotors to slow the wheels. You have a constant outlook of trust and dependance on that. If you didn’t, you likely would not be hopping into a car anytime soon.

3. One more, how about the food in your fridge. It’s there. You trust that your parents will make sure there is food in the fridge for you. They always have and you don’t have many reasons to believe otherwise. You have dependence on that truth.

I hope that gives you a few mental images on what faith looks like. It is really something that is part of our everyday life.

III. Christian Faith

Alright, what is Christian faith then? Anyone?

A constant outlook of trust and dependence on God.

You will notice the shift here, it is obvious. In the previous definition we worked with, the statement does not specify where your trust is placed. It leaves it wide open, faith in creation to follow its patterns (sunrise), faith in machinery (car brakes) etc… you get the idea.

Let’s turn to scripture to give us some examples of faith and then we will look to how we can cultivate our faith in our own life and then in small groups we will focus on those in different ways.

Ephesians 2:8 tells us we are saved by our faith and yet it is a gift from God. There is a whole lot there that we could talk about, but we will (unfortunately) skate over that for the time being. The nugget here is that faith is a gift from God, and although the amount of faith we have does not impact God’s love for us, we have a responsibility to cultivate our faith, and that means to create an environment in which our faith is on a trajectory of growth.

What does Christian faith look like? It looks like Father Abraham with Isaac on the altar. It looks like Jonah preaching to the people at Nineveh (Jonah 4), it looks like Job praising God’s name even when he lost nearly everything (Job 19:25).

Christian faith is having that constant trust that God is who he says he is. I am sure you can imagine what kind of things Abraham was thinking on that climb to the top of the mountain, yet he trusted God knowing that God has a plan.

Let me jump back to the car analogy for a moment to segue into why we need to cultivate our faith. You might buy a car and as a teenager you might buy a car that is a bit of a beater. One that has a tendency to break down from time to time. Now, if you know nothing about how cars work, your faith in that car might be quite small. Many people who know nothing about cars buy cars that are newer so less things go wrong. If you know lots about cars, you might be willing to drive a car with a clunky noise or a grind because you may know that the clunk is really just a worn out strut and the grind is your old brake pads that need to get replaced soon. The more you know about the car the more faith you will have in it. So, if you have a crappy car and no knowledge, you probably need to watch some YouTube videos or talk to someone who knows about cars so that you grow in your knowledge and be able to trust your car a bit more. This analogy breaks down after a while, like many crappy cars HAHA, but you get the idea. The more know about something, the more you will be able to trust it. Think of people who professional diffuse bombs. They know lots about bombs and bomb construction and are able to cut wires with a certain degree of trust in an effort to disarm the explosive. If you or I were there, with no knowledge of bombs, that would be an explosive situation.

Let me share with you 2 reasons WHY we ought to cultivate our faith before we talk about how.

1. Responsibility – it is a gift from God and he wants us to learn and grow in our faith. We have some responsibility to grow in our faith for our sake and the world around. God uses us, his broken and wretched people, the church, to build his kingdom and if we aren’t cultivating our faith we are not loving and serving our neighbors

2. It will sustain us – there are deserts in this life and our faith needs to be strong to sustain in those times when God feels distant.

IV. Cultivating Faith

So then, how ought we cultivate our faith? Scripture gives us four ways: encouragement, prayer, testing, and learning. I am going to go through these briefly and then we will break into small groups and practice some of these.

A. Encouragement:

We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing[3]

Our faith grows by encouraging one another. Each person here has a gift of faith and a long with that gift are unique skills, passions, and abilities that work alongside our faith. When we set our eyes to see one another as sinners who are trying to grow their faith, we can see where are good and others aren’t. A quick story to highlight. My brother in law love the Lord. He serves his wife and kids, he serves his church, and he has lost a fair share of money in his business over the years trying to always be an exemplar of Christ to his workers and his clients. He doesn’t care about the intricacies of theology. He knows that Christ lived, and was crucified for him and he desires to share that good news in his own way. Others are gifted with other skills and abilities. One is not greater, and one is not less, but we need to encourage one another in those areas so that we can grow in faith.

B. Prayer:

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”[4]

This is simple, but oft forgotten. If faith is given as gift from God, why not ask the giver for more. The apostles did! In the same way you might receive a handful of candy from a friend, determine it wasn’t enough, look them and say, “Increase my candy!” the giver has the power to answer that question. Pray for more faith! Pray for understanding, pray for wisdom.

Be careful what you pray for.

C. Testing:

In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” 19

He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised[5]

This is the uncomfortable one and one that usually shows up in people’s testimonies. I think this one is quite evident from the scripture shared and I think is worth unpacking more conversationally in your small groups.

D. Knowledge:

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. 34 He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything. [6]

This is the one that will set our tone for this season of youth group. I want to cultivate our faith by increasing our knowledge of God. Without repeating myself too much, think back to the car analogy – the more knowledge you have of who God is, the more your trust in him will go. If you do not know who God is, why should you trust him? The same thought process can be applied to any personal relationship you have.

Tonight in our small groups we are going to talk about this some more and create some questions we want to answer at youth group. I want to frame some of these questions so that you have some parameters on how to think:

There are 3 categories I think YAFI questions fall into, history, apologetics, and doctrine. The latter two might seem like big words but I will break them down.

A. History: why did that happen? Or When did that happen? Or What happened?

a. You might have questions about historical topics in our faith that relate to the narrative of scripture (Adam to the apostles) or even the early church, reformation period, the enlightenment, etc… These are great questions to ask because many of the struggles that we experience in our faith been struggled through before and we find answers to our questions by looking back

B. Apologetics: How can we know?

a. To do apologetics is to prove the truth of Christian faith. There are many amazing and brilliant people who are apologists and they serve a crucial role in God’s kingdom: helping us know that what we believe is true. These questions are also super helpful because they can answer our own doubts and prepare us to share the Gospel with those placed around us.

C. Doctrine: what does the bible say about, what do we believe about?

a. These are questions that help us understand what the bible actually teaches and how it pertains to life. Sometimes our personal life and sometimes church life, or public life, or marriage, or friendship or whatever. These questions are super helpful in navigating the world around us.

V. Conclusion

I have barely mentioned doubt at all tonight. Usually when discussing faith we also tend to talk about doubt, they go hand in hand and are often thought of as opposites. They aren’t, let me finish with some thoughts about doubt.

We have doubts about our faith. I have doubts about my faith. Some doubts I have had since I am child and some I have had for a short time. Some get answered, some don’t, some, when answered create more doubts.

Doubt is not bad. Doubt is a signal for growth. You may have doubts or questions and you can run from them and put your head in the sand, or you can seek understanding. I want to encourage you to seek understanding. These questions will be used by God to grow your faith in him. There are no bad questions in this regard. Any questions regarding history, apologetics, or doctrine are relevant. We all, partly because we are different ages, but also because God has made us all unique. Some of us care about history, others apologetics, and others doctrine. That is the beautiful thing about church, God has created each one of us with passions and skills that he wants us to use to build his kingdom.

Let me pray for you all before we head off to small groups.

Small Group Discussion

What is Faith and Why Ought we Cultivate it?

Use this time to practice some of the things discussed from the talk. I have organized them in the same way here as I did earlier. I would encourage you to try and work through all of them, but if needed to prioritize, I would prioritize Prayer and Knowledge. Make sure you pray for increased faith together at the end of the group and

1. Testing

a. As leaders, share a personal story when your faith grew through an experience of testing. And then invite students to share either a personal story or maybe a story that they heard before. This will act as a good place to frame your small group conversations

2. Knowledge

a. This is the part where we want to come up with a list of questions to answer. I organized these into three topics, history (why did that thing happen?) apologetics (how can we know…) and doctrine (what does the Bible say about this? Or what do we believe about that)

b. Use those three topics to structure your conversation and create a list of questions.

c. Please hand out small pieces of paper so that students can also submit questions anonymously, we will have a basket to collect those at the end.

3. Encouragement

a. Take time for some hot-seat encouragement. Everyone takes a turn in the hot seat and while there every other person encourages them in their faith by naming something about them that is unique, wonderful, and useful in their Christian walk.

4. Prayer

a. Pray for each other. Pray for each other in any way you like. Pray for increased faith through the previous exercises.

Youth Group Notes

-Criminal Record Checks for all youth leaders except for Brooklyn

- visits – just ask

- Pilgrimage - Jan 1-3, 2021 this year. We leave at 10am on New Years Day.

-

[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Eph 2:8–9). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

[2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (2 Th 1:3). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

[3] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (2 Th 1:3). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

[4] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Lk 17:5). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

[5] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Ro 4:18–21). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

[6] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Mk 4:33–34). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.