What Faith is Not

What Faith is Not

Proverbs 3:1-6

February 16, 2020 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Cathy and I have different versions of how we started dating. Well, maybe not different versions, but certainly different perspectives. This we agree on: we had been friends for about 2 and a half years. We had been serving for about a year and a half with the executive team of the Ball State InterVarsity chapter, and so one night after the large group gathering, at the Flying Tomato Pizza place, I asked if she would like to go with me to a movie on campus. She likes to point out that apparently I never said the word “date,” so she wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she agreed to go. The movie was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the one with the whales, and she asked questions all the way through it. Questions like, “Who’s the guy with the pointy ears?” Okay, in fairness, she had never seen a Star Trek anything before (and the guy with the pointy ears is Spock, for those of you not in the know), but you just don’t ask questions during a movie. After that, according to Cathy (on this we disagree), I didn’t call her for a month, so she wasn’t sure what the status of our relationship was. She was uncertain; she had doubts. But I do know that once I found out that there was another guy in InterVarsity who was also interested in Cathy—well, that was enough to motivate me to solidify things. So, yeah, thirty years later, I’ll just say that uncertainty and doubts played a large part in getting us to the point of officially dating, then engagement and marriage—well, those things and the starship Enterprise got us here.

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been considering the role doubt plays in building faith. I’ve said it both of those weeks, but let me say it again: doubt is not an enemy to faith. Doubt can often propel us toward greater faith—if, as I’ve said to you the last two weeks, we stay in the conversation. Certainly doubt can push us the other way, toward unbelief, partly because uncertainty can place us on unsteady ground. But doubt is not an automatic route to unbelief. Doubt is more often a path to greater faith. Here’s the challenge: at no point did God ever promise to give us all the answers. At no point did God ever say he would answer all of our questions or explain everything to us. To be fully faithful and faith-filled, we will have to learn to live with some uncertainty in our faith and in our life. And that’s not a bad thing. Here’s why.

For one thing, uncertainty adds humility to faith. Certainty breeds arrogance. Have you known people who were “certain” about everything? It doesn’t matter what the topic is, they know everything for certain. How much do you want to be around those people? Come to think of it, a lot of those people seem to live on social media these days! I know I’ve told this story before, but as an extreme example I thought of Brother Jed who would come to campus at Ball State and stand at the main intersection on campus yelling at people about why they were going to hell. Several of you have told me he came to Indiana State’s campus, too; I’m sure he made the rounds of many campuses because he was certain. He was certain he was one of the few who was saved and he was certain everyone else was lost. In more recent times, we’ve seen the same sort of attitude out of the Westboro Baptist Church. About ten years or so ago, they came to protest a military funeral down the street from the church I was serving in Portage. One of our members wanted to get out of the car and give them a piece of her mind; her husband stopped her because he was afraid she’d end up in a fight and get arrested! And of course both of those are extreme examples, but that’s the nature of certainty. It results in extremes; it results in arrogance. I love the cartoon that pictures a person standing before the pearly gates. St. Peter says to the man, “You were a believer, yes. But you skipped the not-being-a-jerk-about-it part.” Certainty can result in believing you’re better than everyone else. Admitting that we don’t know it all, that there is uncertainty is our life, leads to humility, to a place where we listen to the other because we might not be right about everything. The reality is we don’t know everything about God. As I said last week, if we knew everything about God, we wouldn’t need God; he wouldn’t really be worth worshipping if we had him all figured out. Besides, the Christian faith is not about knowing everything or having all the answers. It is placing our trust in a person. We think we want certainty, but what we really need is trust (cf. Ortberg, Know Doubt, pg. 137).

The second thing uncertainty does is push us to seek truth. The easy thing for us to do is to paint God in our own image, and I don’t mean literal pictures, though that is certainly true. Most images of God and especially of Jesus reflect the culture they come from. We’re used to seeing pictures of Jesus that have flowing brown wavy hair, caucasian skin and blue eyes, but actually he probably would have looked more like Palestinians today, considering where he was born and raised. Most likely he had dark hair, olive skin and dark eyes. But even more than the physical representations, we tend to create a God who thinks like us, acts like us and always approves of our choices. I have lost count lately of how many articles I’ve read or stories I’ve seen about celebrities who claim to be Christians and know for certain that God agrees with their political view or their particular Biblical interpretation. They speak very authoritatively. They have the right ideas and anyone who doesn’t agree with them doesn’t agree with God. Now, most of them ignore particular parts of the Bible in favor of others, but that’s what we have to do to create God in our own image. When we are certain we are right, we create a God who seems to be and think and act just like us. But I don’t believe we will ever know everything we could know about God. That’s why we need to continue to study, grow, learn, and seek the truth. I gave my life to Christ when I was in the fifth grade. What if, at that moment, I had decided I knew everything there was to know about God and had stopped learning? I would be “certain,” but I would have missed so much more that God has taught me since that time. The God I knew in fifth grade is so much different than the God I know now; well, not really, he’s the same God, but you know what I mean. I know so much more of him now than I did then. It’s like Lucy’s experience in The Chronicles of Narnia. At one point, she notices that Aslan, the Christ-figure lion in the stories, is larger than she remembers. “That is because you are older, little one,” Aslan says. “Every year you grow, you will find me bigger” (Lewis, Prince Caspian, pg. 148). The God I know now is “bigger” than he was when I was in fifth grade. And, Lord willing, in forty more years I will know even more of him, he will be “bigger” again. I am certain of one thing: I will never exhaust the riches of knowing God. When I remain open, God continues to show me more of his character and his nature.

We could say that “certainty” was the Pharisee’s problem in the New Testament. They thought they had God all figured out. They knew how he wanted his people to live. They insisted that everyone conform not only to God’s laws but also to the rules they had created about God’s laws. I’ve said it many times but let me say it again: Jesus and the Pharisees often agreed on interpretation of the Scripture and the doctrines of the faith. Jesus didn’t quibble with them over what they believed. What Jesus argued with the Pharisees about was the way they forced people to live it out (and the way they didn’t live it out themselves). He argued with them about their practice. It was all about legalism for the Pharisees. What they had failed to account for in their certainty was what the passage we read this morning calls “love and faithfulness” (3:3). The word there is one I’ve taught you before: hesed. It’s often translated as “lovingkindness” (early translators had to make up a word for it, that’s how hard it is to translate) and it is translated 169 different ways across 6 different English translations (cf. In the Studio with Michael Card podcast, September 23, 2019, 33:59). You might remember the definition I usually use: when the one who owes you nothing gives you everything. It’s extravagant love; hesed is the defining characteristic of God—and that’s a shocking thing. The big surprise of the New Testament is that when the Savior comes, he is a servant. But the big surprise of the Hebrew Scriptures is that God is kind. It’s no surprise that he’s awesome, holy or powerful. The gods were always like that. But it is a surprise that he is kind (Card, Inexpressible, pg. 43). That’s what makes him unlike any of the gods of the people around the Israelites. God is hesed, giving us what we do not deserve. And he calls his people to be like that as well.

Proverbs says this characteristic is what defines God, and it should define us as well. “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart” (3:3). Bind hesed around your neck; write God’s very character on your heart. When something is bound around your neck, it marks you as a servant, and when you are a servant, you are expected to reflect the character of the one whom you serve. In this case, Proverbs urges us to be bound to God, the one who is hesed, the one who gives us everything when we deserve nothing, and to allow his character to be written on our hearts. If God’s very nature is hesed, that’s to be our nature as well. Here’s the truth of the spiritual life: as we try to learn more about the love of God, the hesed of God, we find we can never reach the depths. We can never love him more than he loves us.

That, then, leads us to the third thing about uncertainty: it makes trust possible. When it comes to matters of faith, people sometimes claim they want proof. They want to see, then they will have faith. But seeing is not faith; seeing is not believing. “Faith,” the book of Hebrews says, “is confidence is what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” (11:1). If you can see it, you don’t need faith. Angels, for instance, don’t need faith because they live in the constant presence of God (cf. 1 Peter 1:12). “Faith is required only when we have doubts, when we do not know for sure. When knowledge comes, faith is no more” (Ortberg 139). Trust is the bridge between faith and knowledge. This is what Paul was talking about in that famous passage we usually read at weddings. “Now we see [or that could also be translated ‘know’] only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see [‘know’] face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Trust gets us from the now to the then, from when we don’t see to when we will. So why should we value faith? Because, Scripture also tells us that without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6). Uncertainty reminds us that we are not God and calls us to trust the one who is.

The passage we read from Proverbs, then, gives us some clues, some hints, as to how we learn to live in trust until, as Paul put it, “completeness comes” (1 Corinthians 13:10). It begins with commitment. The author of the Proverbs, who tradition says was King Solomon, says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart” (3:5a). All your heart. For us, especially in this season of the year where we’ve just come through Valentine’s Day, we associate the “heart” with emotions, feelings, especially love (the Hallmark kind of love). When the one we love is nearby, our hearts race, we say. We give cards with pretty symmetrical hearts drawn on them that actually look nothing like a real heart and that symbolizes our love. But for the Hebrews—and we have to remember that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is not written in our mindset but from a Hebrew worldview—the heart is the seat of human thought and the spiritual life (http://bit.ly/hebrewheart). The heart is where, in Hebrew thinking, decisions are made, so when we are told we should trust God with our hearts, it’s not about loving God. (In Hebrew thinking, that would be rooted in the kidneys, in the gut, the place where our emotions were thought to live.) Trusting the Lord with all our hearts is about commitment; it’s about choices, decisions, motives and intentions (cf. Hubbard, Communicator’s Commentary: Proverbs, pg. 71). It’s coming to the place where we want to be directed always and in all ways by what God wants for us.

Every year, about the time of the new year, we pray a prayer that says we want to trust God with all our heart. It’s a prayer that has been handed down in our tradition, a prayer John Wesley wrote for a service of renewing our covenant with God. Do these words sound familiar? “Lord, make me what you will. I put myself fully into your hands: put me to doing, put me to suffering, let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you, let me be full, let me be empty, let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and with a willing heart give it all to your pleasure and disposal” (UMBOW pg. 291). That’s a prayer that, if lived out, will lead us to “trusting the Lord with all our hearts.” The question is: do we live it out? Do we live into that prayer or are we just saying words every year? I know there are a lot of words in that prayer I don’t like because they’re hard. Put me to suffering? Let me be laid aside for you? Let me have nothing? Those prayers are not part of the American dream—but then neither is the cross, and that’s exactly Wesley’s point in that prayer. It’s also the point of this call to total commitment we find in the Proverbs. “Trust in the Lord…” Not just with part of your heart, or just the parts of your life that are safe, or just the parts we want to spare. No, Proverbs says trust depends on full commitment: “Trust in the Lord with ALL your heart” (3:5a, emphasis mine).

The writer goes on to tell us to “lean not on your own understanding” (3:5b). “Understanding” is an interesting word in this passage; it could also be translated as “confidence,” but in the Hebrew language the same word is used to describe being stupid. Sometimes it can be translated “foolishness.” That’s the point: relying on our own understanding, our own confidence, our own hunches is stupid (cf Goldingay, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes & Song of Songs for Everyone, pg. 18). There’s no other word for it. When you “lean” on something that is not stable, you will fall down and perhaps hurt yourself. That’s exactly the imagery the author is using here. Lean on your own hunches, your own thoughts, and you will fall. You will be injured. So we learn trust in God through renunciation. We renounce our own ways of doing things and learn to move forward with God’s plan, God’s ways.

I was a young youth pastor when I took a group of youth and adults on a spring break mission trip to Red Bird Mission in Kentucky. On our day off, we decided to go exploring at a local state park. Now, I assumed that their state parks would be like what I knew of Indiana state parks, full of well-marked trails, so I passed up picking up a map at the entrance. Besides, I said, I have a pretty good sense of direction. We’ll be fine. You can see where this story is going, can’t you? We had a great time hiking and exploring and looking at the Kentucky wilderness, but it wasn’t long before none of us had any idea where we were. The trails were not marked like they are in Indiana, and my sense of direction wasn’t as good as I thought it was. After several hours, we did manage to make it back to the gate where our vehicle was parked, and we went to the lodge to enjoy a really good meal, but we could have gotten to that point a whole lot faster had I not insisted on relying on my own understanding! In this case, “confidence” really was the same thing as “stupidity.” We look back on that trip and laugh about it now, but I know it would have been much better if I had relied on someone else’s wisdom instead of my own—if I had picked up the map and followed its instructions! Of course, we have a map for the life of faith; it’s called the Scriptures. And there is much in here about how God wants us to live. When we renounce our own understanding and lean on his, we are on the road toward trust.

Then, the third thing the writer says about learning to trust might be summed up with the word relationship. When we come to know him, our behavior changes. We submit to him, as verse 6 indicates: “In all your ways submit to him” (3:6). Notice again the use of the word “all;” this is not a part-time occupation, not a sometimes engagement. All your ways means “all your ways.” And “submit” means he’s in charge. We don’t get to choose. We don’t get to decide. When we submit to leadership, the leader is in charge. When we give our all to God, he is in charge. But the good news is this: “he will make your paths straight” (3:6). When we lived in Kentucky during my seminary years, I remember being amazed and a little overwhelmed by the roads. None of them ran straight! I grew up in rural northern Indiana, where the roads are marked off by square miles and, for the most part, they are straight north or south, east or west. But nothing in Kentucky ran straight. The roads went around the hills and hollers, up and down the mountains and around the bodies of water. I had a theory that the higher the numbers on a road, the curvier it was. Highway 68 was a bit straighter than Highway 1268, for instance! Anyway, we served at a church in Harrodsburg, about a half hour from Wilmore, but I was and am still convinced that if the roads had been able to go straight, “as the crow flies,” we could have probably been there in ten minutes! It’s worth noting though that, for the four years we were there, every time we went to Harrodsburg, I would look at a car that was down over the edge, hanging in the trees. No one knew how long it had been there; it might still be there for all I know! The first time I saw it, I thought, “There’s someone who wasn’t paying attention!” But the same thing happens to us in life when we trust that we know the way, we know how to do it and we don’t need God telling us how to live. We end up wrecked, along the side of the road, in a world of hurt. When we submit to the plan and the life God has for us, we will find our paths marked out for us. “In all your ways submit to him,” Proverbs says, “and he will make your paths straight” (3:6).

Now, that’s not to say we’ll know exactly what our lives will look like. Rather than giving us a whole life plan, God seems to reveal his plan for us like headlights reveal the road ahead, giving us just enough light for where we are and the next few feet. That’s where trust comes in. As I said a few moments ago, trust gets us from the now to the then. We are not in charge of the world but we know the one who is. And we can trust him to get us where we need to be. Trust in the Lord—he will make your paths straight.

Let me end this morning what what I hope is a pastoral word. Many if not most of you know that the United Methodist Church is in a time of great uncertainty. For over forty-five years, our denomination has disagreed internally over issues of human sexuality. Actually, that’s just what counselors would call the “presenting issue.” The distrust and disagreements are really deeper than that, amounting to factions within the church who differ on their interpretation of Scripture, their understanding of who Jesus is and a lot of other things that, to me, are pretty important parts of the Christian faith. And so last year, about this time, we held a special General Conference that was supposed to, once and for all, solve these issues for us and help us move forward as a denomination. What we got instead was an ugly fight that really just deepened the differences. It seems to have left everyone more entrenched. As one Bishop commented in an article I saw this week, though we made a show of prayer and worship, no one really changed their hearts or minds in the midst of it. We just shouted at each other. To use the words of Proverbs, we leaned on our own understanding. What resulted from General Conference 2019 is a whole lot of unhappy people.

So now we come to General Conference 2020, which will be held in May, and several proposals have been put forth, many of which suggest separating in a variety of ways into groups or denominations in which we can stop harming each other and move ahead with the ministries we believe God has called us to. I don’t know what will happen during those ten days in May in Milwaukee. I agree with the great philosopher, Yogi Berra, who said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” There is great uncertainty in the air around United Methodism, among laity and clergy alike. But, friends, these two things I know. First, Mount Pleasant will continue to be here, doing ministry and touching lives in this place and in this community. No matter what the denomination does, that will remain true. We will continue to be who we are: believers making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. The second thing I know is this: if we don’t learn to trust in the Lord with all our heart, lean not on our own understanding and submit to him, then nothing we do at General Conference will matter a bit. I won’t lie and tell you there aren’t times I don’t worry about the future of the church, the church I have served now for almost twenty-seven years and the church I have been a part of my entire life. But God, the Lord of all, is bigger than any one church, and he’s bigger than any one denomination. So in those moments when the anxiety arises, about this or any other situation, I choose to place my trust in the one who is bigger, the one who calmed the storm, the one who continues to say to my doubts and questions, “Peace, be still” (cf. Mark 4:39).

Faith is not certainty. Faith is not knowing everything. Even for those with the strongest faith, uncertainty will come. Doubts will challenge us. Into every situation like that, let’s be people who speak the ancient words of the Scriptures: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight” (3:5-6). Let’s pray.