This week, I’ve read two ostensibly faith promoting stories and thought afterwards, “Well, I’m happy for you, but your results don’t apply to my situation”. The authors mean well, and they desire to inspire us by writing about how their faith was rewarded with the blessings for which they strove, hoped, prayed, and waited. Both of them however already arrived in the Promised Land meaning that these stories, as inspirational as they may be, are no longer about faith. You see, if you have faith you hope for things which are not yet seen, which are true. In order to inspire faith, they must talk about things that remain as yet unrealized. Both of these stories feature people who have seen their faith rewarded. In these stories, the stories are told from a position of strength where they ALREADY reaped the rewards of their faith. That’s from a position of KNOWLEDGE. If you know a thing, if you are experiencing it, if you see it, it’s no longer faith, and your inspirational story, as interesting and helpful as it may be, does not actually inspire faith. I don’t know what it inspires, but it cannot inspire faith. You are trying to project your knowledge on me and use knowledge to create faith. That’s not how it works.
Both of them are interesting stories, and I recommend reading these type of stories for the positive messages you can take from them. However, as any rational adult will tell you “past performance does not guarantee future results” and “results may vary”. The scriptures are replete with examples of people who did not EVER get what they wanted, because their decisions put them into places where those outcomes were impossible or because the way they pursued blessings could not deliver. I’m glad that both of these stories ended with happy and healthy relationships, because I know that will continue to help them. However, some of God’s favorite children spent time in longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. Jonah in the whale, Daniel watched believers burned alive in the ovens, Elijah in the wilderness, Abinadi burned to death, Jeremiah imprisoned, Peter crucified, ad infinitum. They did not end up living happily ever after, and they didn’t get the outcomes for which they might have hoped.
In my last congregation, one of the leaders named Todd told me that I was the most faith affirming thing he saw each week. I had no wife, no children, no responsibility, and no friends per se in the congregation, and yet I came almost every week, sang hymns, participated in class, paid my donations, and interfaced with the members. He knew that I had no other incentive to come besides that I believe. He knew that I came because I had FAITH. Many people make different decisions. They remain “faithful” if and only if the blessings continue unabated, and as soon as they dry up, those same people conclude that their faith was in vain. Todd knew I had faith because I kept going even though my faith had not yet delivered the rewards often concomitant with living a faithful life. Moreover, it’s important to remember that just because your faith isn’t rewarded doesn’t mean your faith is poorly placed.
This is precisely the argument made by the devil when he received permission from God to tempt Job. Satan concluded erroneously but as we know what’s true all too well that Job was only faithful because of the many blessings he received and that Job would abandon God if God rescinded His favor and protection. As we know, Job lost everything (except for a few friends who were seriously the worst friends ever in my opinion) but despite the privations, tribulations, and criticism, Job stayed true to God and eventually ended up having his blessings restored and beyond.
All too often, however, we quit when we reach what CS Lewis wrote about in The Screwtape Letters as “a reasonable period of suffering”. We conclude that WE have suffered, endured, and persisted faithfully long enough and that, if God does not bless us with a particular gift by a particular deadline, our faith was in vain or placed in a false god. We project our time line and perspective on a diety, which evinces that we don’t actually believe in something greater than ourselves and that our ‘god’ is located just above our head in the vapid air surrounding us.
The real problem with most of these kinds of stories is the emphasis on the blessing and not on the Mediator. Although both of these stories I read justly ascribe credit to God for helping them through a difficult circumstance, the focus tends to be more in most cases on the destination. When we talk about faith, we talk about faith in the wrong context. We have faith in people, in the rising of the sun, in the progress of the seasons, etc. The principle of faith that we ought to be emphasizing is lost on us because we forget in what we ought to have Faith.
remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall.
Our faith is in a Messiah, a Redeemer, a Savior, in Jesus Christ. The faith we ought be promoting is Faith in Jesus Christ, which sustains us no matter the storm, no matter the privation, and no matter how long we must wait. If you trust in Christ, even if you don’t get blessed, you will not fall.
I attend church each week because I have faith in Christ. I don’t like some of the congregants, and I don’t trust others. Most of them I just don’t know very well. I’m not there for them. I’m not there hoping they’ll hire me, or befriend me or help me repair the roof or give one of their daughters to me to wife. I’m not there to please them, to impress them, or because I owe them allegiance. I am there because I want to show Jesus that I love Him enough to keep His commandments and that I believe that in the end He will be the one who frees me from pain, from sadness, from singleness, and from the shadows of anonymity and insignificance. The real point of the stories that affirm faith is that these people continued to believe in Christ, in God’s promises and in the method God told us He would keep His promises, and not in the outcome of the promises themselves. Our lives are a continual invitation to prepare for, wait on, and participate in the marriage of the Bridegroom of allegorical reference and show whether we truly intend to follow Christ and allow Him to rescue us from death, pain, and sin. They are not talking about their continued faith in Christ. They stop the story usually after the part where they obtained the reason why they decided to put their faith in Christ in the first place.
The kind of faith that sustained the prophets aforementioned was a faith in God’s promises and the life and sacrifice of God’s Son. Jonah was thrown from the whale when he acknowledged God’s desire to forgive. Abinadi testified of Jesus’ birth. Peter refused to deny Christ again and asked to be crucified upside down because he was not worthy. Elijah called down fire from heaven to show the Jews who their true God truly was and that He had power to save them. The prophets wrote nothing save it was to remind people of the reality of and their reliance on a Savior. They preached of Christ, they prophesied of Christ, they rejoiced in Christ, and they wrote according to their prophecy so that all the children of men might know to what source they could look to be saved from the struggles, pains, disappointments, setbacks, and heartbreaks of mortal life. They wanted people to turn to Jesus, to the Messiah, and to rely on Him to be saved, and anyone who shares a faith promoting story does well to remember this.
I have not arrived where I hoped to be. I am not wealthy, renowned, as skinny as I like, or even in communication with anyone I hope might be Mrs. Right. I’m still here though. I still go to church, write on my blog, read my scriptures, kneel in the living room each morning to pray and TRUST GOD. I don’t know if or when He will intervene to change the things I hope to improve, but I know that He will intervene in ways that improve my life. One day, maybe my life will change for the better in one of the ways I hope. One day maybe I’ll heal and have a family and know love beyond that of a beagle.
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