What is Faith? (Part 2 of 2)

The Bible teaches that faith is not something we feel. Faith is placing our confidence in what God says is true. Hebrews 11 verse 1 says faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg resumes a study we started Friday. He continues to answer the important question, What is faith? Believing faith is not the fluctuating notions of some kind of subjective dimension within the spirit of a man or a woman, but it is that which is engendered in us as a result of a consideration of what is before us, and say, I'm going to examine it and look at this. And I am concluding that it takes more faith to believe in nothing than it takes to believe in a creator God. But you see, in our foolishness and in our rebellion and in our selfishness and in our unwillingness to allow anyone else to take charge of my life, we do not choose to believe in such a God, because such a God will have every right to call me into conformity with his commands. And so rather than have to face that I have broken his commands and that I must say sorry for that and that I must accept his forgiveness for that, I am not coming to say sorry.

I would rather go on my own way. And when people ask me about faith, I'll say, Yes, I have faith. I have optimism. I have credulity. But it's not biblical faith. The best thing I've found—and it's not brilliant—is to think of faith in this way as a title deed to a piece of property. A title deed to a piece of property. Let's imagine that you and I bought an island on the west coast of Scotland, sight unseen, and that we did the transaction in a lawyer's office somewhere on East 9th Street. And we sat down with a seller and with a lawyer and ourselves, and we drew up the contract for sale, and we determined how large it was and what it had on it and what it would be and when we could take ownership of it and so on.

And then we signed up, and Chicago titled a realty—although I wouldn't imagine they stretched that far—but some title companies said, Okay, now, we'll put this all down, and we'll give it to you with a big stamp on the front, and we'll notarize it, and you can carry it around in your pocket. And when you're going up East 9th Street, and somebody says to you, Hey, what's been happening to you recently? You say, Hey, I own an island in Scotland. Oh, yeah? You've been there?

No. What's it like? Well, I haven't actually seen it. Well, how'd you know you've got it? Oh, I've got it. Well, tell me why. Well, here. Here's my title deed. Says, Here's my island, and here's my thing. Well, you're pretty confident, aren't you?

Yeah? And what are you basing your confidence? That there's actually an island there, and the guy who sold it to me is trustworthy.

We understand that. You say, I'm going to go to heaven. You are? You ever seen it?

No. I got a title deed. I got it in my pocket. I carry it with me. In fact, I carry half of it with me all the time in my inside pocket.

I can't carry the whole thing in my pocket, but sometimes I carry the whole thing. See, you've got to be pretty confident the guy was telling the truth. You know what? I'm absolutely certain he was telling the truth. It's not credulity. It's not wishful thinking.

Well, then, what is it? Well, the one who signed the title deed is infallible. Therefore, he can be trusted completely. He's absolutely faithful. He never quits on his promises.

He's all-powerful, and so nothing can frustrate the purposes. And when we go through Hebrews 11, as we will, we'll discover that in the eleventh chapter, all of these lives lived in faith went like this. They heard the word of God, they heard the story of God, they trusted the promise of God, and then they lived in the light of the promise. They heard the story, trusted the promise, and then lived their lives.

Here's the story. I'm gonna flood the world. Okay. Here's the promise. As you build an ark, and the people run into it, they'll be safe.

Okay. Okay, build the ark. See, some of us have okayed the first two, but we never build the ark. Some of us have said, Yeah, I understand the story, and I actually heard the promise, and I think I believe it.

But we never took the final step. And that's why, when we ask the question, Are you a man or a woman of faith? the answer has to be, No, I'm not.

I'm sorry, I'm not. And what I want to say to you this morning is, You don't have to walk out of that building, this building, in that same position. Today, you can, in a decisive act, make certain that you are a man or a woman of faith. Now, what's involved in that faith?

Let me tell you. First of all, knowledge. Knowledge. Faith is dependent upon what can be known about God. In point of fact, the New Testament says that faith involves us in coming to know God himself.

In John chapter 17, Jesus, as he is about to pray to his father, says in verse 3 of John 17, Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. How can you know God? Well, we're told how we can know God. In the prologue to John's Gospel, John chapter 1 18, no one has ever seen God.

That's what people say. If you show me God, then I might be prepared to listen. But you can't show me God. I say, Well, God has shown himself.

How? Well, he's shown himself in creation, he's shown himself in the Bible, and he's shown himself in Jesus. Verse 18. No one has ever seen God, but God, the one and only—that is, the Son—who is at the Father's side has made him known. So the wee boy is painting. I use this illustration all the time. He's painting on the floor.

All the kids are painting on their canvas, on the floor, on their sheet of paper, on the floor. The teacher comes around and says, What's that? Mary says, It's a house. What's that? Oh, it's my family at a picnic.

What is this? She says to little Edward, Edward says, It is a picture of God. Come now, says the teacher, we do not know what God looks like. To which Edward replies, Come back when I've finished, you'll have a better idea. Now, the actual fact of the matter is that Jesus is the exegesis of God.

That's the word that is actually used here. When somebody says, Well, how can I know God? How would God make himself known so that I could know him? The answer is in the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. That's why it is so important to consider the claims that Jesus made. Because it is in knowing him that we know God.

And it is this knowledge of God which gives the basis for our certainty. When you travel, as you do now—and some of you do this multiple times a week so that you know this stuff off by heart—"Good morning, Mr. Begg. Do you have a form of identification?" Yes, I do. Have your bags been in your possession at all times? Yes, they have. Did anyone ask you to carry anything for them? No, they flat-out did not. And if they had, I would have said no, because I don't even want to carry my own bags.

And so on it goes. But the issue is, did anybody that you don't know get access to your stuff? Because you don't want untrustworthy people getting ahold of things. You're not simply gonna entrust into the care of another that which is precious and important to you. Absolutely right you're not. So you're not about to entrust your life into the care of someone who is untrustworthy.

Right? So you're gonna have to use your mind as you read God's Word to ask the question, Is what God has made known of himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, such that I may with confidence on the knowledge that I have moved forward from here? You see, all of us trust people all the time every day. You get on a bus—it says on the front that it's going to wherever it's going—and you get on in confidence that the fellow who's driving it is actually planning on taking where it says on the sign. But there is, of course, a possibility that he'd been out on a bender the night before, and he had no clue where he was when he pulled the bus up to your stop. He didn't know what the sign said, and he was heading for anywhere south of Mansfield. And all you wanted to do was go up Euclid Avenue.

That'd be a problem. Why? Well, you could sit on the bus and say, I feel very strongly that I'm going up Euclid Avenue. Boy, do I have confidence that I'm going up Euclid Avenue, as the guy drives you as far from Euclid Avenue as is humanly possible. What good was your faith?

Your faith was absolutely useless, because it wasn't grounded in the knowledge and the certainty and the conviction of the rightness of who it was. You sit down on the hairdresser's chair, and you had the magazine, and you looked at it, and you looked at the magazine, you looked at yourself, you looked again at the magazine, you looked at the hairdresser and said, Now, do you think you can make me look like that? The person says, Oh, yes, I can do that. You've been there. Then and when it's all finished, and they finally spin you around—I'm sure they try and make you dizzy at that point—they spin you all around.

You look back at the thing, you look at her, you look at this, you go, Okay, nice try, let's go. You go in the bank, you give them money, they say, I'll put it in here, it'll go to your account, you get your account, you assume that it'll be at your account. If it's not at your account, why not? Because the person isn't trustworthy. But most of the time, they are. And John says in 1 John 5, if we're prepared to accept human testimony, God's own testimony concerning his own Son is surely infinitely more valuable. In other words, if we are prepared to trust relatively untrustworthy people at significant points in our lives—at the bank, on the bus, crossing a bridge, undergoing heart surgery—wouldn't we trust God?

What kind of proud arrogance is this? That I would trust my bank manager, and I wouldn't trust God, who has revealed himself in the person of his Son? That I would trust the bus driver on Euclid Avenue, but I would refuse to trust Jesus Christ?

It's like the two medical students who dissected a dead body looking for life and found that it wasn't there. Don't be silly. Now, the second aspect—and I'll move to this very quickly—is that knowledge has to be followed by assent. That is a noun. A-s-s-e-n-t. I don't want some schoolboy writing down, You can get faith for assent.

And stranger things have happened. Once we've recognized that certain things are true and are to be believed, then it involves our giving mental assent to them. Biblical faith is more than simply giving assent, but it is never less than giving assent. You see, we talk about individuals who inspire or command confidence—someone who is so trustworthy that we'd be compelled to trust them even against our will.

You sometimes listen to people—my grandfather used to tell me stories about the First World War, and he used to talk about being on the frontline of the trenches in France, and he used to talk about all kinds of stories till he wouldn't talk anymore, till he began to weep and couldn't see anymore. But I would ask him, Grandpa, why would you run over there like that? He'd say, Well, we had a captain.

We had a captain. I'd trust him anywhere. He said, We're going, we're going. Everything inside of me said, I'm not going. But he compelled my belief. He compelled confidence in me.

Men and women this morning, if you will read the Bible and consider the claims of Jesus Christ, you will discover in Christ someone who compels belief. Even against your will, everything inside of you is saying, I don't want to believe this stuff. I don't want my life taken over.

I don't want somebody in charge of me. I understand that. But when you come and lay your life open before Christ, and when you see him on the cross, and you understand that there he bore your sin and all your rebellion and all of your emptiness and lostness and brokenness, he will compel belief in you. And knowledge will be followed by ascent. You see, true faith takes its character and its quality from its object and not from itself. And the last thing I want you to know is that genuine faith—the faith that is sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see—involves not only knowledge and not only ascent, but it involves trust.

Trust. You see, simply intellectual ascent cannot be equated with genuine faith. James makes that clear in James 2 19, where he lets us know that the devil and the demons are not atheists. They have an orthodox view of God. So if an orthodox view of who God is and who Jesus is is equal to saving faith, to biblical faith, then we must logically conclude that the devil and the demons have saving faith. We know that isn't true. Why is it not?

Because the simple intellectual awareness of facts does not equate with faith. There has to be the transfer from the knowledge to the ascent to the trust. You see, the summons to trust Christ is there in all of his invitations. He says, Come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I'll give you rest. Your life's all messed up. You're carrying around shopping bags full of disgruntlement and disenchantment and all kinds of things in your life. He says, Come to me, and I'll take those shopping bags for you.

I'll take all that rubbish. He says, If you would take my yoke upon you… In other words, if you would bow down underneath my commands, and you would let me run your life, if you would take my yoke upon you, and you would learn from me all the things I've told you in here, then you would find rest for your souls, and you would discover that I'm lowly, and I'm gentle, I'm humble in heart, and I'll take care of your life. What does that sound like? Sounds like action, doesn't it?

Sounds like action. Come, take, learn, rest. They are all verbs. They're action words.

We know that from English at school. You see, faith is not some passive resignation. It's not some little compartment in my life whereby I say, Oh yes, I have faith. I keep it in a jar on my dresser. I bring it out when I need it.

No, no, no, no. New Testament faith is knowledge, assent to the knowledge, and trust on the basis of the knowledge to which I have given assent. Let me finish with an illustration I use all the time. Getting married. Getting married. There are a number of stages in getting married, if you do it properly. Stage one involves putting together knowledge—knowledge of the individual.

You go out for dinner, you go in the park, you listen to them talk, you observe them with their children—hopefully not with their children, but with their brothers and their sisters and so on, although there will be circumstances in which that would be the case. And in the gaining of knowledge, you're asking yourself the question, Is this an individual with whom I could spend my life? Could I make a commitment to this individual?

Would they commit to me? That's stage one. Stage two comes somewhere, in a nice evening somewhere, where you're at the Cleveland Indians game, and all of a sudden it flashes up on the scoreboard, Karen, will you marry me? Fred! And you say to yourself, Who is it I'm with tonight? Oh, Fred!

Fred! And out of his pocket he produces a ring, and he says, You know what? On the basis of the knowledge that I've gained of you, I am prepared to make a commitment on the strength of that knowledge. I have made an assent to it. I concur with everything that I know, and so much so that on such and such a day, in such and such a place, at such and such a time in the afternoon, I want to move beyond mere knowledge and assent to trust. I want to trust you. I want to entrust my life to you. I want to give myself to you. I want to know you at the most deep level possible. How do you come to faith in Jesus Christ?

Stage one, knowledge. Who is this Jesus? What did he do? When did he come? How did he live?

Is he alive? See, it involves your mind. It involves thinking. Some of us haven't come to faith, because we don't think. We want an experience to reach down and grab us and whack us off our feet and take us somewhere. That's why these people are wandering around all these crazy meetings that you see on religious TV. They're waiting for something to happen to them.

When will it happen? It's not like that. Saul of Tarsus—remember, hated Christians, didn't believe that Jesus was alive?—had a conversation with Jesus. That created knowledge. Knowledge created assent. Assent gave way to trust. And he was changed. Well, let me ask you the question with which I began.

Are you a man or a woman of faith? There's a difference between mathematical knowledge—half-base times height, which is what? The area of a triangle. Experimental knowledge—dropping apples from the tree long enough—said, Hey, that looks to me like the law of gravity right there. And experiential knowledge.

The New Testament biblical faith has every dimension to it. In a communist textbook, under the word kiss, they defined it as follows. The approach of two pairs of lips with reciprocal transmission of microbes and carbon dioxide. Sounds like it was written by a communist, doesn't it? Sounds like it was written by someone who never kissed. You ever kissed the Lord Jesus? You ever come and laid hold of him? Said, Lord Jesus, I love you.

I know you're mine. For you, all the follies of sin I resign, my gracious Redeemer, my Savior art thou. If ever I loved you, my Jesus, it's now. That is the faith which allowed Moses to get his butt kicked every which way from Sunday and stay true. Not foolish optimism. Not credulity.

Not pumping himself up. He saw Jesus' day, and he regarded affliction with the people of God a more significant option than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. That's biblical faith. Are you a man, a woman of faith? With that question lingering in our minds, please keep listening.

There's more from Alistair Begg coming in just a minute. Alistair has titled today's message What Is Faith? And This Is Truth for Life. Our series Fix Our Eyes on Jesus ends Wednesday. If you'd like to purchase the complete three-volume study in Hebrews on CD or USB, or if you'd like to download the audio files for free, visit truthforlife.org.

You can also listen to the series by searching the title on the Truth for Life mobile app. On today's program, you heard Alistair teach about the progression of faith. Faith begins with knowledge, then it moves to personal assent. Finally, it requires trusting in the one who saves us from our sin.

These steps all lead to an intimate relationship with Jesus, the kind of relationship he longs for us to have with him. Pastor Ed Welch has written a book that ties in naturally with this study on Hebrews. The book is called Created to Draw Near. This is a book we carefully chose because it explains how God planned to have a close relationship with us from the very beginning of creation. Request your copy of Created to Draw Near. It comes to you with our thanks when you give a one-time donation today at truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can call 888-588-7884. This book offer will end Wednesday, so get in touch with us right away.

Again, call 888-588-7884 or go to truthforlife.org slash donate. As we wrap up today's program, Alistair Begg is asking every listener to consider, Are you a man or woman of faith? I believe there are some this morning who are here in church, and you're orthodox in what you believe. You have a knowledge of God, you do not deny his existence, and you have a knowledge of Jesus.

At Christmas time, you acknowledge that he came to be the Savior. But you don't have an assurance of what you hope for. You're not certain of what you don't see.

I want to tell you why not. Because although your knowledge has given way to assent, your assent has never given way to personal trust in what Christ has done upon the cross. In your own words and from your own heart, speaking, as it were, to God in the silence of your own being, you can tell him that you do know that you are a sinner, that you do understand Christ to be the Savior that you just acknowledge you need, that you do recognize that faith is action, it's life-changing. You'll never be the same again, but that you do want to be laid hold of by his embrace—gathered up, caught into him, as it were—so that you might be not simply an observer in the hall of faith, but that however small your portrait, however short the years on the nameplate, that your name might appear there.

But remember this. Faith is both a decisive act and a sustained attitude. God grant us faith. And may grace and mercy and peace from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the triune God, rest upon and remain with each one who believes, today and forevermore. Amen. Two days remain in our series called Fix Our Eyes on Jesus, and we invite you to join us again Tuesday and Wednesday for an important study about the perseverance of the saints. I'm Bob Lapine. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.