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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

How to Have Faith

Coming up next, please stay tuned for It Is Written, presented by Pastor John Bradshaw.

The Bible says that people are saved by grace through faith.

Underscoring that faith is really important.

According to the Bible, you can't be saved without it.

I heard recently from a woman who shared the experience of her friend.

She said she doesn't understand faith and she doesn't know how to get it.

She's let me know that she doesn't trust God with her life.

There are people who aren't sure how to exercise faith or want to have more faith.

And what if you weren't raised to accept the Bible as the Word of God and then you hear about a man being swallowed by a great fish, maybe a whale, who then spent 3 days and nights on the most incredible submarine voyage in history?

Or of a time when there'd never been rain and Noah builds an ark because God tells him the world is going to be flooded and only 8 people get on the boat and are saved.

Or the idea that our earliest ancestors lived for almost a thousand years.

But you can understand why someone would find that hard to believe.

And there are people who believe creation and the flood and the virgin birth and the story of Jonah and water from a rock and manna on the ground, and they struggle with having faith.

And that can be for a variety of reasons.

Your friends challenge your beliefs, or a science teacher tells you you're unwise for believing creation.

Remember, we are saved by faith, by grace through faith.

Jesus once asked this searching question, When the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?

He knew that in our secular world, faith might be a challenge due to people being bombarded or overwhelmed by opposing secular ideas.

Romans says that we are justified, made right with God, by faith.

So, we want to know what faith is, and we want to know how to have faith.

In fact, the book of Romans says, whatsoever is not of faith is sin.

I want you to know that you can have faith, and that your faith can grow, that you can have strong faith.

The Bible says, "...faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." That's Hebrews 11 verse 1.

Faith is believing you have what you hope for.

It's having evidence for something that you can't see.

We talk about God, but we've never seen Him.

I can tell you God exists, but I can't claim to have spoken with him face to face.

I couldn't tell you what his voice sounds like.

Now, I will tell you that God makes impressions on my mind through a variety of means.

But someone might think that I'm just imagining things.

So, Is faith simply an excuse for being able to believe in a God that we cannot see?

Is faith a convenient excuse for believing in a God we don't have any evidence for?

The Bible writers were so confident that they said, faith is believing you have it, even when you don't see that you have it.

Well, yes, absolutely, especially when you consider that some Bible writers communicated directly with God.

Moses, who most likely wrote 6 books of the Bible, spoke with God, spent time with God on Mount Sinai.

The prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit.

If that's the case, if the Bible writers interacted personally with God, then faith in God doesn't sound irrational.

Paul is discussing a story that took place back in the book of Genesis.

Here's what he says, Romans 4, starting in verse 13, "...for the promise that he should be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith." We're talking about the man known as the Father of Faith.

Paul is in the midst of explaining that salvation comes by faith and not by the works of the law.

He's already said the law is good and he'll say so again, but his point here is that salvation is obtained by faith.

Speaking of Abraham, we read, "...who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, so shall thy seed be." Now, what's going on here?

Abraham, who was not a young man, was told that he would be a father, even though his wife Sarah was close to 90 years old.

If I told Abraham his wife was going to have a baby at 90, he should not have believed me because I cannot guarantee something like that.

He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully persuaded that what he had promised, he was able also to perform.

As huge as this was, Abraham was fully persuaded that God could do what He promised.

And verse 22 says, "...and therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness." Why is this such a stirring example of faith?

Because, humanly speaking, this was impossible.

Yet, in spite of appearances, Abraham believed God.

Even though he believed against hope, he believed.

Abraham expected the Word of God to do what it said it would do, simply because it said so.

Well, when God says, I will provide for your needs, faith says, I believe you will.

I know folks who are missionaries and they never, ever ask anyone for money.

They're in the mission field and they've chosen to say, God, you have promised to provide for us and so we believe you will, just like George Mueller did in England in the 1800s.

Oh, I'm not saying everybody should do that, but they choose to, and God is providing for them.

Well, it could, I guess, and we'll talk about that in a moment.

But in Abraham's case, God pledged that Abraham and Sarah would have a baby.

Abraham had a choice, believe God or not believe God.

In other words, Abraham chose to have faith.

This example of faith was so powerful that Jesus said He'd never seen anything like it.

And because we're in Matthew 8, well let's look at another faith story, right at the beginning of the chapter.

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How to Have Faith

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