What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see. By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.
When trying to think of examples of faith I have either experienced or seen experienced by others, three initially came to mind. The first one I was thinking of is when a baby manages to get from the crawling position to the position when they are fully upright holding on to a chair or settee. This goes on for a wee while until at last they manage to get from one chair to another chair without the need for support from an adult. Life changes for the parents when they manage that particular leap of faith!! The other two examples are similar, one being the time one of your parents let go of that two-wheeler bike so you’re on your own and the other is when they let go in the sea or in a swimming pool and you’re able to say you can swim. In these examples, it can take quite a few failures before the mission is accomplished.
Faith isn’t about hoping it’s going to be dry when you’re going to the Edinburgh Tattoo or hoping that your team’s going to win at the weekend or hoping that you will get that phone call you’ve been hoping for. That is just being hopeful.
Christians are sometimes described as ‘people of faith’. At Church, we hear the word ‘faith’ used frequently but do we ever take the time to consider all that it means? Hebrews 11 has many examples of biblical characters that have demonstrated their faith in a tangible way, a way that is fairly easy to understand and if you read the chapter, you will see. Among these are the example of Noah constructing the Ark despite no sign of rain, Abraham and Sarah having a baby despite their advancing years and Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt after all the years of oppression. In all the examples within this chapter, it is almost impossible to imagine the outcomes that God delivered which would make it impossible to even hope for them in the first place. When we hope for things in this life, it is always based on things that we know can be achievable, maybe things that we have seen realised by others. God can deliver blessings that we never ever realised were possible. If we set our hearts and minds on the best outcomes imaginable, God, who made this world can exceed these expectations based on the evidence of ‘things we cannot yet see’.
There’s such a lot to consider in today’s passage that I believe can only be absorbed by studying it line by line and considering how it affects each of our personal beliefs and hopes and assessing the level of faith that is personal to each one of us.
Prayer – Heavenly Father, help us today to live by faith and to live with assurance and conviction and confidence in your Holy word. Lord, we would pray for those who are going through difficult times, those who are having doubts and we just pray that they will be blessed with the conviction of things unseen. Though we cannot see you, we know you. We believe in you because you have given us so much reason to believe in you. You have loved us, created us and cared for us. You’ve created the world and all of its beauty around us. And You have come into this world and you have lived among us. You have died for us. You have risen from the grave in victory over death. Help us to live by faith in you. Amen
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