Anonymous Asks (375)

“Why do people struggle with lack of faith?”

On its own, the word “faith” is content-free. There is no such thing as generic faith. To talk about believing without asking what you are supposed to believe is like trying to order dinner at a restaurant when you’ve never been given a menu and the waiter refuses to tell you what the options are. A question so unspecific is quite impossible to answer meaningfully.

Faith always has to be in something or someone. It cannot exist in a vacuum.

Intelligent Projection

Regardless of what or whom people struggle to believe in, one common source of frustration is the hope or expectation of something remarkable and decisive, a settled conviction or some kind of spiritual lightning bolt that makes everything they find difficult to understand obvious in a flash. They think faith is some kind of magic that God turns on or off in your heart at a whim.

Expressions like “Increase our faith!” reflect this kind of magical thinking. The disciples were looking for this sort of external boost when Jesus told them they must forgive their brother seven times a day if he asks for it. “Increase our faith!” they cried. The concept simply didn’t make sense to them, and they wanted either a logical explanation or some sort of external transformation of their thought processes in order to comply. It should be obvious neither was necessary. All they needed to do to respond in faith was to obey a simple instruction when the circumstances warranted.

Faith is not some mystical experience. Faith is simply the process of applying what you do know with certainty to a new situation about which you are not completely confident. Faith projects intelligently.

Considered Faith

Hebrews 11 gives numerous examples of faith that all manifested in obedience to God or in instinctively doing what would please him. A few of these examples give us insight into the process of believing.

1/ Abraham Considered

Abraham, when tested, offered up Isaac. That was an act of faith. At first, perhaps, Abraham could not imagine complying with God’s command to sacrifice his only son. Horror surely filled him at the prospect. Then, the scripture says, “Abraham considered.” The Greek word there is logizomai, from logos, meaning “word”. That’s not a mystical process. It means to reckon, calculate or compute. Abraham put on his thinking cap. He reasoned. He totaled up what he knew about God already, and he reached a conclusion.

A God who could bring him safely to Canaan, who would afflict Pharaoh with plagues on his behalf, who could give him victory over four kings with only 318 men, who could destroy Sodom while preserving Lot, who could enrich him through Abimelech and who could give him a child in his old age — this God was sufficiently faithful to his promises and sufficiently powerful to raise the dead if necessary.

Abraham reasoned his way to trusting in God’s power. As it turned out, raising the dead was quite unnecessary. God provided a more appropriate substitute for Isaac instead.

2/ Sarah Considered

Sarah too reasoned her way to the obedience of faith. Like her husband, she “considered him faithful who had promised”. An unbelieving woman of her age might well not have even tried to conceive. But Sarah considered God faithful. Something about her experience was sufficient to make her say, “God will do what he promised.”

Perhaps it was God’s insistence in making her the mother of the heir of promise that changed her mind. She had faithlessly given her servant Hagar to Abraham, and the situation had gone sideways. When the Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, Sarah overheard him say that she would have a son about the same time next year, despite all her failed machinations. What a privilege! What grace! Initially, she laughed. The Lord heard her and called her out, asking, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” After that, the scripture says, “Sarah considered”, and she acted in faith. She reasoned her way to trusting in God’s word.

Faith is not magical thinking. It’s an intelligent process of reasoning from the known to the unknown. Is there an element of risk involved? Absolutely. Does everybody have the evidence Abraham and Sarah had to reason from? Surely not.

3/ Moses Considered

But there is another example of considered faith in Hebrews 11. The third “considered” is Moses. The writer says, “He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.” Moses did a cost-benefit analysis and went with the risky option rather than the known quantity. He had experienced Egypt, and he wasn’t satisfied with a life he couldn’t enjoy in good conscience. So he acted in faith, choosing to side with his kindred over his adopted nation and becoming an outcast because of it. Sometimes faith is as simple as “What I’m doing now is not working for me, so let’s take a risk.” That’s what Moses did.

Now, Abraham saw God, albeit in visions and wearing the appearance of a man. Sarah overheard the Lord speaking. These were miraculous events, and they gave Abraham and Sarah a big head start in exercising faith. But what did Moses have? God didn’t speak to him personally for another forty years. Moses had nothing more than coming across an Egyptian beating one of his people and the conviction, “This is not right.” That which cannot continue will not continue, so Moses intervened, killed the Egyptian, and hid his body in the sand. For him, there was no miraculous revelation from God, no specific promise to cling to, no evidence of God’s faithfulness at hand. There was just the oppressed and the oppressor, and the uncontrollable impulse to side with the oppressed. Moses exercised faith because he could not walk away, so he was left with no better option than to take a risk and trust a God he had yet to really come to know.

So Consider

Abraham considered God’s power. Sarah considered God’s word. Moses considered he had nothing to lose. Indulging in the pleasures of sin for the rest of his life at the expense of his people was impossible to him, so he did something else instead.

Maybe you’re in a similar place. Your situation is intolerable, and you can’t go on the way you are. I will say it again: faith is not magic. It’s a yearning for something better that is so strong it reasons its way to taking a risk.

So consider. What do you have to lose?