The Power of Faith

The presence of faith in Christ in your mind and heart, no matter how small, if it is genuine, will accomplish great things. Time in the Bible this morning is exciting to me because of the little bit of theology that we’re going to look at. It’s a corrective to one of the more damaging theological trends of our time. It’s a small passage, but it packs a big punch. You know, sometimes when, when, when you think a certain way and then one small observation comes along, or one new fact, it turns it all around. That’s kind of what we’re going to have happen this morning. There’s been a theological trend that has built steam over the last few centuries of the church. That has had a devastating effect on both the core tenets of the gospel and on the practices of the church. And if you walked with us here at Calvary for a while, you have heard us teach a very high view of God’s power and presence and control of all things. This includes his blessings and the happiness and peace that we experience in Christ, and the joy of knowing our sins are washed away. And this is not because of anything that we’ve done. We are not special people. We are not highly skilled people. Or at least of all. Are we deserving people? God has chosen us to redeem us simply because he wanted to. That’s God’s grace to us. And now we point other people to that grace, and we rest. We rest in the firm knowledge that the God who has chosen us and redeemed us and brought us into his family is now working in all circumstances to shape us into the men and women that God has called us to be. That includes both blessing and tragedy. That includes health and sickness. It includes having a lot of things and not having enough things. God uses all of it to shape us, to be like Christ. As James said, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect. They may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. The Apostle Paul talked about this in numerous ways throughout his ministry, but maybe nowhere so clear as when he wrote about the thorn in his flesh, which was some kind of an ailment or a problem that dogged him throughout his life. He said, three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. So, James and Paul knew their faith was powerful, not because they were powerful, but because God worked powerfully through their faith. Now imagine a type of theology that changes faith into something that we produce, and that we strengthen and expand on our own. Picture a God who is who is not strengthening our faith through hardships but is instead sending those hard things into our lives because the quantity of our faith wasn’t enough to earn his blessings. This God would say something like, I have all this wealth waiting for you, healing from your sickness. I have it. It’s waiting for you. I have it all. I’ll give it to you if you can show me that you have enough faith that is called the prosperity gospel. Sometimes it’s called the health and wealth gospel. It’s not a gospel at all. See, gospel means good news. This is not good news. This is terrible news that robs Christians of their confidence in God, because it makes faith into a kind of game. If you have gathered up enough faith, if you force God’s hand to give you the thing that you want. And so, the whole Christian life becomes this mental game of trying to show how sincere and pure your faith is, so that you can claim the blessings that he has for you. And so, when those blessings do come to you, it is a triumph of your faith. And conversely, every failure to get the good thing in your life is an indictment of your faith. You weren’t strong enough in your trust in the Lord, so you couldn’t give God couldn’t give you what he wanted to give you. This is an unbiblical, damnable, heretical teaching of a false church that has spread all over the world. Did you know that? It’s all over, all over the world. As I mentioned, it’s been around for a couple hundred years, but it really gained steam in the 80s when TV preachers became a big thing. That’s when this thing really took off. The so-called word of faith movement roped unsuspecting people into this nonsense from the comfort of their couches. Desperate people heard a false teacher tell them God’s blessing is waiting for you if you have enough faith. And wouldn’t you know it, the amount of faith that a person had was measured by the number of zeroes they put on the check that they sent to that false teacher. Wow,...