Faith, Hope and Love

Faith, Hope and Love.

I don't think that I have ever really understood Faith.

Hope is easy to understand. Hope is the belief that there is a future that will be better than what we experience now. Not much to explain, no need, really.

Love is a more difficult concept. Love encompasses much, but I think we can put this into an analogue that might be easier to understand. Love is the person that God would want us to be. I used to define Love as an action, the result of a feeling of intimacy that causes sacrifice. But I think that Love is more (and less) than an action, because it does not require intimacy and it may not result in sacrifice. Consider the oft-quoted passage from 1 Cor 13:4-8:

"4Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8Love never fails..."

Paul speaks here about Love and how great it is, but check out how Paul uses the word. Paul is describing a person! Now, I've heard and read this passage countless times, but this may be the first time that I've perceived this. I think this is why Jesus said in Matthew 22:40 that all of the Law and the Prophets hang on the commandments to Love. Love is to be the person that God commands us to be, and we are without excuse because inside of us, from the moment we are born to the day that we die, we have within our hearts an understanding of what this means. As surely as we can see creation and everything around us, we can also see what it means to Love.

So, then, we come down to the last thing - Faith.

What may be the heart of the Gospel is this idea of Faith, and how by Faith we are removed from the lists of those deserving of death, and put onto the lists of those deserving of being with God. We do not earn the removal, because it is given it freely (even though it is not free). And yet, we still have to have Faith.

Through study of Romans, we might take it upon ourselves to say that Faith is not the equivalent of works, and is in fact wholly separate from it. So, Faith is not within ourselves to do or not to do. But it still lies in the realm of the human, because it is something that propels us to change ourselves, to turn towards God. And we must have this, on our own.

Does this make sense? I'm not sure. How can something that we think or believe (and therefore the concommitant and resulting action), not be considered works?

I guess we go back to Matthew, for the answer (Matthew 17:20): "And He said to them, "Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." Or check out Luke 17:5-6: 5The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" 6And the Lord said, "If you had faith like a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and be planted in the sea'; and it would obey you. "

How can anyone move a mountain or uproot a tree? Who is the only one who can do such a thing, who can do what would be otherwise impossible? Well, the answer is obvious, I suppose, so then perhaps Faith is like a portal to God's power, a wi-fi access point for God's will? Hmm, but that would still not explain how we get this portal or access point. We aren't quite there I guess.

Ok, so maybe I need to go back to Matthew, going back to one of the more clear examples of faith (Matthew 8:5-10):

"5And when Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion came to Him, imploring Him, 6and saying, "Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, fearfully tormented." 7Jesus said to him, "I will come and heal him." 8But the centurion said, "Lord, I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9"For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, 'Go!' and he goes, and to another, 'Come!' and he comes, and to my slave, 'Do this!' and he does it." 10Now when Jesus heard this, He marveled and said to those who were following, "Truly I say to you, I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel."

So what is happening here? Why did Jesus name the soldier as having Faith, and a lot of it?

I guess what I see here is that what the soldier had, was an understanding of how things work. Just as when you take a step, you are doing so under the assumption that the next step that you take will result in your foot also hitting ground (thus does locomotion work). So then, did this soldier take it as a matter of fact that if he were to issue orders, so those orders would be followed. It is a given, and the soldier, especially in times of war, would base his very life on this assumption. Let me repeat that: the soldier would base his life on this assumption.

So, then, I guess the answer is upon me now.

Faith is the understanding of God's ordering of the world, that we are not worthy of fellowship with God, and yet we are still given by Grace the chance for our addition into the book of Life. Faith is the understanding that God's justice creates a debt that we can not pay, and yet that debt is paid by the sacrifice by God, and that if we align ourselves to this understanding, we will have our debt paid. Whew!

I guess this is why it is tough for anyone, Christians included, Christians especially included, to have Faith to move mountains or to uproot trees. How hard it is for us to keep to this alignment without changing every part of ourselves, to understand how little the things of this world mean, in the grand scheme of things. We are forced to choose, every moment of our lives, how we are to perceive and assume things around us, and when we choose actions or thoughts that are misaligned with God's purpose, we are doing so without Faith.

Tough words. Tough concepts. More on this later.

-David