Maximum Living (eBook)

Part II

The Power of Faith

What Is Faith?

When I think of faith, I think of the thousands of windmills near Palm Springs, California. I remember the first time I saw them. We’d been driving through the desert on Interstate 10 with our air conditioner on, blissfully unaware of the weather conditions outside our car’s windows, when we came upon all those windmills. Seeing them turning, I suddenly realized how windy it was. I couldn’t see the wind, but I could see the effect that it was having on all those windmills, and the power of the invisible instantly became clear to me.

Jesus likened the Holy Spirit to the wind (John 3:8). You can’t see him working, but by exercising faith, you can experience his power. Faith is putting up a spiritual windmill. It is believing in the invisible power of God enough to rely upon him to meet your needs.

Hebrews 11:1 (NKJV) defines faith as “… the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” In other words, faith is choosing to believe, without any evidence, that your hopes are substantive - that they actually exist somewhere in the future. From a psychological standpoint that definition makes a great deal of sense, for it is only when you choose to believe in something which you cannot perceive that it becomes real to you. For example, people imagined going to the moon for a long time, but the idea didn’t become real for most of them until 1962, when they accepted as fact John F. Kennedy’s proclamation, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade ...”.

I have often heard people say, “That helps my faith,” when they received proof that what they were hoping for was beginning to happen, and I’ve had to resist the urge to tell them that they were wrong. Evidence may have increased their feelings of confidence, but it did not strengthen their faith. If anything, it weakened it. If you postpone believing until you have verification that what you are hoping for is likely to happen, you haven’t exercised faith. Faith isn’t an assumption based on fact; it’s a belief based on hope. Therefore, faith is strongest when there is nothing to support it except the will to believe.

How Does Faith Work?

Many within the scientific community think of faith as nothing more than an example of the self-fulfilling prophecy. They argue that when a person believes strongly in something, he or she will act according to that belief and because of his or her actions, will cause the believed-in event to occur. For example, they would assert that if a young lady sincerely believed she was going to win a desirable political office, she would campaign with vigor and confidence and, because of her bold actions, would win the office she was seeking. Likewise, they would claim that if a student honestly believed he could obtain an “A” in a difficult class, and if he valued such a grade, he would work much harder than he would if he didn’t believe that achieving an “A” was possible, and due to his hard work, he would make an “A”.

The idea that believing in oneself or in one’s capabilities will give rise to confident actions has a great deal of merit. Self-confidence is extremely important. In fact, none of us could function if we didn’t exercise faith in ourselves; however, the self-fulfilling prophecy doesn’t sufficiently explain the power of faith. For instance, self-confidence cannot possibly have been responsible for many of the miracles recorded in the Bible: the plagues that Moses called down on Egypt; the healing of the sick, the lame and the blind; the raising of the dead.

Some non-Christian, humanistic thinkers will readily admit that faith sometimes gives rise to feats which are clearly beyond the power of any single individual to perform. To account for such phenomena, they hypothesize that each person is an integral part of the cosmos and is therefore in contact with all the power of the universe. They believe that everyone, as an extension of the universe, has all the power necessary to solve any problem or to achieve any goal. Faith is viewed as a means of funneling this power through an individual. This leads them to make such statements as, “You can do anything if you believe you can,” “Where there is a will, there is a way,” “There is no limit to human potential,” and so forth.

The idea that everyone is an extension of unlimited power and that all one has to do in order to make use of that power is to believe in oneself is a flattering concept with mass appeal. It allows people to view themselves as mini-gods and leads to self-worship. Under the cover of Christian phrases, this idea has found its way into the church and has beguiled a number of Christians. However, this theory is unable to explain why people of tremendous faith are sometimes unable to accomplish the things they set out to do. For example, it can’t explain why someone like St. Paul, whose faith allowed him to perform many mighty miracles, was unable to heal his own infirmity. If faith is nothing more than focusing the power of the universe upon a problem or a goal, he should have been healed.

The Bible makes it clear that there is nothing magical about faith. In fact, it is the belief that faith will not allow you to achieve anything upon which you confidently set your mind which separates Christians from humanistic thinkers. While humanists believe that nothing is impossible for a person who has faith, Christians believe that faith allows God’s will to be done and nothing more.

Does that mean faith isn’t important to the Christian? Not at all! Faith is an indispensable part of Christian living. The Bible says that we are to live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4) and that without faith we cannot please God (Hebrews 11:6). Everything that we obtain from God, we obtain through faith. In fact, Mark 6:5-6 records that in a certain place, Christ could not do many miracles because of the people’s lack of faith. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to, but the Bible says he couldn’t. You see, the Lord loves us so much that he has limited himself to working through us. Consequently, he cannot work any miracles for us unless we participate in the working of those miracles through faith. Faith is important because it is the channel through which the Lord works. As Christians, we must never lose sight of the fact that our power comes from the Lord, not from our faith. We don’t control God through our beliefs. It is only when our beliefs match God’s will that our faith is effective.

There can be no doubt that God wants those of us who have been adopted into his family to be productive. Jesus said, “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples” (John 15:8 NIV). God wants us to maximize our potential and to be the very best that we can be! He longs to infuse us with all the power we need to fulfill every dream that he has given us, but he can’t do that unless we exercise faith. Without faith we are limited to our own human wisdom and our own human strength. But just look at what God promises to us if we do exercise faith:

In Matthew 17:20 (NIV), Jesus says, “… Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, `Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

In Matthew 21:22 (NIV), he says, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

In Mark 11:24 (NIV), we read, “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”

In Mark 9:23 (NASB), Christ proclaims, “… All things are possible for the one who believes.”

In Luke 17:5-6 (NIV), we read, “The apostles said to the Lord, `Increase our faith!’ He replied, `If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, `Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.’”

In John 14:12-14 (NIV), Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”

Those are incredible promises! You would think that with promises like that every Christian would constantly live by faith! That is certainly not the case. In fact, we Christians exhibit so little faith that our Lord, himself, asked, “... when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8 NASB).

Why is faith so rarely exercised by those of us who have such tremendous promises? Although there are many reasons, I’ve identified what I believe to be eight of the most common obstacles to the exercising of Christian faith and ways to overcome them.

Eight Obstacles to Faith and How to Overcome Them

Obstacle #1: Lack of Desire

Some years ago, my mother was alone in our house washing clothes when the hose to our washer broke and water began spewing onto the floor. Something had to be done quickly in order to save the carpet and the furniture. Not knowing where the outside shut-off valve was, the only thing my mother knew to do was turn off the valves behind the washer. In order to reach the valves, she had to move the washer, which was full of water. She pushed as hard as she could on the washer, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, with the water moving closer and closer to our carpet, she...