Tollgate Evangelical Church

‘Faith’ is a word which seems to have so many meanings it ends up having no real meaning at all. How often do we hear people saying ‘I have my faith’ in response to our talking to them about the good news of Jesus Christ? It seems to be the ultimate argument against which there is no defence - how can we persuade them that not all faith is true - or saving - faith? When the Bible tells us to have faith in Jesus Christ - what does it really mean?

To discover the real meaning of ‘faith’ we will turn to Acts 16 and read from verse 22 onwards. The story is told of the jailer who keeps Paul and Silas in prison pending their trial for unlawful conduct in Philippi. The jailer is a hard man who takes his career very seriously. He is told to keep the two ‘troublemakers’ very securely and he does not hesitate to subdue them with a beating and then locking them in the ‘inner’ prison. He sleeps soundly after his hard day’s work but his prisoners are unable or unwilling to sleep and pass the night in singing songs of praise to God - intriguing the other prisoners with their cheerfulness under such a trial.

The sleeping jailer is rudely woken by a great earthquake which rocks the very foundations of the prison and causes the opening of all the doors and chains - torn away from the walls by the tremor. The jailer is distraught but remains very faithful to his duty and prepares to take his own life as the consequence of losing his prisoners. As he is about to impale himself, a voice calls out from the inner prison and says ‘Do yourself no harm, we are all here’. Paul sought to reassure the jailer that no-one had taken this opportunity to escape. Lights are brought and heads counted but the jailer realised that he had just had a close encounter with Paul and Silas’ God. Trembling, he asked them ‘Sirs - what must I do to be saved?’.

Paul and Silas’ reply is a helpful starting point in our attempt to discover what true faith is
‘Believe on the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved,
you and your household’

The jailer was told to ‘believe’ - but what does that mean? There is a song which goes something like this - ‘I believe that for every drop of rain that flows, a flower grows’ and that sounds nice but it simply isn’t true. It is one of those romantic notions that we have about life - which we often apply to spiritual matters. The person who says ‘I have my faith’ usually means that if he or she believes something sincerely enough it will come to be true - but that isn’t so. As a very little girl our eldest daughter watched ‘Peter Pan’ and later the same day we caught her jumping off of the settee trying to fly - she believed it sincerely enough but it simply wasn’t true.

The Greek word which is recorded in our Bibles and translated ‘believe’ is the word pisteuo. It always involves three principles

            1.         To think something to be true
            2.         To be persuaded of that thing
            3.         To place confidence in that truth

 

1.         Saving faith is always based on knowledge

 

Verse 32 of Acts 16 tells us that far from asking the jailer to make an ignorant leap of faith,  Paul and Silas told him about the Lord Jesus. The jailer was prepared to believe what they had to say because he had felt God’s power and nearness in the earthquake and when he was at the point of taking his own life but he needed to hear the facts about God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Knowledge is vital. People believe all sorts of strange things about God but the facts are what counts and the facts are found in the Bible.

Is your faith founded on fact - Bible knowledge - or is it based on some strange, romantic notion of what God is - or what you hope He is like? Be warned - no man ever worked out what the true God is like1.
At this point the jailer was in a kind of no-man’s land - like the area between two countries border controls - neither in one place nor the other. He was prepared to change all his ways and beliefs but as yet he hadn’t heard the truth. When Paul and Silas told him about the Lord Jesus, who He was, and what He accomplished by dying on the cross, the jailer had facts before him which he took to be true.

In his letter to the ‘Romans’ Paul writes ‘How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed?And how shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard?2. Do you know the facts about Jesus - well that’s a good place to start but it’s only the beginning.

The jailer now had a foundation on which he could build - but  a foundation in itself is not a house. There is a church near us which a number of years ago laid the foundation of a new church building. sadly, things didn’t work out and all that is there today is a foundation. It needs to be built upon. Knowing about Jesus isn’t nearly enough - in the letter of James we read that even demons believe (know) the truth about God and even shudder because of it - but they aren’t Christians!

 

2.         Saving faith is being persuaded of the truth

 

Often on TV advertisements for financial services there is a little paragraph at the bottom of the screen which says things like ‘past performance is no guarantee of future performance’ and ‘the value of your investment can go down as well as up’ and ‘ your home is at risk if you do not keep up repayments’. We are all used to small-print but we are also used to ignoring it or believing that it doesn’t apply to us. This is how people are ruined when the stock market collapses or they lose their jobs and cannot make their mortgage repayments and therefore lose their homes. It comes as a shock but it shouldn’t - the information has been there all along.

As we have said in the last section - knowing the truth is not the same as having faith. Having faith means that you are persuaded that the truth applies to you. The problem with so many people today is that they do know the bare facts about Jesus but have decided that it is not relevant to them - they dismiss it.

The birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus are not some grand symbolical gesture - each has relevance and significance for us as individuals. Jesus death on the cross was because of sin - whose? Isaiah tells us that it was ‘our griefs He bore, our sorrows He carried - He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities....’ 3 If that is true then it means something to me as an individual - I need to respond to it in some way, I cannot ignore it.

Suddenly we find that the truth has a power over us - it drives us to do something, the facts become a conviction and the conviction becomes a driving force in our lives. In the Apollo space programme, all the pilots were deeply involved in the designing and construction of the parts of the space-ship and rockets. They had an intimate knowledge of how the rocket worked, but when they began their epic journeys they were all shocked at what that rocket could do - they found that it was driving them - the pilots became passengers. This is not dramatising the truth because the truth about Jesus Christ is more powerful than this. Jesus stops being a Sunday School memory or a man from history lessons and instead becomes the driving force in our lives. Look at verse 33 of Acts 16 and see the transforming effect on the jailers life!

Has the truth about Jesus become the driving force in your life? If it hasn’t then there is something wrong. You only have a knowledge of the facts and that is not enough to call saving faith. It is not the faith that God looks for in a man’s heart. This is the time which Jesus spoke about in the parable of the sower when He said that there seems to be growth but in reality there is no root and the new plant simply withers away4.

3.         Saving faith places absolute confidence in the truth

 

I once saw a documentary which featured a fire in a tower block in an Asian country. There were no fire precautions or means of escape because of the shoddy building regulations there. The fire was raging in the lower floors and everybody above it was in desperate danger. Incredibly we watched as some construction workers on another tower block opposite began to build a rickety bridge out of bamboo scaffold poles, wire and anything else available. It spanned the great gulf between the two buildings and was supported in the middle by the concrete bucket suspended from a tall crane. The whole thing looked terrifyingly fragile and insubstantial.

Incredibly we saw people - one by one - inching their way painfully over this structure to safety. To stay on the burning building was to face a certain and terrible death - to cross the bridge was almost as frightening - yet we had seen many people doing it. The point is this - those on the burning building had a decision to make. They had seen how the bridge would hold people and knew that it could - they believed that much. But their belief would not save them - they had to act - they had to cross the bridge.

So it was with the jailer - he had the facts, he was persuaded that faith in Jesus Christ was the only way to be right with God but this belief would not save him until he had placed his own confidence in Jesus. It is the same for us - merely believing is not the same as having placed our faith in Jesus. To place our faith in Him is to accept that there is no escape from our sin other than to trust in His sacrifice for us on the cross. We need to become followers of  Him as well as believers in Him.

One important thing needs to be said - our faith must be in Jesus Christ alone. We cannot say that we believe in Jesus but that our good works are the reason why we go to heaven. We cannot even claim credit for having our faith in Jesus as if it is our own cleverness which has saved us. The Bible says ‘for by grace you have been saved through faith; and that is not of yourselves it is the gift of God’ 5

If I were to dismantle the engine on my car and then re-assembled it but left out one tiny little spring, the car would not start. No matter how much I might complain that ‘it’s just a tiny little spring’ it doesn’t matter - the car won’t start and this little spring has become the most important piece. So it is with anything which we bring to our salvation apart from Jesus Christ - it becomes the most important piece - without which I cannot be saved. It is no good saying that Jesus has done nearly everything and I need to do a small thing myself. The Divinity, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are my only grounds for saving faith. There is nothing I can add to that perfect work of Jesus who stood in my place at the cross.

Augustus Toplady wrote this verse in his famous hymn ‘Rock of ages’  which expresses the attitude true faith has:

Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Saviour, or I die.

So where does doing good and keeping the commandments come in? If the death of Jesus is the only means of salvation and my goodness plays no part in it, why don’t I just live as I want from now on? The early Christians made this mistake in their thinking and Paul had to rebuke them for it6. Saving faith shows itself in a changed life, a following of the Lord Jesus, repentance from sin and a desire to please and glorify God in everything.

What evidence can we have that our faith has brought us to salvation? Simply this, that we love the law of God and follow His commandments and ways. Paul writes ‘For the love of Christ compels us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died, and He died for all that they who live should no longer live for themselves but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.’ 7

Those who have a saving faith will give evidence of this by the way that they live - not for the world and according to its ways, but for Christ and His ways. We see this clearly in the complete transformation of the jailer after his conversion - his faith worked itself out in practice - and so must ours.