What is Faith?

Delivered June 24, 2012

Hebrews11:1-6    Video

One of the Summer Sermon Suggestions that I received from a member of the congregation was about faith. Her exact sermon request was that I speak on the importance of Faith, how to have faith, how to develop faith. My mind went immediately to the premier biblical definition of faith in Hebrews 11. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” But before I get into this scripture, I want to review some other definitions of faith. Some are inspiring like Oswald Chambers: “Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.” Thomas Aquinas said, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”  Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.” 

There are also less flattering definitions. Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Faith is not wanting to know what is true."   Mark Twain is even more to the point: "Faith is believing something you know ain't true." And of course the great philosopher Archie Bunker said, “Faith is something you believe that nobody in his right mind would believe." As I have mentioned more than once, I do a lot of reading of books and articles written by those who do not have faith. I like to be challenged by those who do not share my religious convictions. What good is reading books or articles by people that agree with you? You don’t learn anything; you aren’t confronted with the weaknesses in your positions. I like to read books by people who think I am completely wrong, people who will challenge my assumptions and poke holes in my reasoning. So I read a lot these days by atheists, skeptics and humanists. They challenge me at the core of my beliefs. They make me think, which is something that most popular Christian writers these days do not do. But as you can imagine, they don’t value religious faith.

Richard Dawkins wrote in the New Yorker, “Faith is one of the world's great evils." (THE NEW YORKER, Apr 2, 2006, p. 80.) He wrote in the God Delusion, “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.” He said elsewhere, "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.” "Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."  I recently read a book entitled “Divinity of Doubt: the God Question” by Vincent Bugliosi. He writes:  "The word faith is a euphemism for hope and speculation. Indeed, the definition of faith is belief in the unknown. And if I may borrow a clichéd term, I, for one, have never had much faith in faith. Since faith is an acknowledgment that the truth is unknown, it is nothing more than wishful thinking, and the wish is no evidence of anything beyond itself." Christopher Hitchens, the recently deceased notorious antitheist said, “Faith is the surrender of the mind; it is the surrender of reason, it is the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”

Today I am going to talk about faith, which is the basis of Christianity, under two categories. First is what faith is NOT. The other is what faith IS.

I. What is faith NOT? It is not believing something is true in spite of evidence to the contrary or without evidence. It is not wishful thinking. It is not a delusion. Dawkins entitles his best-selling book “The God Delusion.” Freud entitled his famous essay, “The Future of an Illusion.”  Faith is not a delusion or illusion. I am not saying that some religious people are not deluded. Many are. People believe some really strange things. I mentioned in an earlier sermon about a book I just read entitled “Why People Believe Weird Things.” People DO believe very weird things. Faith in God is not like believing in UFO’s, Bigfoot or The Noch Ness monster – or Santa Claus, the tooth fairy or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Faith is not wishful thinking.  It is not wishing something were true so much that you ignore the facts and put aside common sense and convince yourself something is true when it is not. 

Faith is not irrational. Faith is not anti-science or anti-reason. Unfortunately, in much of the popular cultural discussion of religion, faith is put over against science as if they were in conflict. This is due mostly to the creation - evolution debate that is constantly rehashed in the media and in school boards across the country. Can you be a person of faith and a scientist? Yes, of course! As I have stated before from this pulpit, I was a geology major in college before I went into religion and I see no contradiction between the two. I have no problem accepting the scientific theory of the big bang, the fact that the earth is 4.6 billion years old and the universe is 13.7 billion years old. There is no conflict in my mind between those facts and the statement in our scripture lesson today that “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.” I love science. It fills me with awe and wonder. I think that medical science is one of the greatest things that ever happened in the history of civilization. Faith is not anti-science or anti-intellectual. Faith is not believing in something against the scientific evidence. That is misguided religious dogma. I am not defending dogma this morning; I am defending faith.

II. What is faith? I already quoted the most well-known biblical definition in our Epistle Lesson: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The word “substance” is an exact translation of the Greek word used in the text. It is composed of two parts – sub means under and stance is to stand.  It means literally “to stand under.” The word “understanding” is the exact English equivalent. Faith is a way of understanding, a way of knowing. It is a way of knowing God, of experiencing God. Other translations render this word certainty, assurance, confirmation, or confidence. It is a way of knowing.

Here I have to resort to my personal experience. I experience my faith as a kind of spiritual faculty. We have five bodily senses; sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste are physical faculties. Faith is a spiritual faculty like intuition and conscience. We all have known things intuitively, even though we cannot explain how we know them. We know things are right or wrong through our conscience without having to refer to a set of moral laws or principles. Faith is knowing the reality of God. It is not crazy for me to say that I perceive God, I know God, that I am aware of the presence of God. To me it is like being aware of the presence of light or air. I have a difficult time understanding how anyone cannot sense the presence of God. God is clearly here now. I am not making a theological statement; I am describing an experiential awareness.

I admit that this is something that cannot be scientifically verified. For many people if you can’t measure it and demonstrate it with scientific data, then it isn’t real. I disagree. Faith is more like music or art than science. This is why religion has historically been expressed through the media of music and art. Would you say that music is not real or art is not real? You could measure the ingredients in paint and the way it is applied to canvas. You can measure the decibels of music. But that doesn’t get you anywhere closer to experiencing the power of art or music. Art and music communicate something real to our hearts, our minds, our souls. And it prompts an emotional and spiritual response from us. Faith is like that. Faith is the apprehension of spiritual reality. Our text calls it “the evidence of things not seen.” It is convincing evidence of God even though we cannot see God. It is not historical evidence nor scientific evidence. It is not legal evidence that will hold up in court. You cannot prove the existence of God.  But we can know God, apprehend the spiritual reality of God by the spiritual faculty of faith.

Atheists will call this wishful thinking, imagination or hallucination. There is no way I can disprove that. I might be hallucinating when I sense the presence of God. Maybe the atheists are right, and I have been deluded into thinking that I experience a God which does not in fact exist. I might be crazy as a loon. Crazy people generally don’t know they are crazy, and I might be one of them. But I don’t think I exhibit any other symptoms of mental illness. What is more likely – that the 97.5% of the world’s population who are religious are deluded into believing in a spiritual reality that doesn’t really exist or that the 2.5% of the world’s population that are atheists are deluded? Maybe the two and a half percent are right and everyone else is hallucinating; but it is more likely that the 97.5% are right, and the 2.5% are somehow missing it.

There are more color blind people in the world than atheists. 3.5% of the world’s population are color blind! Are the colorblind right and the color sighted wrong? Maybe atheism is like colorblindness. Maybe some people are God-blind; they really do not have this ability to perceive God just like some people cannot perceive color. I don’t know. Maybe that is not the best analogy. The apostle Paul seems to say in Romans that everyone has the ability to perceive the existence of God, but some choose to reject that knowledge. He says, “²⁰ For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, ²¹ because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” But in any case faith is awareness of spiritual reality.

But awareness is just the first step. It is what you do next that is important. Faith is the response to that awareness that God exists. Our passage says, “he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” Believing God exists is the first step; next is to diligently seek Him. If Paul is right then everyone knows God exists whether they admit it or not. Faith is the next step of trusting the God that you perceive as real. Hebrews 11 gives a list of people who responded in faith to the God they believed was real. Abel responded in presenting an acceptable sacrifice, Enoch responded in living a life that pleased God, Noah responded in building the ark, Abraham responded in obedience, the list goes on. Faith is responding positively to whatever perception you have – however dim – of the reality of God.

For some people God’s presence is very strong and clear. For others it is much dimmer and less certain. But whatever measure you have of the reality and presence of God, respond to that positively. Seek more of the real presence of God. Our passage says to “diligently seek.” That is more than a casual interest. The person who asked me to preach on faith asked how to have faith and how to develop faith. This scripture says to seek God and he will reward you. Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” Moses said in Deuteronomy, “seek the LORD your God, and you will find Him if you seek Him with all your heart and with all your soul.” God says in Jeremiah, “you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.” Our text in Hebrews says, ““he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” We have faith by diligently seeking God. 

Our faith becomes stronger by exercising it. Faith is a spiritual muscle. It is strengthened by use and weakened through lack of use. Many people’s faith has become atrophied through lack of exercise. You know that if you lay in bed for a few months or years your ability to walk will be severely compromised. The same with walking in faith. You can’t have faith if you don’t exercise it. The more you exercise it, the more you develop it. Historically Christians have understood that certain spiritual disciplines increase faith. They are like physical therapy for physical weakness. We can do spiritual exercises. Richard Foster has a well-known book called the Celebration of Discipline where he lists 13 spiritual disciplines. He categorizes them into Inward Disciplines: meditation, prayer, fasting and study; Outward disciplines: simplicity, solitude, submission, and service: and Corporate Disciplines: Confession, worship, guidance, and celebration.  That book is a good place to start. I might lead a study of that book in the fall or spring, if there is an interest.

Faith is not just plopped in your lap fully developed. Faith needs to grow and develop. You have to want it. We have to seek it. It is like anything else in life. You have to give time, energy and attention to your faith. I think that the reason that the American church is so weak is that people don’t work at developing their faith. There is no mystery to it. If you want faith, then you need to dedicate yourself to developing faith. It is never too late.