Vital faith
Mark 16: 15 – 18; Heb 10: 35 – 11: 6
Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 09 February, 2003

HEB 10:35 SO DO not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. 36 You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.

38 For in just a very little while,
“He who is coming will come and will not delay.
38 But my righteous one will live by faith.
And if he shrinks back,
I will not be pleased with him.”
39 But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved.
HEB 11:1 Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.
3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
4 By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith he still speaks, even though he is dead.
5 By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death; he could not be found, because God had taken him away. For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. 6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. (NIV)

Today I am talking about the value of faith, and I believe that one of the most powerful passages about faith is this very passage that we have just heard.

Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

Our world doesn't understand faith. But, just to survive life, we exercise faith daily. Even atheists, pagans and cultists use faith just to survive. Faith is not the real issue. The issue is, “What is the proper object of faith?”
But we will start by looking at what faith is not; then we will try to picture the leap of pure faith. Next we proceed to look at where faith fits in life, and we conclude by asking about the object of faith.

WHAT FAITH IS NOT
People regularly write to newspapers rubbishing faith. They call it “An irrational leap.” They joke about people who commit their lives to something that doesn’t exist. They accuse us of acting against all reason.
I don’t like their smug arrogance. They are wrong. They confuse the leap of faith with the senseless acts of a madman. Faith goes beyond mere reason, but isn’t unreasonable.

But before I tackle that, I want to mention something else that faith is not.

Faith has little to do with those booklets or slide-shows of beautiful pictures or religious mottos. It doesn't matter how breathtakingly picturesque they are, or how much they sound comforting and religious.
In 18th century Germany, people put cute wood carvings on the wall, each with a pious saying carved in. They even have a word for the style: “Biedermeyer”.
Underneath the kitsch, the message is that faith has to do with feeling at ease, with all the dirt and all the unattractive things in life swept away. It's a romantic view, a pink chiffon and marzipan-icing picture of life.

Often when so-called irreligious people think about faith, that is what they imagine. Where is prettiness at Calvary? What place has unthinking piety at the cross? Who needs an emotional and un-examined faith? Thinking people react against it. Then they imagine that all believers are like that underneath.
Biblical Christianity is far tougher, far more oriented to the real world, than that.

By all means, communicate truth in a pleasant way; but it's so easy to fall over the edge into romantically unthinking piety and a religiosity that passes itself off as faith. Show people the real thing — a faith about bravery and sacrifice, about blood, sweat and tears.

THE LEAP OF PURE FAITH
There is a time in everyone’s life when you have to make a leap of pure faith, and, as the atheists would say, that leap itself is irrational.
Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

But there’s a difference between faith and mere blind irrationality.

I worked with a migrant woman. She and her husband were still struggling to settle. Our boys were little then, and we were battling, too.
The house next to where we worked was being demolished for an office block. And this lady was eyeing off a few of the fittings and furnishings. She asked the builders, and they said, “Take whatever you want, as long as it is out by the weekend.”
She knew I wouldn’t look down on her for scrounging, so she asked me to help her get what she wanted. She wouldn’t go onto a building site alone.
Getting in was hard. The steps were already gone. She needed help to climb in. Getting out was worse... not bad for me, but very undignified in a skirt and high heels. Jumping could break a heel or even a leg.

We decided that she would put her hands on my shoulders and jump, and I would catch her. She wasn’t very big.
It wasn’t like in the movies. She nearly knocked me over. But nothing got broken.

That jump was an irrational act. She had no guarantee that I would catch her, or even try to catch her. She didn’t know that I wouldn’t just decide to walk away, finding it all too hard. She jumped without any proofs and guarantees. My atheist friend would call it irrational.

Yet wasn’t it perfectly sensible for her to do that? We knew each other. She knew I could be trusted to do what I said I would. We had worked together long enough; we knew each other well enough, that she knew I thought of her welfare, and would protect her.
From that angle, she did what was perfectly reasonable. She saved herself a lot of bother by trusting me. She acted in faith that I would do everything for her safety and comfort.

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see

Christian faith is like that. I might sing,

On my way to heaven,
I shall not be moved...

but I can’t give you a scientific proof that faith in Jesus will take me to heaven.
I might say,
“The Lord will carry me through this crisis”, but how do I know?

Life doesn’t give me the luxury of absolute proof. It doesn’t even often give me any hint of what will come next. All I can do, all anyone can do, is to act in faith.

If you look for absolute proof, you will never find it, because life isn't like that. Only a scientific laboratory is ever like that, because science is about eliminating all the uncertainties until all you are left with are the certainties.
You don’t see crash test dummies driving up and down the Hume Highway. Well, you do see dummies who are heading for a crash test in their Subaru WRX with rude words for a number plate, but you know what I mean.
They don’t send crash test dummies onto the Highway, because who can be sure if an injury is due to the crash itself, or to a pothole that the car hit before crashing? So they use testing laboratories where the floor is dead flat, there are no crosswinds, and no one tries to pass while you are trying to crash. That’s as close to absolute proof that you get, when all the uncertainties are removed.

But I don’t live in a crash testing laboratory. I crash test life on the Highway and in the home and walking through the office. And I mostly don’t have a clue what happened.

So this brings us to the third main part of this sermon.

WHERE FAITH FITS IN LIFE
In the first place, I want to talk about the less religious aspects of faith, and move to the more religious, more traditional aspects. So,
You need faith to live an ordinary life
You need faith to live an extraordinary life
and, for the more religious aspect,
You need faith to live a supernatural life.

AN ORDINARY LIFE OF FAITH
Our family has experienced a lot of grief in the past couple of months. Yesterday, my wife’s mother died. 9 weeks previously, my father-in-law died. For each of us those losses have a different impact.
One thing is certain, you need faith to handle such crises. They are everyday crises in some respects. We expected the losses. We have prepared for over 2 years. On the other hand, the families that lost members in last week's train disaster at Waterfall had no warning.

Yet, whether you had preparation or not, whether you lose all your family in a single blow, or you lose one member after a long and losing struggle, however it happened, it is an everyday kind of crisis. Everyone faces it at some time, everyone has to live through it.

I knew an old lady whose manic–depressive daughter lived at home. We all worried what would happen when the old lady died.
It’s a big issue in some families. Some members constantly live on the edge. How do they cope, unless they exercise faith?
What about the people who support them? When the turning point looms, they face the possibility that everything will turn to chaos. How can they go on with life, but by faith?

Let me tell you that, every time you get dressed and go to do the daily shopping, you exercise faith — faith that the shops will open, faith that you will not be obliterated by an alien attack, faith that your project will succeed. If you had no faith, you would not even get out of bed. You would lie in until you died.

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see

Christian faith is much more than the mere faith in constancy and goodness that most people have.
Whenever the road of life is rough and steep, you need faith that somehow God will get you through.

AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF FAITH
If you are a Christian believer, you know that your life is about more than just muddling through. You know you were created to do something out of the ordinary.

By faith Telemachus leaped into the Roman arena and ended centuries of killing for entertainment.
By faith John Chrisostomos confronted the sins of the Empress in Constantinople, and was banished for his pains.
By faith a failed Anglican missionary stepped out into the streets and fields of England and became the great Methodist Apostle, John Wesley.
By faith Gladys Aylward went to China as a missionary when no mission society would take her; she vanquished armies, evaded the Japanese, and rescued hundreds of orphans.
By faith Neph... by faith, Gwen... by faith, Paul... by faith Joyce... by faith... by faith... what are you going to do with your life by faith? What difference are you about to make to our world?

Without faith, you will never really start. Faith is at its most real when it feels the least like faith. When you are afraid, when you are facing a task to great, that’s when you need faith in someone greater than yourself to carry you through.

When I stood alone as a 20 year old and preached to a tough–seeming bunch of teens, I didn’t feel that any faith was at work. I felt terror and a rumbling feeling throughout my abdomen. But I exercised faith, I used faith, and that’s what counts.

When the time comes to do your next mightier work, you will need faith, because faith is what gets you started.

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see

A SUPERNATURAL LIFE OF FAITH
If you want to know that your sins are washed away, you need faith. If you want to know that you are on your way to heaven, you need faith, too.
Without faith, it is impossible to please God.

I can’t dip you into an indicator solution and wait ten minutes until it dries and turns red if your sins aren’t forgiven and white if they are. All anyone can do is to ask for forgiveness and trust that they have it through Jesus our Lord.

I can’t ask you to show your tickets and inspect what you have to make sure that each one is a genuine pass to heaven. All anyone can do is to ask, and trust that they are heaven–bound through Jesus our Lord.

When we sing Old Time Religion, we sing, "It will do when I am dying" last, because true religion is more about living than about dying. But we need faith when the grave opens wide to receive us. I can’t know absolutely, but I can know by faith that the promises are mine.

THE OBJECT OF FAITH
The mother of the little girl whose clothes caught fire at the copper was convinced that she did the right thing by throwing a dish of clear, colourless liquid over her. A pity it was kerosene. It was accidents like that that made them put the blue into kerosene.
But that mother acted in faith. It was just a misplaced faith.

We read,

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

We all exercise faith in a vague sense of goodness and continuity in the universe. But we need something stronger. We need a God who exists and rewards our search; we need a Christ who died in the pursuit of God’s will in his life, and who rose again as total proof that his mission was accomplished.

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see

And this is so, because Christ died, Christ rose, and Christ shall come again. We have a faith that overcomes the world, because it is the faith of Jesus Christ.
If you don’t have that kind of faith, talk to me straight after we close!
AMEN