It’s Always Been About Faith

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

 In many love stories, there's the moment where the main character realizes that a love interest that was unknown to them has always been the one. Usually it's the friend that has been faithful, that has tried to show up, that has had a hard time sharing their affection is discovered to be the one that that person is actually in love with.

Think of Frozen, for example. When Anna is inside next to the fire with Olaf, having learned that Hans was not the love of her life, even though that she thought she was. And she's saying, what is love, really? How do I even know what love is? And Olaf basically begins to describe Christoph, how he's willing to sacrifice for her, how he's willing to care for her, and in fact look at her.

And then at that moment, Anna realizes that Christoph was always the one, was always the one the whole time that she loved and that he loved her. Well, in the book of Romans, Paul talks about faith in a similar way. So the Apostle Paul, one of the early leaders of the church was a Jew, and he was an excellent Jew according to himself, and followed the law to the "t".

But what Paul is writing in Romans is that the faith that Abraham had to be the father of many nations to trust in the goodness of God was always the way that God would relate to humanity. And so this is the good news, that it's always been faith. That faith in the good God who loves us and desires good for this whole world is what is going to help us engage and experience God as well as live in this world.

So I wanna talk to you about three things. If faith is the way. So the first, I just wanna talk a little bit about what faith is. Second, I want to show us how it helps us in our life. It allows us to operate in a certain way. And then finally, I wanna recognize that faith has a bit of a burden to it because it's a challenge for us.

All right, so first, if faith is always the way, what is faith? Exactly? Well, we put our faith in things all the time. Before you sit down in a chair, you are putting your faith that that chair will hold you. You trust that the chair is built for you to sit in it. When you go to your bank and you put your debit card in, or you go online and you look at your balance, you trust you put your faith in this idea that the numbers on the screen represent the number of dollars that are actually for you. The other day I was doing electrical work, and so I go downstairs and I turn the breaker off because I am believing that if I turn that breaker off, then electricity will stop. And so what I do is I have a little tester, cuz I'm not entirely convinced of that.

But if I've gotten the wrong breaker and so I test it and if it beeps, it tells me that the power is not in fact off. And so then I don't touch it. But in our life we put faith in things all the time. And the simplest definition of faith is this, that we put our trust in something. Now for larger things, we put our faith in future in the outcome of life.

At one time in history, people put a lot of faith in the church. The church did not live well. Did not earn that trust. Did not keep that trust so people don't put their faith in the church as much anymore. I think at one time there was a lot of faith or trust put in the government, but again, that has eroded over time.

And now maybe we put our faith, we put our trust in progress and technology that somehow as human beings, if we come together and we discover new things, that those new discoveries will take care of evil and pain and injustice in the world. All of these are an age old story in which human beings were created and designed to put their faith to trust in God.

But instead we put our faith and trust in all kinds of other things. And so what Paul is looking to teach both the Jews and the Greeks in Rome is that it has always been about faith. That it is faith that reconnects us with God and our faith is trusting that God is good, that God created this world, that God loves this world, and that God has sent the person of Christ whose life, death, and resurrection offers us life.

And how do we tap into that? Well, we trust, we put our faith in Christ. We have faith in God's goodness. Okay. So that's what Paul is saying to us, that it's always been that because Abraham, even though he is the father of many nations, and the father of the Hebrew nation came to this realization and this understanding early and gave his faith to God. He believed God's promise, trusted in God's goodness. So for us, we want to have that same action.

The second thing I want to talk to you about is how faith gives us an operational understanding of life. So for you and I, when we wake up in the morning, we go about our day. And that day we'll have some things in it that are joyful and good.

It'll also have some moments that are challenging, maybe awkward, maybe exhausting, maybe downright painful, and we have two choices. We can operate out of a place of faith, or we can operate at a place of no faith. If we operate out a place of faith, what we're believing is that there is a good God who created creation.

That is good and that will one day bring restoration in it. Well, why do we have this faith? Why do we trust? Because God has revealed that in the person of Christ, in Jesus life, as Jesus loves and engages people, that tells us something about who God is in Jesus death on the cross. That's God acting on behalf of humanity.

And then in Jesus resurrection, that's God conquering death. And so you and I can operate moving through life with faith because we trust in the goodness of God. So we trust that both the joys and the struggles, the challenges, the hardships, the wins will all be formed and moved towards a good outcome.

Because what we are trusting is we're trusting in God's promise to restore the world. Now, there's a lot of benefit to this because it tells us that our life is meaningful, that the joy and goodness and beauty that we experience is not just temporary. It's not just relative, but rather it is the true meaning of life.

Now, our other option, and we'll face the same struggles and challenges, is to go through life without faith. Now without faith, we have to assume that the world is as it is, and in this way it means it's beautiful. It also means it's horrible. It means sometimes injustice will reign and that we are transient, that we will exist, and then we will not exist.

And that is all that there is to life. Now, I think the challenge is when we are there, when that's how we feel, or maybe that's sort of our belief. What happens is we often are looking for ways to escape, to numb, or to fight. To fight for all that we can get. But in the end, I think that that leaves us with a lack of peace and a lack of wholeness.

So faith, trusting in the goodness of God as Abraham has, and as Paul calls all of us to, to trust in the goodness of God displayed in the person of Christ empowers us to live in this world. To keep us moving forward because we operate with a sense that God's goodness will reign, will be ultimate. Now the last idea that I wanna talk to you about regarding faith is that faith is also a burden.

So in this same story as Paul is talking about how Abraham put his faith in God and believed God's promise that he would become the father of all nations with Sarah, even though he was old and even though Sarah's womb was Barron. He trusted in that, and he operated with that idea in mind, and that was really hard.

That was a burden because the idea of those things coming to pass seemed ridiculous, seemed farfetched. And so in this world to operate with a faith, a trust in God's goodness can sometimes be hard. It can sometimes be a burden because it means that we're believing, we're committing, we're holding on to hope. That the good and the beauty and the love in this world are the ultimate thing. And so we're clinging to those despite at times the evidence that injustice and evil and brokenness could win the day, or that life itself is just transient and meaningless. So to hold on to that, faith is sometimes a burden.

Furthermore, our faith, calls us to love the neighbor, to love God, to love others. And that's hard because in that way, faith becomes a burden because we're choosing gentleness and patience and kindness and generosity in the midst of a world that might be inviting us to something else. So just as Anna at the end of Frozen discovers that it's always been Christoph, what Paul would want us to know is that the way we connect to God and the way we connect to a full life. Has always been faith. It was true for Abraham, and it's true for the church, and it's true for humanity now in the person of Christ. And so my encouragement to you is to lean into that faith, to embrace faith because it's always been the way that human beings are meant to connect with God. Don't put your faith in other things that will let you down, but rather trust in the goodness of God.

Allow that to be your operational understanding as you go through the ups and downs of life. And understand and accept that at times that faith is a burden, but it's a, a burden that produces. Good. I hope you have a great week. It's always good to be with you. Take care.