The Basics of Faith

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, November 6. Faith is of great importance to God. But what exactly is faith?

Today's podcast kicks off a challenging series explaining the basics of learning to walk by faith. Secondly, belief that God will always do what God says He will do. Apart from these two basic convictions, there is no salvation and there is no blessing. In fact, the Rite of Hebrews said it this way. If we're to please God, we must believe that He is and that He is a reward of those who diligently seek Him or that He will do exactly what He promised. The basic foundation truth of the whole Christian life is faith. That's how we relate to God. That's how we relate to His Son, Jesus Christ.

And yet, that is the one area of our life that probably most people either misunderstand or have the most difficulty with. Can I trust God? Why don't I trust God? Oftentimes, life feel full of doubt. Well, this is the beginning of a series entitled Learning to Walk by Faith. And I want you to turn, if you will, to 2 Corinthians chapter 5. And the title of this message is Learning to Walk by Faith, The Basics. Now, what do I mean by the basics?

I mean the starting point. This is where we begin in learning to walk by faith. And what I want you to note in this passage is this, that the Apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians, is talking to them about life and death and the condition of our body and what is going to happen to us after we die. And the process of discussing that, he makes one statement here that I want us to note.

But I want us to look at this whole passage for a moment. He says in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 verse 1, For we know that if the earthly tent, speaking of our physical body, which is our house, is torn down, we have a building from God, that is, another body. A house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For indeed, in this house, that is, in this body, we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven. Inasmuch as we, having put it on, shall not be found naked. For indeed, while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed, but to be clothed in order that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now he who prepared us for this purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge. Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are home in the body, we are absent from the Lord, for we walk by faith and not by sight. We're of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. The apostle Paul is saying, you know, there will come a time we lay these bodies down.

We'll have a new body, a resurrected body, which our Lord promised, and which he certainly demonstrated in his own resurrection. Paul says, we have the privilege of living by faith. We walk by faith. Therefore, we're not worried about death. We're not afraid of death.

We're not concerned about what's going to happen to these bodies. We have the awesome promise of a resurrected body and a heavenly home. And he says, therefore, we're not walking by sight. We're not walking by feeling. We're not walking by other people's opinions. We're not walking according to reason. We are walking simply by faith. It is the will and purpose and plan of God that all of us learn to walk by faith.

Now, if I should ask you, is your life a picture of? Could it be described as a life of one who is walking by faith? Well, probably you may think in terms of the way you think of faith and you may say, well, yes, I do. But I want you to listen carefully and I hope you'll jot down a few things when I give you a couple of definitions or so here.

Want to make it as simple and plain as possible. But it's very important that we understand what the Bible says about faith, not what the world says about it. When you think in terms of the word faith and the word believe, probably in our culture today, because people say, I believe this and I'm a believer. And yes, I believe and all the things they say, probably the better word is the word trust. That is, I'm placing my trust in. I am committing myself to the word believe or trust is an action word. And if you took these three words in the Greek language, love and serve, and if you put the word believe, all three of these have the same ending on the word and a Greek ending on a word is very significant. They're all words of action.

I love if I love someone, I'm going to respond. If I serve someone, I'm going to act. If I believe I'm going to act. For example, you can read the forty verses of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews and nineteen times the Bible speaks of someone believing. Whether it's Abraham or Jacob or Moses or Noah, they all believed. And when they believe, the Bible says they did something.

So in the New Testament, you can go all the way through the New Testament. Every time someone is believing or placing their trust in, there is an action. It is an inner action that moves the will. And so when we think in terms of believing, it isn't some stagnant kind of belief that says, yes, I believe. Never moves, never budges, no action.

The very word is a word of action. Something is going to happen in your life and my life when we place our trust in, when we commit ourselves to Almighty God. Now, the issue is this, not whether you believe or not, but what is it you believe? What are you putting your faith in? What are you putting your trust in?

What are you committed to? Just the idea that I believe something is not sufficient. Listen, the whole key to the belief system is who is the object? What is the object of my belief? Therefore, the only legitimate object of my belief when it comes to relationship that is spiritual is this.

I must believe in the life-giving God who resurrected Jesus Christ, His Son from the dead. If my belief and my faith about my future and about my present is in anything other than that, it has substance that will, listen, that will ultimately disappear. And therefore, when we say, well, what is faith? It is a confident conviction that our God is who He says He is and He will do everything He promises to do. So when I say we're talking about the basics, I'm talking about the starting point, that faith is a confident conviction that our God is who He says He is and He'll do everything He says He will do. Now, we said that the theme of this series is learning to walk by faith, learning to walk by faith. And so now we have to talk about how do we walk and what is, how do we exercise this faith that we have? Now, it is the will and purpose and plan of God that we live by faith. Well, the Apostle Paul said we walk by faith.

What did he mean by that? When the Apostle Paul used the term walk, he usually referred to that conduct, lifestyle, manner of life. This is how we live our lives. And so you recall that on other occasions, he said, for example, we're to walk not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. We're to walk in love or walk by love. And we are to walk in the Spirit.

Many things he said, and what he was saying is this should be our lifestyle. If somebody were to say to you or ask you the question, do you live by faith? I wonder how many of you would say yes. Probably most of us would say, well, yes, I do. And what you mean is, well, I do most of the time. Or I do some time. Or there are things that I have a difficult time trusting God for.

You know what? That doesn't mean that you don't live by faith because I'm going to come to that in a few moments. What I want us to notice here is what the Apostle Paul is saying when he says we're walking by faith, not by sight, not by feeling. Now, most people walk not by faith, but by sight and by feeling and by reason. I reason this thing out. This is what I'm going to do. Oftentimes, God gets left out even sometimes when he is included.

He is included in this manner. Here's what I think I ought to do. And God, I'm trusting you to help me. Instead of saying, Lord, what would you have me to do? What is your will? What is your purpose?

What is your plan? It is the will and purpose and plan of God that you and I walk by faith. Now, there are going to be those moments when all of us at times suddenly we may fret over something. Then we say, OK, God, I'm just going to trust you with that. Or there may be moments of fear that come. We hear about some difficult problem that's arising and we might suddenly feel fear. But you know what should last shortly?

Father, you're in charge. And it may be that when you see someone who is learning to walk by faith or someone who is in the process of learning, we're all learning, and you don't see them wringing their hands and getting all upset and throwing a tantrum. You think, well, you don't care. You don't love me.

You don't understand. That may not be it at all. It may be that they have learned to trust God. And they know that fuming and fretting and having a and having a pity party and throwing up, it's not going to do any good because the truth is if my heavenly Father who loves me, perfect, is absolutely in control of my life and who infinitely in His wisdom knows the best thing every single time, can I trust Him with it? Doesn't mean it won't hurt. Doesn't mean it won't fall. Doesn't mean it won't falter.

Doesn't mean that at all. Because we're all going to falter and fall. We all have those anxious moments. And oftentimes we'll find ourselves asking the Lord for things and or maybe for somebody or whatever it might be.

And He doesn't do it. We want Him to do it. We can get anxious. We can fret. We can fume.

We can get angry at God. You know what? Doesn't bother Him one bit. He knows we're going to get over it.

You know what happens? It does absolutely no good to argue with God. He wins every time.

You can't do anything about it until He's ready. The truth is, walking by faith is the only way to walk. Happily, contentedly, joyfully, confidently, assuredly, courageously, with a sense of anticipation in life. And so the Apostle Paul said, we're walking by faith.

He said, we're not afraid. We're walking by faith. Now, you say, well now, you said learning to walk by faith. How do we learn?

Well, it's very evident, the very idea that we'd say learning implies that it's a process. For example, when you and I trusted Jesus Christ as our personal Savior, we didn't automatically trust God for everything. We didn't do that. What happened was we prayed. Maybe God didn't answer our prayer the way we wanted Him to, or we expected certain things to happen and it didn't happen the way we expected Him to. And so, you know, we had difficulty.

Well, let me ask you this now. When you were born, you didn't come out of your mother's room running across the hall or the room. No, you came out, somebody had to hold you. Finally, you reached that day that you could stand up by yourself and wow, what a hero you were that day. And then you took that first step. You fell down after the first one, but you took the first step. And then you took two steps before you fell. And then next thing, you could walk all the way across the room to your mom or your dad.

That was a wonderful day in the life of your parents. Now you're walking. And so you began to walk by yourself. You fell down. You scratched your knee. You cut your hand.

You beat up your face. And so, you know, that's part of growing up. What's part of growing up? Walking, falling, walking, falling, walking, falling, standing up, falling, running, falling, running, falling until you walk and you don't fall.

And you can run and you're not falling. What happens? You grew. It was a process. Now, how do we grow in our walk with the Lord? Here's how I'm going to learn. I'm going to make a request. I'm going to put God to the test.

Not trying to tempt Him, but I make a request. And you know what? God answers my prayer or sees me through this.

And you know what happens? When that happens, one layer comes down on my foundation of faith. My foundation is built on Christ.

It's a solid foundation. But now, I've got to build on that. I've got to build on the foundation of the eternal Son of God.

How am I going to build on it? I'm going to trust Him and watch how He works and see Him come through and I'm going to thank Him for it. But I'm going to observe what happened. Second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get His Word and I'm going to find out what the Bible says about Him.

Now, listen carefully. If you don't know who the God is that you trust, how are you going to trust Him? That's why, as we said a few moments ago, all this foggy, frothy, light, non-substance belief that's going on has absolutely no credibility to it whatsoever.

And there's no way to defend it. But when you and I get in the Word of God and here's what it says. The Bible says that God loves me. And the Bible says He will meet my needs.

The Bible says that God is holy and He'll forgive me. In other words, when I began to look at the Scriptures, here's what happens. My understanding of the nature of God.

You know what that's doing? That's like pouring into my whole foundation, pouring into my whole foundation, the oil that makes everything work. Here's who God is.

Here's what He's like. And if this is who God is and this is what He's like, then I can trust Him. Now, the way God builds faith, as we said before and I repeat this, trouble, trial, difficulty and hardship. If I really want to understand what God is like and I want Him to strengthen my faith, I've got to be willing to get thrown in the fire. I've got to be willing to face difficulty and hardship.

Listen, you don't build faith that sustains you in life by simply reading it in a book. Listen, what makes it work is experience. It is experience that makes it work.

But what, listen, what gives impact to your testimony? Experience. It is the fact that you've been there. You've walked through deep waters. You've walked through fire. You've walked through trials. You've walked through hardship. You've walked through those times of great need when there seemingly was no way in the world for those needs to be met and God met them. How do we learn?

We learn by living, trusting, failing, keeping out, getting our focus back on Him and moving on in life. And my friend, God will build such awesome faith. And you see people say, well, I wish I had the faith that she has or he has.

You know what? Faith is available to every single person. Now, listen, watch this. You already have faith. When you trust that Jesus is your Savior, listen, you're standing on the immovable foundation of faith.

It's not going anywhere. Now, what you do on that is what you build into it. And you build into it a confident conviction that this God whom I believe, this God is, He is the one true God. And He will keep His every single promise. Now, I'm going to put him to the test. You see, he says, put me to the test and see what I'll do.

So let me ask you this. Are you willing to say to Him today, Lord, not for my sake, but for your sake, Lord, that things in my life I can't handle. Needs I have, I don't think I can meet. Lord, I don't know how to handle these things. I've struggled. And I'll give you a little word that the Lord laid on my heart because I was doing the same thing.

And He just laid this word on my heart, A-S-H, ash. Don't be anxious. Don't strive over it and don't hurry. I have to keep that in mind. Don't be anxious. Don't strive about it, working at it. Don't hurry. And for me personally, it's been a tremendous help to me. If I find myself getting anxious, you say, don't be anxious.

Don't strive and don't hurry because those three things usually go together. You have to decide, Lord, I'm going to turn it over to you. Now, here's the whole issue. You're listening to say amen.

It's the last thing I'm going to say. Do you believe that you're a God who is the life-giving God who raised Jesus from the dead? Do you believe that He's who He says He is? Say amen. Do you believe that He'll keep His every promise?

Say amen. Now, are you willing to tell Him today, Father, I believe You're who You say You are. I believe You'll keep every single promise. I believe You're a trustworthy God that I can put my life and everything I am and everything I have in Your hands, and You will take care of me. Now, are you willing to surrender your life to that God? Body, soul, spirit, finances, relationships, marriage, family, everything. Can He handle it?

Will You let Him handle it? You say, well, I'm not even a Christian. What about me? Well, simply this.

Here's where you have to start. You have to ask yourself the question, do you believe the testimony of God's Word? That except you're born again, except you trust Jesus as your Savior, you'll be lost eternally. Do you believe that? Do you believe that Jesus Christ went to the cross and died on the cross and paid you a sin debt in full? Do you believe that?

You have to begin right there. If you're willing to accept that truth and willing to say to Him, Lord Jesus, I confess my sins to You. I do believe what You say in the Scripture. I do believe that Your death at Calvary atoned for my sins. I'm trusting You as my Savior. I'm trusting You that what You did will atone for my sin. I'm trusting You to forgive me of my sins. I'm trusting You to be my Savior and my Lord. The moment you do that, that moment you become a living child of God, then you begin the journey with us. We're all learning how to walk by faith.