I attend a Bible Study
every Monday morning at 11 am here where I live. Our group is made up with a wide variety of
retired people: a couple of ministers, a
rancher, a dentist, a missionary, a few housewives, and a few singers. The thing is, not everyone believes in Jesus
or that He ever existed. We had a
conversation this week regarding how Jesus fed over 5,000 (Matthew 14) faith. The disciples told Jesus that they should
send the people away to go get food for themselves but Jesus literally told
them, “They do not need to go away; you give them something to eat!” The pastor asked us how we would feel, what we
would say, and what we would do if we were the disciples faced with feeding so
many people. I wondered, would I have
the faith to feed so many? As many of us
remember this story from Sunday School, Jesus took loaves of bread and fish,
blessed them, broke them, and gave them to the disciples and they DID feed all
the people, with a lot of food left over.
Did the disciples use faith to feed the people? No, but they trusted the One Who is the
Author faith, Jesus.
Just what IS faith? We can give the accepted Sunday School answer
that it is belief in God. This is true,
but it is only one aspect of faith. The
dictionary states that faith is “complete trust or confidence in someone or
something”. Note those words: complete trust. The Bible states that faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 KJV). Substance is something tangible. When you say something has substance then you
are saying that something has the quality of being important, valid, or
significant. I like how the Amplified
Bible puts Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the assurance (title deed,
confirmation) of things hoped for (divinely guaranteed), and the evidence of
things not seen [the conviction of their reality—faith comprehends as fact what
cannot be experienced by the physical senses].” So, if faith is so tangible, why is it so
hard to grasp or understand?
Morris Venden, in his
book “To Know God”, helps us understand it this way:
“The story is told of a
little girl who came to a church service where people were gathering to pray for
rain. The crops were drying up and they
needed rain badly. The little girl came
bringing her umbrella. The people smiled
at her faith.
But it did rain. And so they
said that it rained because the little girl brought her umbrella, and if you
have enough nerve and courage to bring your umbrella it’ll cause the rain to
come. But the truth is not that it
rained because she brought her umbrella, but that she brought her umbrella
BECAUSE SHE KNEW IT WAS GOING TO RAIN (emphasis mine). Is there a difference?
…Faith is a gift from
God. You don’t work it up. Faith is MORE than belief. It is more than ‘taking God at His word’,
which many Christians have accepted as a definition. Faith is trust—and trust comes from
communication and acquaintance with One who is absolutely trustworthy.”
I know that we all know
that we are not supposed to “work-up” our faith. I know that we all know that faith is a gift
from God. But do we really KNOW? When I read this story by Mr. Venden it made
me think. How often have I brought an
umbrella thinking that it is an outward show of the faith I wanted to
exercise? How often have I not been
close enough to God to know it was going to rain, and then brought the
umbrella?
