In his popular work, Walden, Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I know he was not a Christian, but he was a keen observer of the human condition. Sadly, what he said about people in general can also be said of many who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ. The desperation Christians feel may be of a different sort than others, but it has the same consequence: turbidity. By that I mean that they seem to be confused or muddled in their thinking and acting. Jesus said that He came to bring abundant life to His disciples, yet too many of them appear to have refused or misplaced that gift.
One might ask what the abundant life should look like.
Because Jesus has offered this gift to believers, it would help to know what it
means to believe. In the Greek language of the New Testament, there is one word
that is translated both belief and faith. In English, we need two words because
we don’t have a decent verb form of the word faith. We don’t talk about
“faithing” something, but we can believe something. Hence, we believe in Jesus
or put our faith in Jesus, and we live a life of faith, or we live as
believers.
So, the question becomes what faith/belief is. The tenth
through the twelfth chapters of Hebrews are a good place to look for a lesson
on faith. In the midst of that lesson there is a stunning statement: “Without
faith it is impossible to please God.” At the very least we know that means to
place faith in the atoning sacrifice of Christ on our behalf. That is the
ringing gong of the Hebrews message: remain faithful to Christ, and don’t turn
back to the now empty faith of Judaism. The Cross of Christ brought an end to
the temple worship of the Jews, yet some of them were turning back to it. The
Hebrew writer was admonishing them to remain faithful to the new order
initiated by Christ.
But it is not just being faithful to Christ that the Hebrew
writer emphasizes. The examples of faith he gives in chapters eleven and twelve
delve into the depths of what it means to live by faith. The exemplars of faith
– Noah, Abraham, Moses, et al. – each made critical life decisions grounded in
their belief/faith in God. Their lives – and often their deaths – proved their
faith was genuine. The Apostle Paul
said as much in his lesson on faith in the book of Romans. We are all
justified before God by the kind of faith demonstrated by Abraham.
So, to live by faith means to believe God – to believe His
Word. But saving faith goes beyond even that; it must show up in the actions of
the believer. James
says faith without works is dead. Some have tried to say that contradicts
Paul’s assertion that we are saved by faith, not by works. But in the sentence after
that well-known phrase Paul
ties works to saving faith saying that we were “created for good works.” Jesus
was striking the same chord when He said that true faith would be revealed
by the fruit it produced. The right kind of fruit is that which accomplishes
the will of the Father – sharing the gospel, seeking justice, caring for the needy,
supporting the work of the kingdom of God. That is the thrust of Jesus’
model prayer that God’s will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
There is another important way to live by faith: to pray in
faith believing that our prayers will be answered. Jesus
made the startling claim that if His disciples prayed that way, the results
were guaranteed. That assertion needs to be explained though. The Greek in Mark
11:24 literally says, “all things you pray and ask believe you [already] have,
and they will come to be.” (πάντα ὅσα προσεύχεσθε καὶ αἰτεῖσθε,
πιστεύετε ὅτι ἐλάβετε, καὶ ἔσται ὑμῖν.) Some Christians have tried to
make that a sort of magic formula like rubbing the genie’s bottle and getting
the answer they want. Nothing could be farther from the truth Jesus taught. He
said if you have the assurance by faith that your request has already been
granted, it will come to pass. That kind of faith can only be supported by the
knowledge that the thing prayed for is completely within God’s will. If you know
God has willed something to be, your true prayer is, “Thy will be done.” Which,
by the way, goes back to Jesus’ model prayer again.
A.W. Tozer commented on the prayer of faith: “But the man of
faith can go alone into the wilderness and get on his knees and command
heaven—God is in that! The Christian who is willing to put himself in a place
where he must get the answer from God and God alone—the Lord is in that! But
there is no use trying to cover up the fact that there is a great deal of
praying being done among us that does not amount to anything—it never brings
anything back! It is like sending a farmer into the field without a plow. Little
wonder that the work of God stands still!” [1]
Graham Cooke wrote in Crafted
Prayers that we often fail in prayer because we immediately ask for our
desires for the situation: heal this disease, fill this need, save this
marriage. When those things aren’t forthcoming, we ask why God didn’t do what
we want. The problem, Cooke says, is that we didn’t first seek to know what God
wanted. There are two ways to learn what that is: pray for God to reveal His
will in the situation and look to Scripture for the answer. When we know what
God wants, we can pray in faith. When we fall short of that, our prayers fall
short of heaven.
One time when the disciples failed to drive out a demon, they
asked Jesus why they were unsuccessful. He
said, “Because of your little faith… For truly I tell you, if you have
faith the size of a mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, ‘Move from here
to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” If your
prayers aren’t moving mountains, examine your faith.
[1]
A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith, Evenings with
Tozer: Daily Devotional Readings (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers,
2015), 304.
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