Advent 2024 Week Two Reading: Faith

First Speaker:

The culture has changed over the last few generations. We now live in a world where faith is something to shake your head at. It’s something only fools hold. It is seen as the opposite of reason, the delusion that religions use to control their followers. People with faith are those who bury their heads in the sand and refuse to acknowledge that science and technology have advanced past the need for any sort of God.

In our constant information overload world, it can be tempting to think that faith just isn’t needed by intelligent people. Why would we need to believe in something we can't see when we can look up anything we want on Wikipedia directly from our phone?

Second Speaker:

But does having more information available to you really mean that faith is dead? Aren’t you still believing in someone else to tell you the truth? Or at least believing in yourself to discern the truth? It shouldn’t come as a surprise that God has a lot to say about faith.

Hebrews 11 verse 1 says:

"Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen."

God's word describes faith as the compelling reality of hope. It’s the proof of what we cannot see. What a drastically different definition than our world! Reality and proof are certainly not words our culture would use together with faith. The word that is most often used alongside the word faith is ‘blind’. Blind faith. This term is used to mean someone believing in something with no proof or reality involved in their belief at all. Yet that is not what God calls faith.

First Speaker:

In Luke 18, the blind beggar calls out to Jesus for healing saying: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” What a powerful phrase. Son of David, have mercy on me. This man couldn’t see Jesus, he couldn’t see the people Jesus was healing, he couldn’t see at all. He had no reason to believe that Jesus could or would heal him based on what he could see with his own eyes. Yet he still had faith. Why? Was he simply a fool clinging to delusion? 

To the Jews, the phrase ‘Son of David’ was a term for Messiah. This man believed that he would be healed, not because he could see the proof for himself, but because he believed that Jesus was his savior. He believed. And his blind faith was rewarded:

“Receive your sight,” Jesus told him. “Your faith has saved you.”

Second Speaker: 

This man was no longer blind. His faith saved him. More specifically, his faith in Jesus the Messiah was enough to heal him. This man knew what our culture ignores. We all put our faith in someone. We either put our faith in our own truth, or someone else’s truth. And who better to trust in than the God who created everything? The beauty of faith in God is that He, himself, gives it to you. It is this faith that serves as the proof of what you cannot see. 

Church, let us join this great example of blind faith in crying out to our Savior for His mercy, because we can be assured that He will give it.