To Encourage You

Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Are you a person of faith? No matter what you think about this question, the fact is that everyone is a person of faith. You’ve probably heard people say such things as the following: “You just have to have faith,” “I have my faith and you have yours,” or “No, I’m not a person of faith.”

To really understand what people are saying with these words, it helps to know that another name for “faith” is “trust.” Like faith, trust must be rooted in something or someone, and it is based on the unseen. For example, if someone tells us he will do something for us, or that they will be somewhere at a certain time, we will trust – have faith – in whether this will happen based on our knowledge of that person – for what they’ve told us they will do hasn’t happened yet. It’s an unseen or unrealized thing at the time they tell us. If our spouse tells us that they love us, we will believe this based on whether we trust them, for we can’t really read their mind, and we don’t really know if they are engaged in adultery with someone else. Such things, by their nature, are unseen, hidden from us – at least for a while.

Even a person who says they are not a person of faith has faith, i.e., trust, in themselves. They have to know that they don’t know everything there is to know about everything, so to say they don’t have faith in God means they are trusting themselves to know things that are unseen. Nevertheless, most people have learned that they can’t always trust themselves, for they don’t really know how they will react in any given situation that they’ve yet to experience, and they know that in the past they haven’t handled some things as they would have hoped. We learn to trust based on what we know about a person, including ourselves, and the better we’ve seen that person to be trustworthy in the past, the more likely we will be to trust them in the future.

So, what about Jesus?  Do you trust Him? Do you have faith in Him? Did He ever lie about anything to your knowledge? Is He trustworthy? Which one of us has proved that He ever committed a sin (John 8:46)? Even Christ’s worst enemies couldn’t do so – without lying about it. So, can anyone else? Then ask the same question about anyone else you know, including yourself? On that basis, who’s the more trustworthy? On whom or in what is your faith based?