To Encourage You

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

I used to live in southern Illinois. While I was there, I would see lots of cars from Missouri, which is the next state to the west. On the license plates of the cars from that state you have the state’s motto: “Show me state.” I never really knew why they called Missouri by this name, so I did a little reading this morning. This is what I found out from one website: “There are several stories concerning the origin of the ‘Show-Me’ slogan. The most widely known story gives credit to Missouri’s U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver for coining the phrase in 1899. During a speech in Philadelphia, he said: ‘I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.’ The phrase is now used to describe the character of Missourians; not gullible, conservative, and unwilling to believe without adequate evidence.” It’s the idea that “seeing is believing,” or “don’t tell me about it, show me and I’ll believe you.” The problem with this view, however, is that our sight, in fact all of our senses, can lie to us. That’s why so many people wear glasses. They can’t see things as they are without them. And there are lots of things we can’t see even with 20/20 vision.

Have you ever seen an atom? I haven’t, but they say they exist! Another example is our sense of taste. Every Christmas Eve at our home we have a tradition of making homemade ice cream. My stepdaughter and her family were here for Christmas (I believe the year was 2020) and I asked her to taste test the ice cream. It was chocolate. She told me she didn’t taste any chocolate, even though I had surely loaded the chocolate into it. Then I tasted it, and I could taste nothing but chocolate. How strange! But then we realized that she had recovered from Covid just a couple weeks prior, and her taste was still affected as a result. Thus, her sense of taste was lying to her!

It’s important to consider this when we think about the subject of faith. As the verse above tells us, faith means to believe in something that we can’t see. Faith is to trust in someone because we believe them, regardless of what our five senses might say about them. So, why would we do this? Who can we trust at a higher level than we can trust our own senses? There is only One. While our own senses can lie to us, and while people lie all the time, there is only One who cannot lie, and that is God (Titus 1:2). We learn about Him in the Scriptures, and what we learn is that not one word that He has ever said has ever been anything but the absolute truth.

An example of this is found toward the end of the book of Joshua, where we are told, “Not one word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass” (Joshua 21:45). Listen to Solomon’s words at the dedication of the temple that he had constructed in obedience to God’s command: “Blessed be the Lord who has given rest to his people Israel, according to all that he promised. Not one word has failed of all his good promise, which he spoke by Moses his servant” (1 Kings 8:56). In Hebrews 6:17-19 we have these words regarding God’s promise to Abraham that He would bless all the world through him. He was pointing to the Messiah Who would come through Abraham’s line and one day in the future, bring salvation to the world: “So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul . . .” Then listen to Jesus as He speaks the following words to His disciples regarding His coming death: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:1-3).

So, what about you? Do you believe Him? Do you believe the one being in all the universe for Whom it is impossible to lie? Or are you trusting in your own senses, or someone or something else. You see, everything else will fail us. Everything else has limitations regarding knowing, perceiving, and conveying the truth. But there is only One Who is the Truth (John 14:6). Doesn’t it make sense to put your trust in Him?