Faith in practice

Hebrews 11 is known as the chapter of faith. It is the go to when someone is asking what is faith, how do I see it in practice, or what would that look like in my life. Yesterday I went on a hike. I have been on this same hike a few times before so I was familiar with the trail, I was familiar with how to get to the places I needed to go. In all senses of the word faith, I did not demonstrate faith in this hiking. However, without fail, there is a point in this hike where exhaustion sets in and I don’t know how I am going to keep pushing myself to get to the top. Every time without fail, I make it. I have never been stuck and given up. I give credit to God for the strength to keep going where my physical body is worn out. Yet I have a certain confidence going into these moments. Why? Because I trust God every time I go. I know with certainty, God will help me through this. I have this assurance demonstrated in the past that God will be with me. I have confidence in God to help me get through the difficult parts.

There are times in life where we know everything we need to know. I knew how to get to the park I was going to hike in. I knew which trails to take to get to the falls which was my furthest point into the park trails. While I am not in the worst shape of my life, I am not in the greatest shape either. I packed lunch, snacks, and plenty of water. I packed what I thought I would need to sustain me and give me enough energy.

However, in this hike the same as life, our best preparations still often come up short. We often don’t fully understand the tasks we are embarking on. Or we underestimate the effort it will take to accomplish it. Or some other way we are not prepared enough. In some cases, the unknowns come into play and derail our plans.

In my hike, I made the best preparations I could but climbing but up the mountainside, I was still running out of energy. I was still exhausted and my mind was getting foggy. And yes, don’t forget the unknowns called thunderstorms that we thought we were well ahead of.

While we had ponchos to try and keep us dry, they did the opposite. if you have ever worn a poncho is the hot summer with rain, you know what I am talking about. You pour sweat like crazy. While I was protected from the rain, the heat under the poncho from my body working hard made me pour sweat and struggle to breathe. I could not walk far without getting a stitch in my side and trying to breathe and catch my breath.

With a break in the rain, I was able to take the poncho off and this helped. In some ways, I think the poncho made my journey more difficult. As I was talking this over with Jacob, we both realized we were more soaked from the sweat under the poncho than the rain would have made us.

As you see me here today, I made it through the journey and have not sworn off hiking. However, each time I go, there is a bit of growing that happens in me as I learn about the twists and turns and unpredictability of certain things in life.

If you look at Abrahams story, God called him to go to an unknown place and stay for a promise that he would not see in his lifetime. He and many others are given in this chapter to demonstrate faith in their lives. How do we translate their examples into our own lives?

As I was studying this passage, it helps to understand how we experience faith in our lives. We talk about it but sometimes miss how it is different than what we use to experience the world by. One bible scholar describes faith as ”Faith extends beyond what we learn from our senses, and the author is saying that it has its reasons. Its tests are not those of the senses, which yield uncertainty” (Expositors Bible Commentary)

In other ways, it helps to define what faith is not like what I started out describing my hike by. In my hike there were things beyond my physical senses that intervened. All the things I had control over were not faith. It was when I was in those moments where my physical senses were telling me one thing, and God was telling me differently.

This same bible scholar described faith in this way

“In the Greek the verb “is” (estin) is the first word. Faith is a present and continuing reality. It is not simply a virtue sometimes practiced in antiquity. It is a living thing, a way of life the writer wishes to see continued in the practice of his readers...

meaning is that there are realities for which we have no material evidence though they are not the less real for that. Faith enables us to know that they exist and, while we have no certainty apart from faith, faith does give us genuine certainty.” (EBC)

Faith is where it crosses over into the unseen as the author of Hebrews points out. Where we can derive no sense of certainty based on our own senses or abilities, faith is the counter to this and gives us certainty when there is no evidence for certainty.

Yet we ask the question, if we cannot see, we cannot prove certainty of, how do we deal with life? Faith is where our hope to deals with the uncertainty of life.

Going back to the bible scholar I mentioned earlier he says

“The meaning would then be that faith, in addition to being the basis of all that we hope for, is that by which we test things unseen. We have no material way of assessing the significance of the immaterial. But Christians are not helpless. They have faith and by this they test all things” (EBC)

Yes, he does say we test by faith. You have heard me say many times that we must trust in God more than we trust in ourselves. This is how faith is enacted in our lives.

You see Abraham did not know where God was leading him, yet by trusting God, Abraham went by faith to test God to see where he was leading. In other word, God if you are saying to go to this place, I will go to test and see if you are leading me to good. As you can imagine, when Abraham got to this land, he became very prosperous. Abraham had tested God by walking in faith to see whether God was leading him to a promised land of prosperity and security. Abraham was able to stay and grow his family by faith in this promised land. Abraham tested by faith God’s ability to produce an heir. Isaac was born. Abraham tested God by faith when he was asked to sacrifice Isaac that God would still somehow provide an heir despite the hardship of Isaac being his only son born miraculously in old age.

This is how our faith in action looks too. Where is God calling you to go? Are you willing to go to test God by faith? In other words, you may have no certainty for what lies ahead if you answer God’s calling, yet by faith, test God to see what good He has in store ahead.

What is God calling you to stand up against? Moses’s parents defied Pharaoh. Moses defied Pharoah. There was no certainty with the plans Moses left to go back to Egypt that any of it would make a different with the Israelites or with Pharoah. Yet Moses answered God’s call to go and stand up against Pharoah. Moses tested by faith God’s ability to produce something he could not see because God asked him to stand up against Pharoah.

Where is God calling you to care for others? If we look at the disciples and the crowd of 5,000 hungry people and a few loaves and fish, how they also tested in faith Jesus’ ability to feed these people with so little to work with. We often face this same dilemma that we have little resources so it won’t make much difference. Yet, if God is calling you to care for others, where are you willing to test God by faith, that your little will be transformed into something that makes a difference?

We sometimes get caught up in saying we should not test God but faith is taking God on his Word and then watching to see what he does when we go where he leads, stand against what he asks us to, and care for those he asks us to. Faith is about trusting God and at the same time watching to see what God does with our faith we place in him.

Today I ask you, where are placing your faith? If you are unsure how to trust God, come forward to the altar and ask God for help to trust in him. If you are unsure where God is calling you to go, come forward and ask God to show you. If you are unsure what injustice or oppression you are to stand up against, come to the altar and ask God who you should be standing up for. If you are unsure who God is calling you to care for, come to the altar and ask God to show you.