Faith

My last words were based on the need for hope. Hope is such an important thing. Hope often becomes our legs in dark times. Hope becomes a soft pillow instead of stone for our head. Hope lifts our head, our heart. But hope is misplaced when unaccompanied by faith. It becomes wishful thinking.


But faith gives hope its strength. Faith is the thing that can produce hope within us.


In his great work My Utmost for His Highest Oswald Chambers wrote:

Faith is not some weak and pitiful emotion, but is strong and vigorous confidence built on the fact that God is holy love. And even though you cannot see Him right now and cannot understand what He is doing, you know Him. Disaster occurs in your life when you lack the mental composure that comes from establishing yourself on the eternal truth that God is holy love. Faith is the supreme effort of your life—throwing yourself with abandon and total confidence upon God.

I work with a lot of hopeless people. It's not an economic thing; some of them are wealthy beyond my dreams. A tithe of their money would facilitate a lot of ministry here! They are hopeless because they have a misplaced faith.

Sometimes they have faith in faith itself. That is almost always the case among those who follow prosperity theology. They don't see God as the object of their faith; instead, God is the servant of their faith. Their faith is in their praying, not in the God who answers. And when He does not come through, well hope wanes and often dies.

Others have placed their faith in an image, or an icon, or in a religion. I know a few Baptists like that. I know a few Methodists like that, too. I know too many people like that. They trust something other than God. And without faith, said the author of Hebrews, you cannot please God. That is not carte blanche for us. We cannot claim that verse and then believe whatever. God must be the object of our faith. Abraham believed God and God wrote it up as righteousness for him.

I spoke with a woman this week who has a misplaced faith. So her hope is also weak. Her faith is in me. Yes, in me. She said that she wished I would return to their community and do the teaching, because then she could return to the paths of the Lord. A friend of mine once warned that our people group almost worships the missionary as a god. May we reject such a notion when it appears! I told the woman she was not on the Lord's path because she made a choice not to be there. If I allowed her to place her faith in me, what kind of man would I then be? If she could place her faith in me, when I left--and one day I will--then her hope would likely leave, because the object of her faith left.

Consider the megachurches in the world, especially the United States, where great, eloquent, appealing men of God have fallen. Soon thereafter many walk away from their faith because the object of their faith let them down. That will always happen with a misplaced faith. It's a false faith. It's an empty faith. It's a hopeless faith.

When Elisha left the place where Elijah was taken up from him, he came to the Jordan River with the mantle that Elijah had dropped. Elisha struck the water and cried out, "Where is the LORD God of Elijah?" (2 Kgs. 2:14) His faith was properly placed. It was not in his former teacher/mentor; it was in the only one who deserves to be the object of our faith.

Is your hope weak today? Consider examining your faith, too. If you shift your "faith-gaze" to the Lord, I think you will find your hope, right were you left it.

Hope

In my last post I spoke of a young man we took to the hospital. I learned yesterday that the young man had tried to commit suicide. He drank some kind of poison--probably rat poison. What moves a young teen to such despair? How can one so young believe that life is so empty that the only solution is to end it?

The boy's plight is tragic, to say the least. His father is nowhere to be found. I think he left ages ago. His mother has to earn a living by selling second-hand goods and candies on the street. Those of you in developing countries may have seen such a scene. There are men, women, or children standing on the road, holding a bag of candy. They climb onto the buses or tap on car windows, offering their goods. You can get six pieces of hard candy for about 35 cents.

My sources tell me that while the mother sold her goods, the boy drank. A lot. He spent many days quite drunk, in fact. Where does a 14-year-old get booze? What kind of pervert would sell or give it to him? Better a millstone be hung around his neck!!

So this young man is in the hospital, recovering from a self-inflicted injury. I don't know if he will be the same again. His nervous system was affected. He was already losing his eyesight when we got him there. I am praying for a different kind of eyesight. I am praying for him to see hope in the midst of a miserable life circumstance.

With the bad news flowing around the world today, with men waving weapons and executing people at will, before destroying their own lives, with men and women railing at God, we still need to have a clarion voice that there is hope in Jesus.

Life on a Hillside

This morning, Victor (one of our helpers) and I went to a section of town called Las Torres de la Rinconada. It means, "The Towers in the Corner." It's a very appropriate name. The community is up on a high hill, towering over the other communities. We are helping them with a community development project. This area is a high-risk landslide zone. So we are using general relief funds, given by Southern Baptists for this kind of work, to build retaining walls and sets of stairs up and down the very steep hills.

It's a hard life that they have to live. There is no running water in this part of our city. What lights they have are from makeshift connections, pulled from a part of town where there are power cables. In other words, they steal the electricity from an electrified zone. So the wires are thin, mostly useless for the long distances they have to pull the power.

Today we went to check on the progress of the work and then to lead those interested in a Bible study. Some 35 adults, plus a few small children came to the study. It was a precious sight to see. Some of them actually knew something about the Bible. Others seemed to know the Lord. Victor taught. He shared a lesson about the Law of God. The whole point, of course, is that the Law cannot save; only Jesus saves. When his lesson culminated in the plan of salvation, about half the adults indicated that they wanted to repent and place their faith in the Lord Jesus. It was a blessed moment, but a short-lived one.

As we took time to register the professions of faith, one of the residents of the community called to me from outside. She looked concerned. She looked very concerned. Her name, incidently, is Mercy. Mercy told me that a 14-year-old boy had fallen some 2 hours earlier and could not get up. I called out and had one of the men go up and bring him down so that we could take him to the hospital. We were in Victor's borrowed car. The boy's name is Junior. We laid him on the back seat, borrowed some oil from a store owner, anointed the boy, and prayed for him. Then we drove like crazy to the hospital.

The boy could not feel his legs, though he did have some motion. He cried with fear. He trembled. My prayer all the way to the hospital was that God not let that boy die. He is old enough to know that he is a sinner. We did not believe today was the appropriate time to share the gospel with him, or with his mother. Some may use such an emotional moment. I did not want a "fox-hole conversion." I want to see Junior up and walking, and able to listen to the gospel. So I prayed for healing and for his life. Mercy rode in the back seat, along with Carlos, the man who carried Junior to the car.

We take so much for granted. We have so much that we often become blind to the reality that grips others. As one man said to me yesterday, if someone is poor and has Jesus, he is just a poor man. If, on the other hand, he is poor and does not know the Lord, he is in misery. God help us remember what is was like to be miserable! And God help us to be able to rejoice with those who rejoice, but weep with those who weep!