Quiet and Thunderous Assurance

 

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1 (NASB)

 

What is faith? Strong’s Greek dictionary says, “(Faith) for the believer is ‘God's divine persuasion’ – and therefore distinct from human belief (confidence), yet involving it. The Lord continuously births faith in the yielded believer so they can know what He prefers.” Faith comes from the Greek word “pistis,” which has its root word meaning “to be persuaded” or “to persuade”. What we must realize is that faith, for the Christian, always comes from God. 

 

Strong’s continues to teach about faith by saying, “It is God's warranty that guarantees the fulfillment of the revelation He births within the receptive believer. “ That’s powerful! Faith is God’s warranty, His guarantee, that what He promises will happen. Without faith, then, we believers would have no hope that we are saved from our sins, that God is real, that Jesus is God’s Son, and that there’s an eternal life. There’d be no purpose in believing in anything and no purpose for living. God, in His loving graciousness, gives us hope by giving us faith in Him, the entirety of the Trinity. 

 

Now, this faith God gives us is our assurance in what we hoped for. God’s gift of faith birthed in Christians undergirds them. Faith is the guarantee for what God says, reveals, and promises. As Christians, it guarantees the inheritance of God’s promises to believer’s because He is always faithful and Christians are co-heirs with Christ as sons and daughters of God. Rightly understood, God’s gift of faith is the undergirding, the guarantee, of our inheritance—the fulfillment of His promises to us, our hopes.

 

The hope about which the author wrote is actively anticipating and waiting for the fulfillment of promises by God. Without faith, hoping would be futile. It would be like trusting in the role of dice. Hope, to be worth anything, must have a firm and assured basis or it would just be chance, coincidence, and happenstance. God, who is YHWH (I AM), has always existed, created all things, is always faithful and loving, is almighty, omniscient, and omnipresent, is the only one who can know and does know all that will occur in the future, has power over all things, and provides a definite and unchangeable eternity for each person who yields his/her whole self to Him in recognition that He is God, the One and only true deity. Belief in YHWH means Christians can know and trust what He promises is true and will definitely happen. That is hope. It comes from the faith God births in each believer in Jesus. That faith is the guarantee that what the Christian believes and hopes will occur. True faith and hope are not a game of chance. Hope and faith in God comes from God’s love for all people. He wants only the best for us and offers that best through belief in Jesus, His Son.

 

This faith God births in Christians that guarantees in them the hope of God fulfilling His promises is a conviction that propels each believer forward in their faith and in their relationship with God. This conviction  is the proof, certainty, or persuasion of something. The faith inbirthed in a believer by God, that a person actively pins their hopes to and is assured by God because of who He is, becomes the conviction—the proof and persuasion—of the believer’s soul that leads to living out his/her faith in the world and his/her circles of influence fully yielded to God’s plan.

 

Looking at this verse in another way, faith comes down from God to a person to create hope in the person’s heart that leads to assurance of the mind, and transforms to conviction of the soul, which is enacted by the body in the world so that others see and hear about Jesus and lean towards God to hopefully seek and begin this process of faith within themselves. Faith is an all-encompassing gift. It affects a person’s heart, mind, body, and soul. That makes the Shema of Judaism more understandable. This Jewish prayer is from  Deuteronomy 6:4-9. It says,

 

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

 

Millennia later, when asked byJewish scribes what is the greatest commandment, Jesus replied, 

 

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” 

 

Notice the difference between the two passages; Jesus added to the Shema that a God/believing person must love God with his/her mind. What’s most important to note is we are to love God with our whole being—heart, mind, soul, and body. God wanted to redeem the whole person. That’s one of the reasons why faith affects the mind, heart, soul, and body. When a person is redeemed in totality, that person is able to love God with his/her whole being. That enables each of us to be totally renewed. It gives us total redemption from Satan. 

 

God loves us—people whom He created—so much that He sent His only Son, Jesus, to earth to live without sinning and die the perfect holy sacrifice as the sin offering for anyone who chooses to believe in Him so he/shewill not die and be eternally separated from God—His goodness and love—but will have everlasting life with Him in His kingdom. 

 

Faith is a God-given gift to people who yield their lives to Him. It activates hope in the heart. It  provides assurance to the mind. And that assurance becomes active proof in the soul, which leads to actively living out their faith in their sphere of influence. When God speaks, though it’s a nearly silent whisper to your ear, it loudly thunders in your spirit and heart. God desires all people be saved—rescued—from their sins and Satan. He loves each of us and wants to save us. 

 

Hear God’s voice. Recognize His conviction.

 

Seek God. Receive Faith. Accept His assurance. Gain hope. Live convicted. 

 

Be a life wholly yielded to God. For faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen.

Hebrews 10:1-6, 9-10 A Devotion

1 The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming--not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship.

2 If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins.

3 But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins,

4 because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

5 Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me;

6 with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased.

9 Then he said, "Here I am, I have come to do your will." He sets aside the first to establish the second.

10 And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. [NIV]

The Law God gave to Moses and the Israelites in the Old Testament was given to lead people to God, never to save them. The writer of Hebrews said this and Jesus confirmed it in these verses.

Hebrews 10 says the same sacrifices offered endlessly year after year cannot make a person perfect (sin free). If it did make a person perfect and sin free, then there would be no need for sacrifice after sacrifice. A person’s guilt is not wiped away with ritual sacrifices, nor is their sin. Those sacrifices of the Old Testament were just reminders of sin.

Jesus said, “With burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased.” Therefore, The Father created a body for His Son to indwell and sacrifice. He was the perfect sacrifice that lasts forever, because the Son rose from the dead to be alive again. So His sacrifice for sins lasts, because He is part of the everlasting Godhead.

Jesus said this in verse nine when He said, “Behold I have come to do your will.” It was God’s will to provide a better sacrifice than that of bulls and goats that had to be sacrifices over and over. He provided the ultimate and perfect sacrifice, the life of His Son, Jesus Christ, whose sacrifice lasts forever because He rose from the grave to live forever. Because of that, His sacrifice covers all sin for all time.

From this, we learn we cannot provide the sacrifice to cover and take away our sins. Our sacrifices would be finite. So, we can do nothing to be cleansed from our sins. What we can do is accept by faith the grace God offers to us by His love and through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. We cannot save ourselves from sin and death, but Jesus can and did. You have only to accept it by faith.

And what is faith? “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” [Hebrews 11:1]

Will you believe and stop striving to save yourself?

Physical and Spiritual

           So often, we live our lives only in the physical sphere without even realizing we chose physical over spiritual. Some people choose not to recognize a spiritual side of life at all. Why do we choose to live solely to our physical wants? Why do we choose to ignore or avoid anything spiritual? Do we not believe? Do we not want to give any claim of our lives to a higher power? Alternatively, do we intentionally only feed our physical nature out of disobedience? 

            In my studies, I found humans live in both the physical and spiritual realm at the same time. We may not admit to being dual-based beings, physical and spiritual, because we are doubters or never thought of it. God is around us and, if we are Christians, in us. God’s angels do His work for Him around His created and spiritual world. This is very hard to understand much less deem true when we, as a scientific people, must "see it to believe it.” For us living almost 2000 years after Christ's death, resurrection, and ascension, we say we do not see God and, thus, we cannot have faith in Him. Still, we do have the ability to see God through the statements and testimonies of the many people who walked with Christ while He walked on earth. They testified of what He did, where He walked, and what He said while in human form. In our scientific-based thoughts, we say we must see something with our eyes, but scientific reasoning gives credence to other scientists who state that this plus that makes this compound. The rational scientists are relying upon the testimony of another scientist. So what is the difference to relying upon the testimony of the disciples and other followers of Jesus? They gave actual eyewitness accounts of Christ and His works while on earth. The followers of Jesus experienced real occurrence with Jesus and their testimony is valid. Can we not allow ourselves to comprehend that? The Old Testament prophets foretold of a coming Messiah and trusted the prophecy to be true though they would not physically see the Messiah. The prophets searched and inquired about this salvation (1 Peter 1:10). They did not know to which people, when, or where this salvation would occur, but they knew, because of God's Spirit in and upon them, that salvation through the Messiah was without a doubt in the future. The prophets rendered the prophecies for future people. This did not make them doubt. God’s prophets trusted the prophecies and God who was behind them even though they did not see the fulfillment with their own eyes. They prophesied even though their intellect said salvation was unreasonable because they trusted in the un-seeable, yet visibly powerful, God. These prophets sought to accept the prophecies as true even though the prophecies appeared irrational. God gave them faith to trust and the Spirit to bolster them. In the book of Hebrews 11, Paul told us of a great cloud of witnesses. In both Hebrews 11 and Genesis 5, Enoch stayed in habitual fellowship with God and, because of his close relationship, did not experience death. God raised him to heaven before Enoch’s body died.

             If so many people in the Old Testament could trust without having actually seen God/Christ, why can we not believe even though our intellect says this belief is irrational? Relying upon someone’s testimony is not irrational. Belief becomes even less irrational when relying on the testimony of many people whose declarations of faith are bound into one book testifying of God and His work in human history. To rational humankind, it appears more irrational to believe when not seeing before Christ’s physical birth. Why cannot we as humans, almost 2000 years after Christ's works on earth, His death, and His resurrection, acknowledge and trust in Jesus based upon the testimony of many people and the recording of His acts upon earth? What seems harder to consider is that with so many witnesses and testimonies of God's work and His salvation offered, some people still choose not to believe. God is here. God is now, in this present physical world, in and around us, calling our names and choosing to walk in a relationship with us. How can we deny this reality when all along He has been here? Choose to acknowledge and trust. Choose to be in habitual fellowship/relationship with God, our maker.