Without faith, it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6)

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going (Hebrews 11:8).

Jesus Christ is the same – yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

Faith can sound like a fairy tale. A grain of it as small as a mustard seed is enough to move Mount Rushmore into neighboring Nebraska (Mat. 17:20, somewhat adapted). Faith can also seem to be a matter of substantial human endeavor. If YOU only believe, you can have whatever you ask (Mat. 21:22). And sometimes it strikes us as a kind of crap shoot that veers between the grand mustard-seed vision and the burdensome idea that it all depends on me. You were healed; I wasn’t. My sister prayed for and got a new job; my best friend didn’t. I asked God and found the best parking space at last week’s Michigan football game; you walked 3 miles just to reach the park-and-ride. Who had more faith? Or better faith? Or believed harder? Or was favored by the God of Parking Spaces?

Why does faith present such difficulties for us? To go back to my previous post, the center of our problems with faith come at the center. What is faith about? Above all, it is about the God who gives the gift. About who he is and what he has done. About his glory and his greatness. About his sovereign ability to bring grace into our lives regardless of what transpires within or without us. We lose all perspective when we make faith about us, or think that it comes from us, or look for results that please us or conform to our vision of what life should be.

At its heart, the gift of faith is a bridge to experiencing the love and power of God in a relationship where we grow to trust him with the entirety of our existence. The outcome of faith is not a christianized version of a successful life, even though there is a strong strain of such distortion seducing believers in some churches. Paul puts it this way: God has given Jesus’ disciples the call and ability to obey him by the dynamic, transforming presence of faith in their lives. (Rom. 1:5 and 16:26). To believe and trust (and then obey) the Lord means, in its broadest sense, three things:

First, having an ongoing awareness of the Holy Spirit bringing faith into our lives, communicating God’s greatness and goodness. Second, giving ourselves to the presence of faith and receiving its power. And, third, allowing God to be our reference point for our desires and decisions; to determine how we think of ourselves and how we relate to how others think of us; to empower how we express our identity as his children, reflecting his nature and “shining as lights in a dark place.” Here we have arrived at the scriptural claim that “without faith, it is impossible to please God.” And yet we can equally see that the saying could be, “without God, it is impossible to have faith” (and so please God).

God – and not us – as the focus of faith is comprehensive and cures us of “I” disease at every level of our lives. The work of faith in us is crucial for rightly interpreting our past, present, and future. For example, when we think about our past, we can take on two possible mindsets. One is painful and self-oriented. The other is God-and grace-filled and outlined. The first has no reference to faith. Its primary characteristics, depending on our experiences and personalities, can run the gamut of regret, incompleteness, loss, bitterness, blame, wistfulness, or resentment. We might direct any or all of these at ourselves, at others, or even at God himself.

My anti-faith lens of choice is the wish-dream of regret. Would that I were different, or have acted in a “better” way. Used my gifts more productively. Become a man of more notable influence. Not wasted time and energy on folly. Avoided the snares of temptation that I now understand as leading to death. I know men and women who allow other defective points of view to obscure their understanding of how God regards their past. Some merely like to revise, to overlook, to idealize: Nothing to see here. Others – the abused, the un-parented, the un-friended, the passed-over -carry and even revisit the scars of their not-very-tender years until God is just a bit player in their dramas.

In these distortions is a sense of discontinuity (or false continuity for those who gloss over the past). It’s not that I don’t love my testimony. And yet, perhaps even more as time goes on, I am sometimes uncomfortable with the disparity between the two “halves” of my existence. I cast my gaze upon what was, and feel that I was a disappointment, a disturber of divine destiny. Who was that unmasked man, and where was God in all the mess? I realize that this happens to be my own (and perhaps somewhat male) orientation. For others, it may be that the Father could not have been present in experiences that diverge so much in their memories from the ideal of a blessed life. Whatever the manifestation, there is some kind of core denial at work behind our illusions. A denial occasioned by suffering, by disappointment, by fear of discovering the truth about who we or others were.

What’s behind such thinking is hard to grasp. Perhaps for me there’s a sense that I should have been worthy of the grace that came to me at conversion. Regret accuses me of not performing, not being good enough. And then it goes further and at least hints that God might not have been good enough, either. I don’t go to the place that says that he was not ABLE to be good, but there is sometimes a nagging thought that he chose not to be. The same seems to occur with those of us who endured deep suffering. As for any who see the past as our halcyon days, or who are happy to protect ourselves by burying it, the reckoning with reality will come, usually after years of beating our heads and hearts against the wall of who we really are.

A view from the vantage point of faith sees very differently. Faith looks at a life and recognizes a unified sovereignty, one that overcomes the foibles and follies, as well as the too-weak goodness of our pre-surrender lives. Faith doesn’t use the evidence of our failures, or the failures of others, to judge God’s character. Instead, it recognizes the Lord’s nature – his goodness, kindness, and grace – as the very power that not only blunts what is worst in us and diminishes what most strongly comes against us, but as that providence that creates and sustains a purpose that we could not make, or even imagine for ourselves.

The challenge for us in perceiving ourselves and our past as God does comes from not having his eternal sight. The way to overcome the challenge is in itself a challenge: To put away our myopia and the resulting unbelief, and to receive and hold tightly to God’s own faith. And then, through faith, to take firm grasp of the Lord himself – like the woman desperate to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. To thus embrace the Father draws us out of ourselves and corrects our   We no longer regret, or fear, or ignore, or idealize, or rail against the past. Instead, we can own it, and own who we were and the healing for what was out of joint (and that we sometimes continue to carry).

Living in God’s past is a great freedom, most obviously because it opens a door to a greater taste of his grace for the present. And that’s an open door that we’ll walk into next week. Until then, may we find new eyes to see more clearly the great God who knows the end from the beginning in every life that he has created.