Faith Bible Study

The book of Hebrews was written to a primarily Judeo-Christian audience in the midst of persecution (Hebrews 10:32-34). This community knew God, had followed God’s law for generations, and believed God would fulfill the ultimate promise to send them a savior, the Messiah. They imagined the Messiah would be a king: someone who would topple the Roman Empire and lead them back to their homeland, after a long period of exile.

They believed that Jesus was the Messiah. However Jesus wasn’t the kind of Messiah they had expected. They believed that Jesus’ resurrection was part of God’s redemptive plan. But in the meantime, they were still exiles, living under the rule of the Roman Empire.

Sometimes we lose faith because we don’t have the eyes to see what God is doing. We are unable to look beyond the pain and brokenness—in our own lives and in the lives of others—as we live out our calling from God. The writer of Hebrews exhorted this community to “hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).

But what is faith? And how do we cultivate the virtue of faith in our own lives and communities?

Your Kingdom Come
On one level faith is simply trust in God’s character and promises. But faith can also be exercised on a deeper, more profound level. Faith is the means by which make real on earth the heavenly realities of God’s Kingdom. Faith moves us forward, through the “already but not yet” tension we feel when we see and experience the sin, brokenness, and injustice all around us. We don’t yet see the perfect justice, peace, and redemption that is already fully realized in heaven. But by faith we call those things into reality here, “on earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

Faith is the vehicle used to help us experience God’s power and better understand what God is doing in the world. The article “Epic Is About Faith” describes faith as “having eyes to see something where there is nothing—in people, in mission, and in the challenges of life.” Faith requires us to see the invisible and believe the improbable. Faith empowers us to persevere, even when we are gazing at a big empty field instead of the crops we had expected to start growing by now.

Faith is demonstrated through the actions it produces. There is no such thing as a passive faith. James writes: 
Do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. (James 2:20-22)

We build intimacy with God when we step out of our comfortable, known ways and follow wherever God leads. Even when the path God calls us to travel doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Faith comes with no guarantee of success. Faith is not a formula, where if we put in X, God will produce Y. In Hebrews 11—often referred to as the Hall of Faith—the author chronicles the faithfulness of God’s people over the centuries. The stories of are meant to inspire. But midway through the list of heroes, the author pauses to remind us: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth” (Hebrews 11:13). Sometimes even heroes don’t get to see the culmination of their faith.