Walking By Faith Not By Sight (Part 1)

Walking By Faith, Not By Sight, Pt. 1

Pastor Cho’s letter

 

              We want to live a life that focuses on pleasing God. We should have no desire to make ourselves or others, for that matter, happy. Rather, we should want to live in a way that pleases God. It’s written in Hebrews 11:6 “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”And the way to do just that is to walk by faith. However, the Bible goes as far as to say that when we live without faith, we’re not just failing to please God, but we are actually sinning. Romans 14:23b, “Everything that does not come from faith is sin.”

Then, what does a life of faith look like? Hebrews 11, which is known as the Hall of Faith, teaches us about 18 spiritual giants that marched before us and lived extraordinary lives by walking by faith, and not by sight. In fact, the phrase “By faith” appears 26 times in this chapter. We’ll look at the life of a few of them, and learn what it means to live a life of faith, and how that pleases God.

There are 5 marks of the people of faith, and the first one is: believing is seeing. I’m a believer in minivans. My first minivan was really a faith mobile. It always started after three tries. The engine was on its last leg and leaking oil. It ran not on gas, but with plenty of faith. Have you ever had one of those? Starting the car in the morning is a test of faith. You don’t have to see it to believe it. The first characteristic of the people of faith is that believing is seeing. Hebrews 11:1 says “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see.”

Faith is visualizing the future in advance. It is seeing the future in the present through the eyes of faith. It is different from blindly hoping for a better future, like “Oh, I believe that I’m going to win the lottery this week.” Faith is believing in God’s promises. Faith is responding to God’s Word and His promises before we see it (the future) come to pass.

The world says, “Seeing is believing.”  The company Hyundai had as a slogan “Driving is believing.”  But, the Word of God says “Believing is seeing.”  Faith is believing when you don’t see it.          

(To be continued in the next edition)