The brutal facts of faith

Poatina Morning tea devotion given today

Moving forward together

It’s been a long weekend!  Ran out of hay fever medication yesterday.  We had a fantastic night on Trinity Sleep-over on Fri night – not a lot of sleep.

As you know, I started a series of devotions based on I Tim 4:12.  As a young person, I held onto this verse, “Don’t let anyone look down on your because your young, but set an example. Let them follow the way you teach and live; be a patterns for them in your love, your faith and your clean thoughts.”

This morning I want to talk about Faith.  How would you go if you were told you had to set an example to “everyone, in the area of faith.  But Timothy is in a community and Paul’s saying, “This is how you lead the community. You set an example, including in Faith.”  The Chapter we use in talking about faith in Foundations is Heb 11:1,  “Faith is being sure of the things you hope for; certain of the things we cannot see.”

Sometimes it feels like faith is doing the stupid things – things that sound heroic:  there is a danger of confusing faith with presumption. “I’m going to set out on this course and God is going to meet me.”

As we look at Abraham, you see a man who had in his head a picture that God had given him and he worked toward that. By faith, Abraham when called to go to go to a place which was his inheritance, responded and went, even though he didn’t know where he was going.

Later in Heb 11, it writes of all the people of faith who were living by faith when they died – yet they hadn’t necessarily received what they hoped for.  Faith doesn’t necessarily mean that what you think is going to happen will happen.  It’s tempting to believe having faith as a grain of mustard seed means there is a Santa in the sky, who gives you anything you believed about.

I came across the book, “Good to Great” by Jim Collins.   He sat down with former General from Korean war, Stockdale, who was taken a prisoner.  Stockdale wrote a book about his experience and Collins found it depressing.  He couldn’t imagine how you would hang on to faith in the face of what they were going through.  Even when he knew that Stockdale survived, he was depressed as he read the story.  So he asked him, “How did you hang on?”  Stockdale said, “That’s easy. You never, ever give up believing you are going to get out. You never ever lose faith; or lose sight of your goal and you are committed to that goal”.

Collins said, “Yea, but there were men who didn’t make it. What was wrong for them?”.

Stockdale came back and said, “That’s easy, they were the optimists! They were the ones who believed they were going to be out by Easter or by Christmas. They set up their own timeline and when it didn’t happen, they died.  Optimism, in terms of imagining the facts as you want them to be, is dangerous for your health when you’re a prisoner of war”.

As we sit here there is a question of faith that confronts us as a village and a movement. It’d be tempting to say, let’s go for the big and the impossible and say, “Let’s do this now!”

Faith is not about ignoring the facts. Real faith confronts the brutal facts but it never loses hope, or sight of the vision that God calls us to.

Bono says Fear is the opposite of faith. He wrote a whole album about it –it starts with” Vergito”, ‘fear of heights’; and finishes with “Yahweh” – he says it’s about the journey from fear to faith.

The theme in my journal over the last 18 months is the word scared, which comes up often. I know that for me, my journey of faith is to confront my fears but also to confront my picture even of what faith is.  Yancey said “I have observed that people involved in ministry live with an unstated faith contract: after all, they’re giving time and energy to work for God, don’t they deserve special treatment in return?  “God, can’t you see? Can’t you make it a little easier?”

Faith is actually about trusting that there is a God.  The brutal facts without God is where despair will come. And facing the facts as though there’s a Santa in the sky, is where dysfunction comes.

We’re not at a point now where we can invite every person who needs us, into Poatina. If I just look at the facts, we’re not ready. I would like to pretend that we are, but the question for us as a village is what is God saying. Are we are to wait till the brutal facts say we are ready? Chances are we won’t accept anyone for a while then. But what is the vision God has for us? The question for us to wrestle with is, “God, what are you saying to us?”  Is it time to press forward?

The only way we are going to find a future together is if we have a genuine wrestle with what he is calling us to and hang onto his view and not our view.  In times when I feel most desperate, it’s good for me to go, “Yes, but there is a God and everything’s ok”.