How Faith Works

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:23-31; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

When I was a young boy, I often watched Westerns on television. Of course, given my age, I had a distorted view of the Westerns, since I was born a few years too late for the golden age of the Westerns on television. My Westerns were Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and those two oddball Westerns – the Wild, Wild West, and F-Troop.

If you’ve ever watched a Western, you know that there were certain stereotypes you could count on – the good guys wore white hats, the bad guys wore black hats, there was a strong leading man who was a great shot, six-shot revolvers held 22 bullets, and the Native American Indians were unpredictable. You also knew that in the last ten minutes of the show or movie, the hero or heroes will get pinned down in a firefight, surrounded by Indians or outlaws, when suddenly you’d hear a bugle sound the charge and the undefeatable United States Cavalry would charge to the rescue.

You could always count on the Cavalry to arrive just when things were getting bad. In fact, you had a tremendous faith in the goodness and the integrity of the young Cavalry commander, who always managed to show up with a company of men on horseback with rifles and carbines blazing. The Cavalry were going to be there – you could count on it. In fact, if the Cavalry did not rescue the good guys, we considered it to be a strange episode. We had such faith in the Cavalry.

And we even see this in more modern movies. At the end of Saving Private Ryan, the tanks show up just in time to rescue the good guys. And much the same thing happens in our crime dramas – twenty uniformed cops show up just in time to rescue the detectives. It is something embedded deep into our consciousness that says this is the way things are supposed to be. A great and powerful force rescues us from our certain death – and we have great faith in that force, whether it be the Cavalry, the tanks, the boys-in-blue – or in God.

Abraham was told by God that he would become the father of a nation. In fact, God changed his name from Abram, which means “exalted father”, to Abraham, which means “father of many”. His wife’s name was changed from Sarai, which means “my princess” – almost a pet name that emphasizes Abraham’s love for Sarai, to Sarah, which means simply “princess” or “noblewoman”, a more substantial title which emphasizes her position in the nation of people descended from her. It is from these two people that both Jews and Arabs claim descent.

God said to him, 4 “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram[b]; your name will be Abraham,[c] for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you.

How joyful! To a man who had no children, this was a wonderful promise. There was only one problem with this picture. Abraham was 99 years old at the time, and Sarah was nearly the same age. And yet, they are to have children?

We look back in time and we know the end of the story. We know that Abraham did have two sons, and from his grandson Jacob came the twelve tribes of Israel, which about 500 years later numbered around 600,000 people.

Yet, Abraham did not know the end of the story. Yet, as Paul says when writing his letter to the Romans, “18 Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him…”

It has been said that faith is another word for “relationship”. Abraham had a relationship with God by this time. He trusted God – and he knew that God had the power to do what God promised. So if God said that at the end of Abraham’s life he would have children, then Abraham trusted that he would have children, just as we trusted that the Cavalry would arrive in time to rescue the good guys in those Westerns.

Faith, you see, requires trust. It requires that the One in which we have faith can safely be trusted. And in order to trust someone, we must see in them an integrity where we know that the promises they make are promises they will attempt to fulfill. In other words, the One in which we have faith must have a deep integrity, demonstrated to us over time.

God has that integrity. We see that integrity in many different ways. First, we see that our Universe still exists. God created the Universe and maintains it. If God were to stop maintaining the Universe, it would collapse and disappear in less than a second.

The Deists were a group of men from the late 1700’s who believed that God created the Universe and then walked away, letting it function like a giant machine, but not paying any further attention to it. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson may have been Deists. But the Deists were wrong. Our modern science of quantum mechanics has shown us that something amazing happens at the atomic level, that a negatively charged electron circles a positively charged nucleus in each atom.

Yet, according to everything we know, those electrons should spiral into the nucleus in less than second, and all the atoms in the Universe should collapse. And yet this hasn’t happened. And so the physicists simply tell us that the electrons don’t spiral in and instead circle the nucleus, but, speaking as a physicist, we really don’t know why. We know how those electrons behave, but they don’t behave the way they ought to behave. And so quantum mechanics describes how they behave, but can’t explain why.

But speaking as a theologian, the answer is simple. God actively maintains the Universe and keeps it functioning. Why? Perhaps because God cares for us? Every second that we exist is further proof of the integrity of God, God’s essential goodness, God’s essential honesty.

A child gets bored of a pet and might let it starve. But a man or woman with integrity knows that when you take on a pet, you have made a life-long commitment to that pet, promising to feed it and protect it and – when the end comes – help it to die without suffering.

God has integrity. God keeps the promises God makes.

There is another aspect to this faith. For most people, while we may have trust in the honesty of a person, we may question their power to keep their promises. For example, last week, a UPS truck caught fire in Anmore and the contents of the truck were destroyed – all of the packages. UPS has excellent honesty – but that fire kept those packages from being delivered. UPS did not have the power to prevent that fire.

Yet God has the power to deliver on God’s promises. Any promise God makes will be kept. And so, we can have faith in God.

But how and why does faith in God make a difference in this Universe? To understand, we must go back to the Garden of Eden and the Fall. You will recall that God put a tree in the Garden and said to Adam: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

In the Garden, the direct cause of Eve eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil were the words of the serpent.

He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

The issue, you see was trust. It was Eve’s lack of trust – her lack of faith – in the goodness of God that led her to fall for the serpent’s words.

Eve did like we all do – we decided to trust in the created things of this world and the words of those creatures rather than have faith in what God had said. It even happened to Peter, and Peter tried to make it happen to Jesus:

31 He [Jesus] then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. 32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Following human concerns – following the ways of the world that we’ve been taught as we grew up by our friends, our classmates, our teachers, our television, our movies, our books, and even in many cases by our parents – is can lead us to trouble. Jesus was so upset about Peter being caught up in the ways of the world that Jesus even called Peter “Satan”, the name of the devil.

When we face the world and look toward it and trust in what it teaches us, we can do no better than the rest of the world. And in much of the world, we see the effects of the world’s teaching – war, violence, hunger, disease, poverty, depression, hopelessness, and sadness. Why do these things happen in the world?

It is mainly because most people substitute fear for faith in God. Fear frightens us. When we are frightened, we do stupid things. We don’t look at the long view and instead we take the short view. Our fear leads us to become angry because we can’t control our future – or hand it over to a loving God who can control that future. And when we become angry, we gradually begin to hate. When we hate, we do things that injure others, and this leads to suffering – more and more suffering. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.

But when we truly have faith in what God’s promises are, God also knows then that God can trust us. And for some reason, as we increase in our faith, we see God’s actions more clearly. And as we see God’s actions more clearly, our faith in God grows stronger and stronger. And the cycle continues and we become more confident. When we face God, we do godly things.

For ultimately, our faith in God is like our faith that the Cavalry will arrive just in the nick of time. When we deeply believe that God will show up in time, we lose our fear. Faith destroys fear. And thus the cycle is broken. Our growing trust and friendship in God is our faith and this removes our fear. And with faith instead of fear, we have patience. With patience comes planning and wisdom and the doing of good things.

Let me give you an example of two families.

Fred and Harriett have two kids. One day, Harriet discovers that her neighbor has a bare pantry – no food in the house. Harriet thinks about giving her some food or money to buy her food, but then the teachings of the world sink into her. Harriet thinks: “If my friend is out of food, that means that I could one day be out of food. I need to keep all the money I can so I will never be out of food.” Perhaps Harriet finds out that other people around are running short of money to buy food. Now Harriet begins to think “What if I am robbed by someone who is desperate for food?” and she begins to stay in her house, locking all the doors and worrying about her neighbors. She won’t let her kids play with the neighbors. When she sees a neighbor standing in front of the house, she rudely yells “Go away” to him, and soon the neighbors all think of her as a mean, nasty woman. Very soon they talk and she has no friends. Neither do their kids.

On the other hand, George and Mary also have kids. When Mary finds out that her neighbor has no food, she thinks about giving her some food or money to buy her food, but Mary has a strong faith in God. So Mary trusts that if John and Mary were to run out of food, God would provide for them. Mary gives her neighbor some food, and gives to her other neighbors. Gradually, Mary becomes known as a wonderful woman who loves everyone. Her kids learn from her and become well-liked around the neighborhood as well. Everyone treats them well. And one day, when George’s business gets in trouble, the neighbors take up a collection and bring them enough to handle the business problems. You might want to watch the movies “It’s a Wonderful Life” to see what faith in action does.

Faith in God as our ultimate Cavalry and faith in God’s promises can completely change our world. There is a tremendous difference between two men when one feels that everything is up to him and the other understands that God loves him and won’t let him fall. Our faith in God has changed us – and then we can change the world. It is the faith itself that changes the world – not any direct action of God. It is just our recognition of the integrity and goodness and power that is Who God is. You might say, it is simply God’s glory that changes the world.

And this is borne out by an episode that happens to Jesus. There is a woman who has been sick and bleeding for several years. She hears of Jesus and thinks, “If I can only touch Jesus’ clothes, He will make me well.” One day, Jesus comes to her town and in a crowd she manages to touch his cloak. Jesus instantly stops and says, “Who touched me?” The woman comes forward, frightened, because women did not touch men in that society who were not their husband. They talk a moment, and Jesus says, “You faith has healed you.” He doesn’t say, “My power has healed you.” No, Jesus says to the woman; “ Your faith has healed you.”

And we see this today. Doctors and nurses know of what is called the “Placebo effect”. In medicine, a placebo is a pill made out of simply suger and a coating. It has no real medicine in it. Yet, in many tests of many different medicines, the placebo cures people. The actual cure comes from their faith in the medicine’s ability to cure.

I have a challenge for any atheists in the audience today. Begin to act as though God will fulfill the promises God has made. Run an experiment – find out if the Cavalry comes. And you’ll find something out – as long as you are skeptical, God will not appear. But as soon as you truly adopt an open mind, you’ll begin to see some interesting things happen. And when you begin to believe – you may hear a bugle call in the distance when you truly need it.

Faith in God works because God wants to be able to work on your heart throughout eternity. If you trust God, God can work with you. If you don’t – you are in rebellion and cannot be worked with except through coercion and force. And God will not force you to believe. God is too good, too holy, --too polite to force you.

But if you recognize that you don’t control the Cavalry, then God will arrive and begin to build that trusting relationship with you. And when you understand the sacrifice that Jesus made for you so that you and God could have a close relationship, you will understand God’s goodness.

Around 30 AD, a man named Jesus of Nazareth began to preach in northern Israel and around Jerusalem. His message was that God wanted a close relationship with all people – not just the priests, not just the good people, but all people, including the very lowest, struggling, most desperate members of society – those who could not afford the Temple sacrifices, those who could not afford to dress properly, those who could not own farms and nice homes and be married to the king’s daughter or son.

Repeatedly, this man Jesus claimed to be God Himself walking upon this earth. And every time He did this, the crowds became upset at Him for His so-called blaspheme. Yet He was reported to heal people and do other miraculous things that implied a supernatural power was at work.

Finally, in priest-run Jerusalem he challenged the powers that be and was arrested, tried, and executed for the crime of claiming to be God. This was on a Friday. He was hastily put into a tomb before sundown according to Jewish custom of the time.

On Sunday morning, women who were visiting His burial tomb to clean and properly bury the body were astonished to find that He was no longer there. They ran to tell others. That day, Jesus walked up to several groups of followers and talked with them and even ate with them. Over the next 40 days, He showed up at least eleven times in different locations and circumstances. In one case there were over 500 witnesses present. He taught his followers and then the eyewitnesses claim He ascended to Heaven.

Miraculous events continued to occur with His followers, so often that about 200 years later, Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Today over 2 Billion people claim to be Christian.

The death of Jesus was to pay for all the sacrifices that needed paid for all the crimes against God that were committed over the centuries by billions of people, including you …and me. God Himself in a complicated way – we say Jesus was the Son of God, but it is a rather complicated thing – God Himself was of infinite value and the only thing valuable enough to pay the bill.

The Resurrection of Jesus was for a rather simple reason. It was God’s way of calling attention to Jesus. Yes, we agree that people don’t just come back from the dead. Yes, we agree that this was something unique in history. Yes, we agree that this has never been seen before – or after. There is only one true Son of God. And God wanted us to listen to what Jesus said.

Jesus said that those people who believe in Him – who have faith in Him – will have eternal life. If this is false, it is the greatest lie in the history of the world. If it is true – it is the most important thing that has ever been said. Take some time to examine this in detail. Take some time to read and study the claims of Jesus. Take some time to determine if we here – and such other people as Abraham Lincoln, Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – are crazy for having faith in Jesus or not. Does the Cavalry exist or not, ready to ride into your life?

It is interesting that the hill upon which Jesus was executed has an old, old name. The hill was called in Aramaic Golgotha, the place of the skull. In Greek, this became Kraniou Topos and then in Latin, Calvarae Locus, the place of the skull. And thus, in many older hymns and Bibles, the place where Jesus was crucified is known as Mount Calvary.

Have faith. Your faith alone has the power to change the world. But your faith, combined with the Calvary that lies behind it, is undefeatable. Have faith.