The Blessing of Believing
The Blessing of Believing by Rev. L. John Gable
December 11, 2022
What would you say is the benefit of believing? I asked that rather open ended question to the group gathered for Bible Study this past Wednesday morning. What is the benefit or blessing that comes with having faith? Without hesitation, they began listing many. Faith gives our lives meaning and purpose. It offers us peace in times of anxiety and comfort in times of difficulty. It gives us strength and power beyond our own abilities. Rather than it being a flight into fantasy, faith gives us a foundation and perspective for life that is grounded in reality. One even described it as a “useable asset” in good times and bad. And beyond the promise of eternal life, which is where I thought the conversation would start, faith gives us the confident assurance that God is with us, particularly in the difficult times, and that He is faithful to His promises, even when we can see no possible way forward and things just don’t make sense to us.
You may add still other insights to this list, but we would be safe to say that to live in faith then is to live with these kinds of comforts and assurances. It is to have these principles, perspectives and convictions shaping the way we understand and interpret all the events of our lives. To have faith is to recognize that God is at work in our lives and in our world, even in ways that are beyond our sight or understanding.
With this in mind, we look at two stories this morning, one Old Testament, one New, one very familiar, the other probably not. Both though speak to us of the very nature of what it means to live in faith.
The first comes from the book of Jeremiah, in the Old Testament, and it is the lesser known of the two stories. To set the stage, Jeremiah was a prophet who lived in the southern kingdom of Judah between 627-587 BC. Without getting into too much detail, the northern kingdom of Israel had already fallen to the Assyrians about 100 year before and the southern kingdom of Judah was under siege and about to be overtaken by the Babylonians. In the midst of this pending conquest, the Lord told Jeremiah to “go and buy a piece property and hang on to the deed for a future time.” Jeremiah, in obedience to the Lord, did this. But then later, almost as if he had come to his senses and wondered why the Lord would have him do such a seemingly ridiculous thing, asks, “Tell me again why I paid good money for a piece of property that is soon going to conquered by a foreign army?” And the Lord answered, “Trust me on this one. I am the Lord your God, is anything too hard for me?” God then restates a promise He had made to every generation from Abraham to King David. “The days are surely coming when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those day and at that time I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David and He shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”
God made a promise and on that promise, and that promise alone, Jeremiah did this seemingly very foolish thing. He bought a piece of property in a land that was soon to be conquered believing that one day God would bring His people back home again. Acting in faith which surpassed reason, Jeremiah was willing to trust an unknown future to a known God.
Keep that story in mind if you would as we turn our attention to the more familiar story of Mary’s visit to the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth. We know the background of this story. Mary is a young, unmarried peasant girl, who is found to be with child by the Holy Spirit of God, and the child she is carrying is promised to be the long-awaited Messiah. Finding herself in a very difficult, quite unexplainable situation, Mary sets off to visit her much older cousin Elizabeth, who also is found to be with child under only slightly less unusual circumstances. Both Mary, and Elizabeth’s husband, Zechariah, had had visits from the angel Gabriel announcing their pregnancies. You’ll recall Zechariah questioned the validity of the announcement and was struck mute for as many months, while Mary asked a similar question and got an answer which sounds very similar to the one given earlier to Jeremiah. “Trust Me, Nothing is impossible with God.” Whether asked in doubt or simply out of the lack of understanding, this surely is a foundational conviction for the life of faith. “Nothing is impossible with God.”
As we look at these stories though, the question is raised for us, what is it that Jeremiah and Mary, and Elizabeth and Zechariah for that matter, had that allowed them to believe the seemingly unbelievable promises they have been given? In our familiarity with these stories perhaps we have all but lost touch with the passion and real crises these individuals found themselves in because of these announcements. Consider the times. Unwed teenage mothers became outcasts. Despite the appeal to angel visitations, unplanned pregnancies such as these were a disgrace to all involved. Like Jeremiah, hanging on to a deed to property in a conquered land, there was no earthly reason to believe that anything good could possibly come out of any of these circumstances.
Perhaps, we too know what that feels like, don’t we? We know what it feels like to be trapped in a set of circumstances from which we cannot seem to find a way out. We know what it feels like to face an uncertain future, it might be fair to say we have lived that kind of existence since March of 2020 with the onset of a global pandemic. We know the anxious moments and creeping doubts that come while waiting for test results, or the dread and fear we feel after hearing the diagnosis. We know what it feels like to be torn by a troubled marriage or to struggle with wayward kids. We know the feelings of emptiness which well up within us when we add up the numbers at the end of the month and there doesn’t seem to be enough left over to cover the bills which are coming due, again. We know the anxiousness and ambiguity that comes when we find ourselves in the difficulty, even the crisis, of our present circumstances and are not sure what the future holds. So we look to the likes of Jeremiah and Mary and Elizabeth and Zechariah to see what it is that they had which sustained them in their circumstances, and we find they had faith. It was faith, and faith alone, that allowed them to trust their unknown futures to a very known God.
I am struck by Elizabeth’s greeting when Mary came into their home. In the lesson we read this morning, she begins by praising God and blessing Mary for being chosen as the one to bear the promised Messiah. It was every Jewish woman’s prayer to be the mother of the Lord, and humble Mary, peasant Mary, was the one chosen. Elizabeth had the ability to look beyond the awkward social circumstance Mary found herself in to see how God was using her to fulfill a magnificent promise. She then goes on to pronounce this remarkable blessing. “Blessed are you for believing that there will be a fulfillment to what was spoken by the Lord.” Despite her present circumstances, Elizabeth was blessing Mary simply for having faith, for her trusting that God was at work in her and through her.
The nature of faith is exactly this. It is being willing to trust God in advance for those things which will only make sense in retrospect. Jeremiah, Elizabeth, Mary didn’t understand HOW God’s promises would be fulfilled; they simply believed THAT God’s promises would be fulfilled. In the early centuries of the church, St. Augustine wrote, “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand in order that you may believe, rather believe in order that you may understand.” Unpack that and what he is saying is simply this: we think we need to understand things, to have all of our questions answered, before we can really trust God, when in reality the opposite is true. It is not understanding that leads us to faith, rather it is faith that leads us to understanding. It is faith which gives us the perspective and insight to trust God, even when we do not understand God or the meaning of the circumstances we find ourselves in. Faith means trusting God in advance for that which will only make sense to us in retrospect. The end of faith is understanding and to live in faith means to live with the ambiguity until we get there.
As I think about this, I remember teaching our kids and now our grandchildren, to swim or to jump off the ledge or the diving board for the first time. You know the setting, a terrified child on the edge of the board, afraid to jump, while the parent is offering words of encouragement while treading water down below. The child cries, “Promise me you’ll catch me.” The parent promises, “I will.” The child hesitates, “Prove it to me.” And the only possible response is, “I can’t prove it to you unless you jump, so trust me.” The moment of action comes when the child’s confidence in the promise of the parent becomes greater than their fear of the unknown, and the same is true in the life of faith. We live out our faith most fully when our trust in the promises of God exceeds our fear of the unknown future. And the more we experience this, the more confident we become in the trustworthiness of God’s promises.
That is what is remarkable in the stories we’ve looked at this morning. This is what Elizabeth was commending Mary for having, faith. Faith enough to trust her unknown future to her known God. Rather than saying, “Show me the answers and I’ll believe you”, she was willing to say, “I’ll believe You and wait for the understanding to come.”
Margie McCoy was a seminary teacher and author. In the early 1970’s she wrote a book about death and little more than a decade later was facing her own. She had written a book about Mary, the mother of our Lord, and co-authored another about the cross, but then, at the height of her career, was stricken with a life-threatening and debilitating disease. Rather than being defeated by the pain of her deterioration, Margie instead looked to her faith and to the people around her who loved her, telling them that they helped change her difficult days in to times of wonder and joy.
At one point in the midst of her struggle, she wrote, “What does it all mean? we ask in puzzlement. How can all this struggle and turmoil and suffering and caring too much or too little not have some significance beyond being ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ ‘No one knows’, we must respond to these questions that well up out of our wayward longing. We are called to TRUST, not to KNOW. And trusting is difficult for us…All of our knowing, if we know anything at all and if it can really be called knowing, is knowing by FAITH. Suppose that we could step into faith wholly, cast off from the anxiety of the tension, and dwell fully in the mystery. Suppose that we could really learn to TRUST. Is this not what the Gospel calls us to do… to trust?” (Tom Long, Witness of Preaching, p.169)
Yes, this is what the Gospel calls us to do, to trust God even in the midst of the difficulty and ambiguity of our present situation. To trust God even beyond the bounds of our vision. Simply, to trust God to make good on His promises. And how do we know He will do it? How do we know He is trustworthy and true? Because He has made good on this promise by sending His Son, the child of Bethlehem. As the Apostle Paul will later write, “All of the promises of God find their ‘yes’ in Jesus Christ. For this reason it is through Him that we say ‘Amen” to the glory of God.” (II Cor. 1:20)
Jeremiah, Elizabeth, Zechariah, Mary and countless others before us and among us have been willing to believe in advance what would only make sense to them in retrospect. People of faith have been willing to trust their unknown futures to a God who has made Himself very much known in the birth of Jesus, the One we call Savior and Lord. So let us do the same, for such is the blessing of believing. Amen.
Rev. L. John Gable
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN