Let's be practical about faith

Faith is what connects us to God who is invisible. It is connected to what we believe about God, but that is not the whole of what we call faith. Just focus now on this passage in Eph.2:8,9. "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast." Here it talks of salvation which God offers us freely as a gift, which we cannot earn, and which is totally undeserved. And this passage also talks about our faith through which we receive this salvation. Grace from God's side, and faith from our side. We can receive this salvation freely, but we cannot receive it without faith (Heb.11:6). When Jesus died on the cross, He completed all that God had to do from His side in order to be able to offer this salvation to mankind as a free gift. He paid the penalty for our sins so that we didn't have to pay it ourselves. This was how God met the righteous requirement of the Law by which we deserved to be punished. All of us deserved to be in hell, eternally separated from God because of every single sin we have committed.

Jesus has died for the whole world (1Jn.2:2)! But all people are not saved automatically. That is because there is something man has to have in order to receive it. What remains for everyone to do in order to receive this salvation and become a child of God is to go to Him through faith. Salvation cannot be earned no matter we do, but we can freely receive it through faith. Now we can see how important it is for us to understand what faith means, how to have it, and how to go to God through faith. Salvation is still a gift of grace. We can't earn it by exercising faith. But to receive it from God, we must have faith in Him.

But here is the problem. Practically everyone has some idea in their mind about what faith is, and they are sure that their idea of faith is right! But since the ideas that different people have are different, all of them can't be right, can they? Perhaps some of us are just following what our parents believed, or accepting what some teacher has said. If our faith is our connection to God and eternity, can we afford to be mistaken about it? We can go wrong at three levels. What we believe about God can be wrong, what we understand about faith may be wrong, and how we apply faith may be wrong. So, let us look at faith from these practical considerations.

What we believe about God
Of course, God is not what we make up through our imagination, but He is the One who has no beginning or end, and who has created all the universe that we see now. Many people have wondered about God, and some of them have brought out what they considered to be possible descriptions of God, by talking about their ideas or writing. But what we can easily see is that people all over the world have their own stories and ideas about God, and they are all different because these ideas have come from their own imagination! It is plain that all religions are not leading to the same God, as some people teach.

But this approach is to go backwards. God is the One who created us, and we small, finite creatures are trying to figure Him out. What we need is for God to describe to us who and what He is. So, instead of looking at what different people have imagined about God, let us start looking for what God has revealed to mankind. This is what the Bible does.

Here God tells us how He created the whole universe of galaxies, stars, planets, animals, fish, birds, and finally man. God tells us about His original plan for man, and how man messed it up by disobeying God and going after his own greatness. Then God tells us about the plan He made to bring man back to Himself through sacrificing Himself. God also tells us about the future, how this world is going to end and how He will place those who follow Him on a new earth under a new heaven! Here we see God as almighty, all-knowing, all-wise, ever-present, holy, righteous, just and impartial. There is no other book like the Bible.

But there are other books also that claim to be revelations from God. So how can we be sure that the Bible is the true revelation from God? The biggest proof for me to show that the Bible is the inspired word from God to man is that He supernaturally transforms people who go to it, seeking Him sincerely. History is full of people whose sinful lives have been transformed after they came to God through reading the Bible. There are many prophecies in the Bible that have been fulfilled even centuries after they were announced. This includes detailed prophecies about the coming of Jesus, His birth, death and resurrection. The miracles that Jesus did, healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding multitudes with a few loaves of bread and fish, etc., signify to the fact that He was indeed what He said He was, the Messiah to the Jews according to prophecy and the Son of Man who came to die for the sins of the world. Even though the Bible is a collection of 66 books written over a period of 1500 years by 40 different authors from different parts of the world, it carries a single story throughout the Bible about God's dealings with man, showing us that God was the One who inspired these writers. One man who did a comparative study on the teachings of the major religions of the world concluded that the Christian faith is the only one that is cohesive, consistent, fitting with reality and which makes overall sense.

The Christian faith is for everyone who wants to know God personally, get into a relationship with Him and experience salvation from sin. There is no other book like this.

What is faith?
God is a personal Being, and to have faith in Him is to trust Him as God. We trust Him when we know Him and become convinced that He can be trusted. This usually happens when we get to know Him through someone's preaching or reading the Bible by oneself, when someone tells us about their experience with God or through books or other media, or sometimes when He answers one of our prayers miraculously.

Those who see God for who He is and what He has done for us in giving His Son on the cross for our salvation find it easy to trust Him. They are willing to hand over the control over their life to Him, obey Him in everything that He tells them, and follow Jesus all the way as His disciples (2Cor.5:15). These actions show the reality of their trust in God and their commitment to Him. God responds to them by giving them the Holy Spirit to dwell in them in order to help and lead them.

But we can observe easily that there are many differences among what people trust God for. Some people have come to God for healing, and some others for receiving different types of blessings for them. Some of them have come to so expect God to give these blessings that they are even willing to sacrifice money and energy. But the true Gospel is about God paying the penalty for our sins and offering a way of salvation for us to be restored to Him. This was the message the angel Gabriel told Joseph about the Baby Jesus Mary was going to have (Matt.1:21). When people have not responded to this Gospel but only about Jesus healing the sick and solving all our problems, they have actually not become Christians. The gap that sin causes between God and man still exists for them, and they have not been made right with God (Isa.59:1,2).

False types of faith
We have already seen one kind of faith that appears to be genuine but which has not touched the basic problem of sin between God and man. It is not wrong to have faith in Jesus for healing, but then once they come to Jesus, they should learn more about Him through the Bible, and they should respond to the Gospel through repentance and faith in Jesus as their Saviour. The problem is when people have not repented from sin but they still imagine they have faith in Jesus.

Many children who grow up in Christian homes go to Sunday School and church meetings, and they attend festivals like Christmas, Good Friday and Easter. So they have heard some form of the Gospel and they believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the Saviour of the world. But many of them have not seen themselves as sinners who will be lost without Jesus, and this kind of knowledge will only remain at the intellectual level in their mind. It is very common for such people to imagine that because they accept Jesus as God and go to church, they are acceptable to God. They may also think that they have not committed any major sins and therefore God must be pretty happy with them.

But every sin they have committed, whether they think they were minor or not, were enough to separate them from the holy God. Remember, God told Adam and Eve that the day they sinned they would die. They died physically many years later. But immediately after they sinned, they got spiritually separated from God and lost all fellowship with Him. This separation from God is spiritual death. Till people admit their sins and their sinfulness to God, and ask for forgiveness on the basis of Christ's substitutionary sacrifice for them, they cannot be forgiven, and they cannot be Christians.

There are many people who think they have accepted the God of the Bible as their God, but who imagine that finally, on the Day of Judgment, God will see if their good deeds outweighed their sins and they will be taken to heaven based on that. These people also consider themselves to be Christians. But they too have not seen themselves as sinners before God and believed in Jesus as their Saviour, as the only One who could save them from their sins.

For many people, their understanding of faith is that they should believe something without doubting. If they want to be healed, they try to make themselves believe that God is going to heal them. If they want some problem to be solved, they try hard to believe that God is going to solve that problem for them. In order to reach such a level of faith, they quote Bible verses repeatedly, avoid people who might plant doubts in their mind, etc., till they think they have achieved the level of faith that is required. But here we can see that their trust is in their faith rather than in God. God does not want us to create faith by manipulating our mind. He wants us to trust Him to do for us what He promises. Suppose we want Him to do something for us and He has not promised it to us, can we make Him do it for us still by creating enough faith in our mind? No. We cannot force God to do anything. But when we trust God, we trust in His love for us and also in His wisdom to know what will be good for us in every situation. Once we have that trust, there is also peace and rest. When we have agitation in our mind when we are putting pressure on God to do what we want, we must see that our trust is not in God but in ourselves.

Think of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego who stood before Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. The king had made a golden statue and had asked everyone to bow down before it. The punishment for disobedience was to be thrown into a fiery furnace. These three Hebrew men knew that they could not bow down before any idol, and they told the king, "O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to give you an answer concerning this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up" (Dan.3:16-18). This was their trust in God, believing that God was able to save them, but at the same time also willing to submit to the wisdom of God gladly even if they were not going to be saved. This is faith, or trust in God as Someone whom they could trust, even with their life.

If we don't trust Him, we don't really believe in Him. Remember what happened when the people of Israel came to the border of the Promised Land. When they saw that there were giants in that land, they forgot all the miracles God had done for them in Egypt and along the way. They could not trust Him to keep His promise for the Promised Land and to deal with the giants. All that they thought was their belief in God was now shown to be shallow. When it came to the test, they could not trust in Him. They did not really have faith in Him. They all perished in the desert.

Now if we believe in Jesus, do we trust Him in such a way that we can hand over our life to Him? Will we trust Him and obey Him when we feel like doing something else? Will we order our life in every detail when we know that once day we will have to give an account to Him (Rom.14:12)? Will we trust Him when obedience to Him may cause us loss or hurt in this life? The answers to such questions will show us if our faith is genuine.

Let us look at one more wrong understanding of faith before we move on. Some people think that there is supernatural power in their words, and that they can make things happen by speaking out what they want to happen. But this is a big blunder. We are not gods, but only mere created beings, and we don't have any such supernatural power. This is a modern heresy called 'word of faith' based on a wrong interpretation of Prov.18:21 that says, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue, And those who love it will eat its fruit." Remember, this is only a proverb that describes some common truths in figurative ways rather than a promise of God, and all it means is that we must be careful what we speak, because it can have serious consequences. Just think, and you will see that we have no power to give life to someone or kill someone with our words! What we need to do when we wish something to happen is to ask God for that in prayer (Php.4:6). If we trust God, we will be willing to leave the final decision to Him.

How to receive faith
Once we understand that faith in God means to trust in God, it must be obvious that the way to have faith and also to grow in faith is by getting to know God better. We can do that by reading the Bible, talking to God through prayer, talking together with other disciples, etc. But remember, it is not sufficient to grow in knowledge about God, but we need to have a personal relationship with Him. For this to happen, it is important that we allow the new things we learn from the Bible to transform our practical life. Then we will get to know God through experience, and we begin to see more and more that His word is also trustworthy.

"So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ" (Rom.10:17). This is not merely talking about listening to someone speaking from the word of God, but about hearing from God in our heart directly. For example, when we are reading the Bible, we find that suddenly some word stands out for us, and we see that it is just what we needed for our particular situation at that time. This is to hear God. Or another time when we are facing some special situation, the Holy Spirit brings to our mind some particular word of God that is suitable for us. It can also be that the Holy Spirit gives some idea in our heart at times in order to guide us. All such experiences help us to trust in God and His word more.

It is also important to point out a particular warning that is relevant for the times we are living in. The spiritual gift of prophecy seems to have got the fancy of many people, and many seem to be very eager to guide other people with that gift. If someone comes to you and says that God told him to tell you something for your direction, for example, who you should marry, which job you must take, where you must relocate to, how much money you should give to the church, etc., you need to hold on. Why is it that God is not telling you directly something He wants to tell you as your Father, but sending you someone else to tell you? Have you gone away from God so that you are no longer able to hear God? What you need to do is to go and ask God what He thinks about this, whether it was He who sent you this message. Otherwise, blind faith in prophecy can lead you into foolish situations (1Thess.5:20,21)

Without faith, it is impossible to please God. We cannot receive salvation from God without faith. So we must make sure that our faith in God is genuine trust in Him, and that we are growing in faith and in wisdom.