Faith - Lesson 1

Alright, today we're going to talk about an introduction of faith and I think the way to start this, and I think most of you as I look around have been in my class, our class before, so participation is a big deal. We should have prayed for Joanne, is she better? A little better. She's got the flu. I'm not praying for that.

So faith is one of those things like a lot of other biblical words that you already have embedded in your mind, maybe what you think it is, right? You have what I would call a frame of reference. So let's talk about your frame of reference? What do you think faith is?

I won't all answer at once. Belief. Alright, it's belief. I think it's trust in who God is, first of all, and then trust in what he did and what he's going to do. Okay. Independence on that. Okay. Somebody else? Something that's kind of come to me as of late is when you're struggling with things in your life, realizing that trusting in Him and resting in Him and that it's His work and not ours, it alleviates some of the struggle. You know what I mean? Trusting in that. I do. Is it trusting, relying, and claiming?

It's not, it's not, I'm not looking for the right answer. I'm just looking, what's your frame of reference? You know, how do you look at faith? What do you think it is from your perspective? Defined and defined. Okay. The next word I want you to define from your frame of reference is the word love. What do you think love is? God is love. God is love. Cool. Boy, you guys are stiff. That's a tough one. What's that? put in others before yourself?

My aunt, she's gone home to the Lord. I asked her what true love was when I was 17 years old and having my heart crushed by my girlfriend. And she just said true love is of the will. Interesting. That's a good answer. It's helped me in my marriage. And it seems like just from reading that it seems like it's like kind of part will and then it's part like from God too. So agreeing that it's from God and then going along with it. Whatever it is. Mike, God will love the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Yes, He did. Yeah. So good. Are you ready for a little... I'm going to give you some Greek words now. It's going to make me look smart, but I'm not. The Greek word agapeo, agape, are the words that are used. Agape is the verb form of the noun agapeo.

And if you read in 1 John, who said God is love? That's what He is. John chapter 3, somebody mentioned that. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. If you go to Romans 8.35, it says that there is absolutely nothing that can separate us from the love of God. Nothing, including God himself. So if I had asked you and you came and said something like, well my frame of reference about love is the fact that it is the essence of God, God being the Father, Son and the Spirit and all have the same essence, which is infinite, it manifests itself in goodness and grace and mercy and kindness towards men. Would that be a good definition of love?

Trick question. Answer, no it wouldn't. Everybody have a Bible? Let's look at John 3.18.

He that believes on him is not condemned, but he that believes not is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. So this scripture is convicting sometimes for people Because it shows that the world and you personally, or not you personally, but a person is already condemned because he didn't believe. But now read verse 19. And this is the condemnation that light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. Would you say that that fits the definition that we just talked about? No. Would it? No. The frame of reference is different. The word is agapeo, which is the same word.

Men actually loved the darkness more than the light. And the reason was that their deeds were evil. So one of the reasons we went and talked about the Word of Love is that one of the things that we'll start to hopefully come to grips with as we go through this on faith is that scripture has a context. And sometimes the context changes the way the Word is defined. We went through 45 seconds of, well, God is love and mercy and grace and all that, and now we read a verse, exactly the same word, that said men love darkness. Does that mean they were kind towards darkness? No. They were all in to darkness. They found extreme value in darkness.

What you say, that what was before is an acceptable definition of the word love. Which was mercy and kindness and goodness. Yeah, goodness and infinite grace and mercy and kindness towards man. Is that the good definition of love? I said yes. But in context it isn't. It's maybe like the motivation, like what's under I'm a source? Well, if I take the word, the Greek word agapeo, and I write it on the board and I say, defined as, and I, you know, here's how I define it. That it is, it manifests itself in infinite goodness, grace, mercy, kindness towards men. You would say, yeah, that's pretty good.

But then if I showed you John chapter 3 verse 19, well it's the same Greek word but the definition doesn't fit. And the reason it doesn't fit is because sometimes the context will determine the definition. And we're going to find that with the word faith. Okay, love manifests itself, so it's not even defining what love is. Yeah, okay. Right? It manifests itself as this, but that isn't what it is. Well, 1 John 4 says God is love. Essence verb. Is it a moral attitude? What is a frame of reference?

Maybe we ought to settle that. How many of you are Republicans? Maybe I ought to ask this. How many of you are Democrats? I think I am. So you have a frame of reference. You have a frame of reference about the government and how it should be run. And the person sitting next to you who is a Republican has a frame of reference about how things should be run that's different than yours. That's what a frame of reference is.

See that? It's subjective. OK. So in Zodiatis, he defines that as love being indicates the direction of the will and finding of one's joy in something. That's pretty good. So you can have joy in darkness for sure. Let's define joy. So in that context, or with that definition, Love could go either direction. I could go either direction, that's exactly right. Your joy is in. Yeah. I mean it's hard for us to get our arms around the fact that a human being could agapeo darkness and all that's involved in that. And the agapeo word is not the one fuzzies.

This is a willful extreme value in darkness. and I'm willing to sacrifice anything for it. Somewhere in there, the reference towards self has to be because God gave and that was his selflessness. But other people, I mean somebody who's going to the dark side, they're doing it for self. Yeah, they are. There's a difference. If you think of people sacrificing their lives out of love, that's selflessness, where other people are greedy and just don't choose. Well, the verse says that light came into the world, who is the Lord Jesus Christ, and men wouldn't come to the light because they love the darkness. And it was because their deeds were evil. Wow.

So are you saying, I just want to make it clear, the first definition of kindness, blah, blah, blah, towards men and all that, versus love of darkness. I'm trying to figure out how to say this. Love can have many different meanings based on the point of reference. The first one isn't wrong, is it? No. No, it's not. I just want to make sure that the first one, where kindness towards man and mercy and all that, that's one definition of it.

But it can also mean the latter, which we were going over in 318. Well, and understand, we're not talking about the word philio. We're not talking about the word eros. In other words, in the Bible for love, we're talking about the one word that is associated with God and love. God is agapeo. Darkness is agape by men who are in darkness.

Same word. What if you wrote down the things that don't change? Regardless of the context. So, the will is involved. There's a will. And there's an object. And there is a direction of great value placed on an object from the will of another person. So regardless of the context, those things don't change. It's just a matter of who is in each of those roles at any given point in time. And that we'll find is true of faith. There's a lot of aspects of faith that are beyond the definitions we've already given. And that's why we're going to study the words. So I'm not saying that a frame of reference is a bad thing. It's not. But I want you to be aware of the fact that as we go through scripture, like the word love, we have a tendency to always think of it in the positive sense, but it isn't always that way.

I've always thought that Agape was a kind of love that only God could manifest, so this is really nice. Yeah, it denotes a particular kind of love that's selfless. Can you imagine a man, and you should be able to imagine it because you all came from there, who would selflessly love the darkness. So before the fall, agape existed without the influence of any sin. That's correct.

But in Romans 1, men traded the truth for the lie. So what do they do with agape? So they deformed and convoluted the Lord's type of love to meet their own self-interests. So it's not as though agape didn't have its perfection in respect to man and their creator in the beginning. but that it was deformed by sin.

That's right. It's a good time to throw in Satan too, right? I mean, he's in there working it to help it, maybe. Well, what is Satan's frame of reference? He's the ultimate lover of darkness, you know, and he would recruit his... promote as many people as he could into loving partners like he does. So even a little more than just man, but man with, you know, some help?

I don't think so. I'm one of those people that think that if you've got to sit in nature, you don't need help from Satan. You don't need any help. He doesn't know your address, he doesn't know where you live, and he isn't picking on you. You have, we have, the natural man doesn't receive the things of the Spirit of God, he cannot know them. Even if he wants to, he can't. Why? Because he's in the darkness. The darkness did not comprehend the light, doesn't understand it, doesn't want it, doesn't even want to come to it. You love darkness.

I didn't become a believer until I was 35. I did like what I did. I've never committed a sin that I didn't want to do. No one ever said, you're going to sin. I said, oh no, I don't want to. So would you say that before man sinned, there was no darkness?

It depends on how soon... before Eve's sin that Lucifer took the fall. Because until him there wasn't any sin. That could explain it kind of better. Regardless of the timing, there was a point when Lucifer knew the agape love of God. He had a special place before the Lord. He witnessed the type of love that we haven't witnessed in the same sense. We have a greater love than what maybe was existent before the throne of God, prior to his sacrifice of love through Christ, but still Satan's frame of reference was a willful act against what he already knew. Same with Adam. Same with Adam. They weren't fooled. Neither of these guys were fooled. The problem with Satan was that somebody showed him a mirror. And he looked and saw how beautiful he was, and he just decided he wanted to be like God.

We could do the same thing with the word righteousness, because the word righteousness is in a positive sense in scripture and also in a negative sense, unrighteousness. It's the same information, the same word, same relationship, same rightness, but in context some of it is of God or of man, lost man. So that's the point I'm trying to make, is that as we go through scripture, depending on the context of the passage, it can determine what the word means. So when we come to faith, we have to keep that in mind, and as I asked you what was your frame of reference about faith, we're going to find that there's more defining information about faith than just my frame of reference today. It's almost like if you put self in front of those words, then it turns into the other meaning, like self-love, or self-trust, or self-righteousness, self-faith, that you mess up.

So let's keep going down this road. So what's the first thing that comes to your mind about the word faith? Well, you've already told me. Trust, right? It's belief. You could say it's confidence. Isn't that a good word for faith? You could say that it's rest. Any other words? Expectations. Expectations. I expect to sit in his chair and start to fall down. Okay. Okay. Question is, let's say pick the word trust.

Whose trust is it? And whose rest is it? You have to ask that question, don't you? Am I the one that trusts? Am I the one that rests? Based on the context, whose dependence are we talking about? So usually we think it's ourselves, right? You go into any Bible class and you just sit there and listen. The entire conversation is always going to be about my faith, my love, my understanding, my spiritual growth, isn't it?

I don't mean that negatively, it's just the way it is. Very seldom is it not the frame of reference from where I'm coming from. One of the hardest things to do being a teacher is not to use your own experience as anecdotal evidence for the truth. Because if I've experienced it, it's got to be true. So there's nothing really wrong with the definitions that we've given about faith. Let's look at some passages and see what we can discover that may be in addition to what we talked about. Let's look at Matthew chapter 8. There's quite a few verses here. We'll do them in chunks. So, verse 5, start there.

When Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came to him a centurion. beseeching him and saying, Lord, my servant lies at home sick of a palsy, grievously tormented. And Jesus said unto him, I will come and heal him. The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy.

What's the mental attitude of the centurion here? Everybody know what a centurion is? He's in charge of a hundred guys, that's why they call him a centurion. Is he used to taking orders? He's used to giving them. Does he have authority over the Lord Jesus? Sure he does. In that context you better believe he does. He's a Roman centurion. Palestine is a protectorate of the Roman government and he's in this army.

But he said, look at his frame of reference though. The Lord Jesus said to him, okay, I'll come to your house and we'll take a look. And he said, no, I'm not worthy that you should come to my house. Interesting frame of reference, isn't it? So it kind of is a change. The centurion, did he correctly assess the situation? Yeah, I did. Moving on, and you should come under my roof, but speak the word only, and my servants shall be healed, for I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me. And I say to this man, go, and he goes, and to another, come, and he comes, and to my servant, do this, and he does it.

And when Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to them that followed him, I have said unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel." Faith. So, as the Lord Jesus, from his frame of reference, he looks at all of Israel, he hasn't found that kind of faith in any single Jew. Not one. He finds it outside of Israel, outside of the seat of Abraham. He finds great faith.

Interesting. And I say unto you that many shall come from the east and west, and I say to you that they shall come and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness. Who are the sons of the kingdom? The Jews. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go your way as you have believed, so it is done unto you. And his servant was healed that very hour. So, question. Is this Centurion's faith, was it trust, dependence, reliance, and all the things that we've mentioned before? Answer, yeah it was. So our definition holds so far, right? Yeah.

It seems interesting for you because he didn't, the way he set up, he set this up. This is a spiritual authority, it isn't a physical authority that he makes reference to telling somebody to, one of his people under him to go and they go. He didn't ask Jesus to send somebody, one of the followers to go take care of this.

Yeah, he went right to Jesus. He had a reference to this being that Jesus had spiritual authority. He had the power to heal. He didn't have to be there. Well, no, he thought, yeah, it's interesting, he knew that Jesus had the authority to not have to go and he could heal them right from wherever they were. Interesting frame of reference and understanding he had about who the Lord Jesus was. There wasn't a Jew who thought that about him. Even it seems like the Christians that they were laying on hands and they were all right there and touching robes and everything and this guy was like, Do it from here.

Yeah. I believe you can do it. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? Well, it goes to the frame of reference. He basically says, I say a word and people jump. Yeah. And this is my authority. You have a higher authority. Yeah. And all you have to do is say the word and it's done. Yeah. He understood authority is what he understood.

You know, if you, I don't know how many of you have ever been in the military, but you know that if you have a commanding officer and he says jump, your response is how high? It's not whether you're going to do it or not, it's how high you're going to jump.

Do you think he also included the disciples in that? Well, they were the audience and they were learning. And the disciples are all Jews. And he says to everybody who's around him, I have not seen this kind of faith in Israel, including you disciples.

Did he do his eyebrows like that? So, yeah, I mean, it's kind of a slam. But then his rhetoric in the last part that I just read, I mean, he warns them, you know, you guys think you're all going to come into the kingdom because that's what they were about. but they're going to cast out the sons. They're going to be in outer darkness and they're not going to be sitting there.

Why not? They don't have faith. And then he's saying, not just Jewish sons of the kingdom, but if they were Jewish and had faith, which I guess they wouldn't be Jewish anymore, but they would be sons of God, then he wouldn't be including them. At this point they would be, because Jesus is on the earth and in his ministry in John 3. So yeah, there is no church yet.

Alright, more framework reference. Hebrews chapter 11. What is Hebrews chapter 11? The hall of fame. The hall of fame of all the faiths. Just to show you the power of faith and how it functions, I'm going to run through a bunch of verses, starting with 4.

By faith, Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain did. By faith, Enoch was translated when he should not see death. 7. By faith, Noah, being warned of God of the things not seen as yet, moved with fear prepared an ark to the saving of his house.

20. By faith Isaac blessed Jacob, and he saw concerning things to come.

21. By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph.

23. By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months of his parents. 24 Moses, when he was come two years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter. 30 By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they were compassed about seven days. 31 By faith the heart of Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she received the spies with peace. And what shall I say more, for the time would fail me to tell you of Gideon, of Barak, of Samson, and the rest of them.

All these people walked by faith. So they're mentioned in the Hall of Fame. Kind of cool, huh? Yeah. So for them to even have faith, they must know who to place their faith in. So the Holy Spirit must have told them, right? Well, let's pick one. How about the first one? Tom, Adam, Abel and Cain? So did the Holy Spirit talk to Abel and not talk to Cain?

Well, maybe he talked to Cain and Cain was like, well, I'm just going to do it my own way anyway. That's exactly what happened. And God told Cain, not only should you do it this way, but I brought you the lamb. And his attitude was, You're either going to do it my way or the highway. So in all these, it's like God spoke to them. Yeah. So they were apparently listening. God came to Noah and said, build an ark. Yeah.

And it took him a hundred years to build it. And the whole time, what did the ark represent? It represented to the people that turned them down, end up at the end of the hundred years, there's only what, eight people that went into the ark? Others could have gone in. My favorite is Rahab, though. She just believed and hid the spies.

Not only is she in the Hall of Fame of Faith, but she's also in the lineage of Christ. That's kind of cool. There's an interesting commentary here about man. Whether it's an unbelieving man or a believing man, there's a frame of reference here about men. The wonderful thing is that God is careful to share it with us. God's frame of reference is those who walk by faith, were asked to walk by faith, and here are God's commentary about them who walk by faith. Now, go down to verse 38 and watch this. Somebody read 37 and 38. Somebody who can read English.

They were stoned. They were sawn in two. They were tempted. They were put to death. So I just wanted you to know that you being people of faith, that's what you're, that's going to be. So we're negotiating to buy some property up in the mountains that has all of these nice things in it so you can wander around. Buying a saw or two. You know what the key phrase in those verses are? What do you think they are? There's one key phrase in there. Ever tempted?

No. And whom the world was not worthy. Why is it in parenthesis? I don't know. I didn't notice that. Isn't your Bible's in parenthesis in yours? Yeah. Interesting, maybe it doesn't belong there. I can look at the Greek, but probably of whom the world was not worthy of the man was implied.

What's interesting about this, I think, this little phrase is, the world isn't worthy of people of faith. It isn't the other way around, which is the way the world would have you believe that you're some sort of idiot if you're a person of faith. And it describes the people of faith in the Old Testament, how they functioned. They weren't living in palaces. They were hunted down, that kind of thing.

And what God's frame of reference is, is that the world isn't worthy of them. So, do you want to sign up? Do you want to be one of those people that's in this list that the world is not worthy of you? Kind of an interesting question. It's an interesting commentary. If you want to be in the Hall of Fame of Faith, the Lord says not to love the world because the world isn't worthy of you. Is that a good... Where's that love again? Who says you can't?

Oh, you mean the things of the world? It's just don't love the things of the world, so love comes in. So, it's interesting how even when we start to talk about faith and you look at verses like this, the separation of the believer from the world is everywhere in the scripture. And it's one of those battles we fight all the time. Maybe love means what you unite yourself with. What you unite yourself with, okay.

Can I pick on you a little bit? Oh, yes. Why do you love God? Because he first loved me. So it's a response on your part. Right. And so you love him because the Holy Spirit has shed abroad in your heart a love for you respond. And so then you do things that you know are pleasing to him because you know about him in the word and he rewards you for those. You did all of that and you responded by faith.

Here's a really important aspect of the definition of faith. It's a non-meritorious act. Understand what I just said? Faith is the one thing a man can do that he cannot take credit for. Why not? Why not? Because God orchestrated it in him. Pretty good.

Where's the value in faith? Is it the fact that you believed? Or is the value in what you believe? Where's the value? God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that who should ever believe in him should not perish. Where's the value? When you're believing or that God gave his son?

Sure. So then you would say, by faith, when you read all those, Cain and Abel and Noah and all those, the value wasn't in that they did it. the value is in that God gave an opportunity for them to... I would say in every case that God got the credit for what they were involved in. In every single case. Wouldn't you? I don't know. Yeah.

One thing that kind of really hit home which has always been obvious but more real today is that like with all my friends on Facebook and all that I kind of get into this thing of, you know, I'm this Christian who isn't worthy of anything and all you people are the brilliant ones. I mean in the sense that Christianity is just thrown under the bus at every angle. But, you know, the world isn't worthy of us. Isn't that something?

So you're not going to walk around proud about that. Right, that's the danger in that one. Because the previous verse talks about the kind of life that you're... It's like if you want to sign up for Christian service, you go to 1 Corinthians and it talks about being the off-scouring of the earth. Oh, wait a minute, I don't think I want that job. I have a question.

Yeah. when it says that whom the world was not worthy, could you kind of define, and this might be obvious, but I guess, the world, what, you know, the world is not worthy, is that just reference to non-believers in general? It's a pretty big statement, and to me if I were to read that to someone who is a non-believer, I could see the response being, well, you Christians just think you're better than everybody. That's right.

And I don't think that's the intent, but the world is a big word. Let's talk about what is, from a biblical standpoint, what is the world? It's not the globe. What is it? It's the non-believers. The inhabitants of the world are non-believers. They are the citizens of the world. But the world itself is what?

It's an entire system of mindset and thinking and existence. It's evil. It functions in darkness. It has a leader. It has its own frame of reference. It has its own principles. And like you said, it has no capability of seeing the truth? Well, it's interesting because the Spirit of God penetrates into the darkness and comes to you and shows you the light.

When that happens, there's a decision to be made, I think instantly. When you're presented with the Lord Jesus Christ, you can't say, oh, I'll think it over. You just made a decision by saying, I'll think it over. And what John tells us is the attitude of those persons who are in the world is real simple. They love being there. They agape being there.

So you have to understand that this is not, oh gee, I wish I wasn't in the world. I never met anybody who functioned in the world that wished, well maybe the circumstances were really bad, but he didn't want Christ. And also just like to throw in, like I love being in the world, Agape, it also can be the doing good, kind of to get the, immediate reward of doing good for other people. So it doesn't necessarily mean, oh, I love being in sin. It's like, I love building myself up anyway, even if it means doing good deeds. But see, one of the mindsets of the world is self.

It's all about me. The new creation in Christ is all about Christ. It isn't about me. It's about Him. And that's one of the real tell-tale signs of carnal Christianity. That Christianity exists for my benefit. It is, after all, all about me. No, it's not. It's about Christ. See that? So the world could be anything that's not Christ. Right? Or how about this one? Whatever not a faith is sin. Did that answer your question? Yeah.

I was going to say this friend of mine who's an atheist, I'm trying to follow the simple gospel and you know she's saying she's in Kiwanis and she actually rings the bell at the Salvation Army. Their whole team goes in supers and rings the bell. And somehow I think she thinks being nice somehow, you know what I'm saying? I do know. She should read Romans chapter 1 starting at verse about 17 through chapter 3 verse 19. She's in there. And it will clearly say to her how unacceptable to the one who really counts, God, my efforts are. That's why faith is so important. I'll read it for you, verse 18.

Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power, and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

So when we think about the pagan world system, or however we refer to it, they're blind, but they're not blind to this. They're blind to God's love and the way that we understand it, and they have a love for darkness and a godly for darkness. But they've traded that for these things and it says that his divine attributes, his eternal power and nature are all seen by this world. So they're not without excuse kind of over here loving darkness and never having been introduced to the Lord. They know him and yet have denied him and traded the creator for the creature. That's what this list of verses goes on to say.

And it's important, I mean defining the world is important. because we're constantly talking about frame of references or philosophies, the framework that a man is thinking of, and so for faith or love or any of these things, if it's coming from a world frame of reference, then there's certain things we didn't know about where that's coming from and how that works, versus when it's coming from a Christian worldview, which is much different.

Quickly, next week we are going to talk about faith in four aspects, and you'll need to write them down there and here. There's four major aspects of biblical faith. Faith in its essence, and you're going to find out that faith in its essence has nothing to do with you.

We're going to talk about, when you see the word THE faith, what is that? With the definite article in front of it. And personal faith, which is kind of what our reference is. And then faith as a principle. And so that's where we're going to go for a while and discuss each one of those so that we understand that the word as used in the scripture faith is a lot more than my personal faith.

Okay, so let's close. Dear Father, how we thank you for your word and how we thank you how faithful you are to us to teach us through your word what the truth is. And the truth is really your son, the Lord Jesus. And we pray in his precious name. Amen.