Faith and Belief

I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! (Luke 12:49)

We are not saved by our beliefs, but only by our faith!  Belief satisfies the mind that inquires after truth, but faith brings peace to the soul, which goes deeper and further than our minds.  It has been said that faith is like the pick or hook used by mountain climbers -- it is tossed upwards from where the climber now stands; it anchors into a safe place, permitting the adventurer to climb upwards to that point.  In the same way, our faith anchors our souls into a Person, a Place of Safety that cannot fail us.  Then our minds gradually follow until we comprehend and fully understand our faith.

God does not ask us to dismiss the mind He gave us to understand truth; but the truth is that we will not fully comprehend until we surrender in faith to the only One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 

We've got it backwards if we think to understand first and then we'll surrender.  Our minds are too small to understand the mysteries of the universe, much less the ways of God. 

Abraham was asked to start out on a journey, whereby he would come to know the Creator of the universe in faith.  In everything he did, he encountered the faithfulness of God, who was always and everywhere with him, who never abandoned him.  At first, he did not have right belief, but only faith.  It was his faith in the Person that led him to the Truth.  He came out of a pagan culture, worshipping many gods until he came to know the One and Only God.  His faith led him to the Truth!

Many years ago, I was teaching a woman from Taiwan, a faithful Buddhist, who had entered this country with her two teen-agers on a temporary Visa.  Her children were enrolled in high school, and she was taking English classes at the college.  An unscrupulous lawyer in Texas, who spoke her language, was holding her papers for blackmail.  He was threatening to report her to the government for illegal entry if she did not pay him vast sums of money.  Without her documentation, she was helpless and desperate.   Under months of intense worry and anxiety, she broke down and told me her story.

I asked whether she had prayed about the situation.  She confessed to me, "I pray and pray to your Jesus, but he don't answer me!"  "Maybe this is His answer," I told her.  "I have a good friend who is a Christian lawyer; maybe he can help you."    We prayed together that day for wisdom and direction for her.  Soon, she decided to attend a Bible study I was teaching at night.

The first night, she arrived at 9:00, as we were leaving.  She cleaned houses at night, and had just got off work.  Since she had driven to Metairie from New Orleans East, I could not tell her that we were all going home.  So I told her that we would do a quick lesson.  She had never before seen a Bible, so I showed her the first chapter of Genesis and then the first chapter of John: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God....in Him was life, and that life was the light of men.

"How can I receive this Jesus?" she asked me.  "You just invite Him to come within you," I replied. 

"I cannot," she said; "there is too much crime within me."  "That's why He came," I said, "to take away the crime from within our hearts, to give us new hearts!"  With that, she immediately knelt on the floor and asked Jesus to come into her heart.  In all my life, I have never witnessed anything like what I saw happen that night!  She rose from the floor with tears in her eyes, full of the "fire" of truth:  Now I know the real God, she almost shouted.  All my life, I have visited the temples of Buddha, spending much money on thousands of candles, burning them before every shrine and statue.  How could I have not known that these were not real gods?!  How could I have not seen that they could not help me?!

The Truth entered that woman's heart without anyone telling, explaining, or teaching her.  The Holy Spirit fell on her that night and taught her the Truth from within.  Never again would she be deceived by the empty promises of idols---now she knew the real God, in her own words.  That night, she went home and started reading the Bible for the first time.  The next day, she introduced both of her children to Jesus, and they both accepted Him as their God and began to read the Bible with her. 

The next time she spoke to her husband in Taiwan, he asked, "What happened to you?  Everytime I talk to you, you are crying and worried.  Now you are happy and not worried anymore!"  She told him about Jesus and told him to buy a Bible and to begin reading it.  He too started reading the Bible in Taiwan and accepted Jesus.  Later, her son started a Bible study in his public high school.

If that is not the "fire" that Jesus came to cast upon the earth, I don't know what is!   And here is the interesting thing:  none of these people had to come first to right "belief" or doctrine before they surrendered to Jesus.  Abraham was called first to "leave his people and his father's house and come to a land I will show you."  As he took the first step, he came to know and to believe in the God Who had called him forth.  So, too, my student and her entire family:  they were called to surrender first, and to learn afterwards.  Like the mountain climber, they anchored their souls in the One Who IS Truth, and learned from Him what they were to believe.

If we think we will come to Truth any other way, we have not yet found the Savior of the world:  no one comes to the Father but by Me!  Our belief is the what we hold true, but our faith is in a Person who cannot fail us.  Many people do not know exactly what they believe, but they do know the One in whom they trust.  The Apostles articulated their doctrines, or beliefs, only later, after the One they loved had risen from the death and had manifest Himself to them as alive.  Then, and only then, did their minds begin to re-form and re-shape their beliefs.