The Faith That Changes Everything

              The Faith That Changes Everything
Luke 17.5-10 October 4, 1992
Faith, hope, and love, these three, said Paul, but the greatest of these is love. Without
faith it is impossible to please God. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen.
I. "If I only had the faith, things would be different!" That is not heard very often
these days. "If I only had more money, if I only had an education, if I only
lived in another part of the world, if I only had a different partner in marriage,
if I only..." On and on we could go. Yet the plea of the apostles may be the
most important. Increase our faith!
A. Faith is experienced at a very early age.
1. A baby feels the warmth and hears the songs of love from those
around it. A sense of trust begins. My life is being cared for.
2. Soon we began to understand that there were some ways in which we
could care for ourselves, and that we could trust ourselves with
ourselves.
3. Later we experienced someone else's love and gave our love to
another. We trusted another person with our lives. We have babies in
a variety of biological modes, but fundamentally by faith. We have the
faith that there will be a future for them.
4. Somewhere in the midst of these experiences the word God is inserted.
At our baptisms, in our marriages, at the most holy moments of
communion, at our deaths... "we commend her spirit to the God who
gave it."
B. Sometimes this faith experience that has evolved becomes disturbed or even
shattered.
1. We are abused, we are deceived, we are disillusioned.
2. Leo Tolstoy in his Confessions tells of such an experience in his break
with Christian faith. "My break with faith occurred in me as it did and
still does among people of our social and cultural type. As I see it, in
most cases, it happens like this: People live as everyone lives, but they
all live according to principles that not only have nothing to do with
the teaching of faith, but for the most part, are contrary to them. The
teachings of faith have no place in life and never come into play in the
relations among people; they simply play no role in living life itself.
The teachings of faith are left to some other realm, separated from life
and independent of it. If one should encounter them, then it is only as
some superficial phenomenon that has no connection with life.
C. Faith is the recognition of a relationship between oneself and another. In
the realm of God it is affirming that God knows me, cares about me,
enables me.
1. No disillusionment had come from their walk with Jesus. They were
seeing with their own eyes the power of his presence in human life.
The Faith that Changes Everything 1