A Sincere Faith
2001
The last thing was an unfeigned or a sincere faith, meaning that as I face the issues of life, that I really honestly believe with all my heart that God is God. That His personality, His character, His promises, His Word, the things He has given His Word on -- relating to my salvation, relating to the quality of life, relating to issues like “a hundred fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters.” “…Plans to prosper and not to harm...” “I’ll be found by those that search for me with all their heart....”
“No. No you won’t. I’ve tried. I’ve tried and tried. It’s not working.”
When we begin to give in to thoughts like that, then our faith isn’t real. Faith is the evidence of things hoped for. It’s the substance of things unseen. I don’t see it; I don’t have it in my hands. I can’t prove it to anybody; I don’t have any tangible sequence of events or some pile of logic over here to prove that this, this and this is going to happen and then it’s going to be okay.
But I live over here, like it says a little later on in Hebrews 11. I live in the good of what God has said. Whether I ever experience it myself or not, I’m still living that way. I will not let my mind go back to the old country. I’m not backing off from this thing. What I see God is in, I’m going with that. If it costs me my life I’m not shrinking back even to the point of costing me my life. I’m not going to give in to a collapse of heart. I’m not going to give in to a collapse of decision-making because things aren’t working out the way I think that they should, the way I think God promised they should. That would be a feigned or insincere faith. I profess a religion and I profess a Christianity, but when the pressure is on, I don’t stand up to it. I don’t really believe it in the deepest part of my heart.
Again, I am not telling you that this is not a battle. If it weren’t a battle it wouldn’t be worth anything. It is a battle; it was a battle for me two days ago. For a block of a few hours of time I had a form of a collapse. I saw something that I knew was God, I saw some things or I thought I did. It was my imagination that seemed to somehow contradict that and my heart was like a sinkhole -- it just started sucking in earth -- aaahhh!!
At that point in time I was having to make very difficult, very painful decisions about whether I was going to have a sincere faith, a faith that said, “No, I know what You said is true. I know Your Character, I know Your promises, I know Your personality. I know all these things about You. Forget the evidence! It’s got to be a mirage. It’s just a temporary issue that has an appearance, but I know reality is over here. Your Word is more true than what my circumstances seem to be.” And in fact that proved to be the case in a matter of hours, but what if it hadn’t been a matter of hours? What if, like Job, it had been a matter of perhaps months? Then what would I do? Would I curse God and die?
Again, part of the mindset is a pure heart where all of our affections are only -- there’s nothing divided, nothing compromised, nothing sold, nothing allowed or tolerated, but just what is important to God. That’s where all my affections are. I can play with things, as Paul said, we can have possessions, as long as we are not possessed by them. It’s the same principle. David had a lot of junk around him, but as a man after God’s own heart -- it didn’t touch his heart. His heart was God’s heart. He could be, like Paul, content with much or with nothing, it just wasn’t an issue. He could go out of Jerusalem with nothing but a rag on his head and bare feet. Or he could come back in to the luxury of being the richest man that has ever existed on planet earth, which is what Ripley’s Believe it or Not says, bar none.
He had it both ways, but his God was still his God. When Shimei was shouting down curses on him, David’s faith stood. He said, “God means this for my good. If this is from God, I need to accept this just like I accepted the riches. It’s not an issue. It’s God I want. I’d rather be a doorkeeper in His house with nothing but a rag to my name than to be a slave to possessions or a slave to ego or to physical desires which fade anyway.” All that junk is rotting. The only stuff that matters is what’s on the inside. Everything else rots. You can pick it at any point in time you want, pick your commodity, anything in the human physical realm, it’s going to rot. It will deteriorate or erode.
You take a snapshot and say, “Hey, this is really good. This is what I want.” Give it about a year, six years, eight years, which isn’t very long. Eight years, ten years goes by very quickly and what you thought you had right there that you spent so much for, six or eight years from now it’s worth nothing. It’s like an option in the commodities market. It has deteriorating value. It doesn’t pay. If you hold on to it, grab on to it for all it is worth, there is nothing in the physical realm that isn’t subject to the law of entropy. It will deteriorate, it will erode.
You cash in everything you have for something in this present age and realm that somehow fulfills what you think will be your desire and you will lose. It’s absolutely guaranteed. That’s God’s promise, is that without a pure heart, you’re missing the only thing that really does matter, which is to live in and exude, participate in love, to participate in God. That’s the only thing that doesn’t erode. If you wander away from that by getting distracted by the cereal box of life, you’re going to end up with a real problem on your hands.
That’s what the Holy Spirit through Paul was saying. You can be religious, which is the last part of that verse, and confidently affirm things and want to “have a ministry” and all this nonsense. Meanwhile, your heart’s affections, your conscience is something seared or soiled, at least, and your faith is not standing in the face of a Holy God regardless of circumstances and the person of Jesus and His Blood and His Oath and Covenant. Somehow we get all that stuff mixed up and our religious life goes on, but we’re dead on the inside. We wander away and we lose the goal of all of life, which is to participate in God in love.
One of these little snapshots or minor roadmaps that the Spirit gives of how to get yourself into that place of really seeing Jesus for who He is and enjoying Him for who He is. It isn’t a matter of reading so many gushy books about all His wonderful qualities. You’d be hard-pressed to find books like that. Why? You’re not going to find books on Jesus’ glorious personality because there are so few people that know His personality!
They can’t write about what they have no idea about. All they can do is throw religion and cute stories at you, but they don’t know Him well enough because they’ve violated those things. They’ve sold themselves somehow to their “ministry” and to an impure heart and a soiled conscience because of not participating and being saturated by God’s will. They allow other diversions and an insincere faith as a result, and so they don’t know Him.
What I’m saying is, there is a way. And that’s basically so much of what you read in the New Testament. There are teachings and commandments and things like that. You say, “What do I need all that for? All I need to do is loove Jesus.” Well, what God is saying and what He said so clearly in that one verse is if you can’t love Me, you can’t know Me. If you’re not building this way I won’t show Myself to you. Ezekiel said, “I will hide because of the idols in your heart. I’m going to blind your eyes. You won’t be able to see Me or enjoy Me if you don’t build this way.”
That’s a very practical thing, an incredibly practical thing. I face a day and I’ve got to look at the purity of my heart and the unsoiledness of my conscience. I’ve got to look at the sincerity of my faith when I’m pressed and I have to deal with those things in a real way. Because I can’t see His personality and fall in love with Him without that groundwork being laid in my life. That’s what swings the doors open to go into the deeper chambers of God’s heart and mind are those very practical things.
