Faith?

James 2:19  You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder.


When we think about faith there are so many ways the word is used.

I have noticed a trend in the public sector to see faith almost as a end in itself. It has taken on an almost deified persona of its own. In music this is especially true. Perhaps it is the general influence of Christian thought that has led to this kind of expression.

I have often thought that many of the songs were written with some attempt by the writers to present faith in God in a more palitable way to the general public. Christians have done this since the third century A.D. when, because Christianity became a forced state religion, it became inportant to include the masses in the message.  

The consequences have not always been helpful. What tends to happen is a lowering to the least content possible.


Biblical faith is very specific. It is never faith that is the object. The devils have faith and what is the result? They are terrified when they encounter the oblect of their faith - God.

James is arguing against a view of faith that has troubled the church from the beginning.

Christianity was "Hellenized" early on. As long as it grew in the soil of Hebrew thought it was impossible for their to be a separation of faith and its object.

Hebrew understanding of life never allowed for a disconect between believing in God, or for that matter anything, and our actions. There was no need of adding adjectives like "true" to faith. The Hebrew understanding of life was what you believed was shown by what you did.

The Greek mindset was very different. They believed in a spliting of the human being into segmented parts which could behave autonomously with out reference to one another. A person could have faith but not act on it.


While I would like to say that the Hebrew simplicity is true, reality and history show us that the association of the spirit, mind, emotions and will of a human is a little more complex than most would like to admit.


One of my mentors in my early years was a wonderful pastor who was also a professor at the Christian university I attended. I knew him and his wife on a personal level. He was the one who first challenged me to spend seven minutes with God in the morning. He helped, with Dawson Trotman, to found the group now known as Navigators. He taught me to memorise scripture and to meditate daily on it. Then his wife died of cancer. 

At first it seemed that he was fine. He went through the normal grieving process. Then one day as he was speaking with someone he said things which were directly opposed to everything he had ever taught. Within a year he ended up in psychiatric care. Finally he was institutionalized. He would go through periods where he was as zealous for God as ever and other times he was a man you could not believe had ever had a relationship with God at all.

Some might say that he was never committed. some would say that the things he expressed were always there and only in a time of crisis they were finally coming to the surface. Some said he was possessed of a demon.

But I knew him well and understood that, while all of those things might have been true they did not seem to fit the reality of his life.

But what troubled me most was what my fellow believers who he had invested so much in were willing to do to him in the name of faith. They were quite sure that if he had faith none of what occured would have.... including the death of his wife.

When I saw this response I began to look into a part of Christian history that most people do not ever want to admit. Some of the greatest men and women of God had their stories rewritten to remove these kinds of situations. As I began to look into the actual histories of so many that seemed to have a mythic faith I found many had extreme difficulty during periods of their lives.


The writer of perhaps one of the greatest testimonies of faith, "It is Well with my soul" Horatio Spafford is an extreme example.

I have heard many stories of his life before he wrote the hymn but almost none afterwards.

As a very prosperous convert of D.L. Moody he lost almost everything in the great Chicago fire October 8, 1871. He was planning a trip to England that year but in order to take care of the business of reclaiming his property he sent his wife and children on while he remained in Chicago. On the trip their ship the Ville du Havre sank and his four daughters drowned. He recieved a telegram saying "Saved alone", only his wife had survived.

On his passage to join his wife he passed the site where his daughters died. As he looked out over the final resting place of his children he wrote the poem that became the Hymn, "It is Well with My Soul."


When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.


It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul,


Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.


It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.


My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!


It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.


And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.


It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.


His story of overcoming faith ends there for most biographers. Unfortunately the story has a tragic ending which is, to me, an even greater story of faith.


Almost immediately after Horatio's girls died people around him, mostly from his own church, began to abandon him and his wife. They were sure that some great evil was in their lives to be deserving such a horrible "judgement" from God.

The tragedy concerning his children did not end with the ship wreck. His wife had three more children. His only son born shortly after the ship wreck died tragically in childhood. This only deepend the suspicions that some deep sin was being punished by God.

Within a few years Horatio became mentally ill though, like my teacher and pastor, he himself was not aware of it. He began having delusions. He even thought at one point he was a second messiah.

He went to Jerusalem and set up a cultic group that did wonderful things for the poor but had a terrible theology.

He entered in to a deep depression and at his death had what they called "religious melancholia."

Yet he never lost his love for or faith in Jesus.


Neither did my teacher. He went for several years through a severe depression which left him a broken man locked away in a psychiatric hospital. But he still loved and believed in Jesus.


As I said earlier, when you look into the stories of many of those we esteem as saints there often have been these kinds of periods in their lives. Their historians felt it would dimish their greatness if the whole truth were told. But does it?


Every time I sing "It is well with my soul" I do not think that Horatio Spafford's life was a testimony of unbelief. Knowing the whole story actually speaks to me of the greatness of our God and Horatio's faith.

I cannot imagine the suffering he felt in the loss of his children, the turning of his own loved fellow believers from him and his struggle with mental illness. But all alone and through intense grief he believed what he wrote about Jesus.

He believed in the one who would someday wipe away all the tears from his eyes.


I believe that when we don't tell the whole story we set people up for doubt at the time they most need Faith. Faith is what  takes us through the darkness even when the darkness seems to overtake us. Listen to Jesus' last words....


And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Matthew 27:46


Might I suggest that Jesus was not expressing unbelief or just citing the Bible. He was crying out in the agony of his flesh to the God he had perfect faith in. His expression was one of suffering beyond our understanding.

Horatio tasted some of that suffering. So did my teacher. Why are we not concerned that perhaps we too will one day taste it, even though we believe?
We trivialize the work of God in our lives when we make Him a genie in a bottle come to meet all our needs and give us perfect lives without tragedy.

We break faith with those who walk through desperate times who we know to be committed to God and see them as an act of discipline from Him. 

True faith believes when no sight gives evidence of its reality.

2 Corinthians 5:7 (For we walk by faith, not by sight:)

I have seen the cruelty possible in our fellowships when we allow our hearts to become convinced that bad things cannot happen to good people.

I have seen the lack of compassion when believers think that physical, emotional or mental illness is somehow an affliction that no one who has "faith" will experience.

But I believe that one day we will be looking back at the lives of those who walked through the valley of the shaddow of death and we will see that even when it seemed the darkness of hell itself overcame the light of God their faith looked beyond the darkness to a light they could not see at that moment. I believe that will make them a part of those who God say's "Great is your faith."

We will esteem them even more highly than we did here but might not of if we had heard the whole story.

Their faith tested by the fire of affliction will be what God calls true Faith.