The decade of the nineties so far appears to have been the decade of faith. Everybody has it, from Oscar winners holding up their trophies and casting eyes heavenward with adulatory gaze, to the ebullience of Oprah, breathlessly urging us to get in touch with our inner spirit. Yet Jesus said, “When I come, shall I find faith on the earth?” (see Luke 18:1–8). Somebody’s got it wrong, and it isn’t Jesus.
You can guarantee that wherever a vital spiritual commodity is needed, Satan will make sure he stacks the shelves with the artificial variety. It does not take much delving into his package to conclude that this fake faith has me as the main ingredient. I am supposed to tap into hidden resources that I am not at first aware I possess and discover creative powers within me that can work wonders. My problem, according to this presumed faith, is that I do not realize how special and wonderful I am.
We Christians are, of course, adept at knocking this kind of faith because we know the “new age” when we see it, you bet ya. But not so fast. Don’t be surprised to see innumerable Christian versions of this fake faith.
The new age is not just out there. It’s within, undetected and appealing to our more refined views of ourselves. “God loves you, because He didn’t create junk,” the new, pop-theology goes. And Christianity is so permeated with so-called Christian psychology that a revelation of God is equated with taking a good look in the mirror and discovering that you love what you see.
Real faith, however, is a shock. It is a contradiction of everything rational, everything we sense and feel at the time it is gifted to us. Faith is known only when our mental resources are spent, our willpower shattered, our moral fortitude bankrupt, and our ability to direct the course of events utterly frustrated. Faith starts where humanity ends.
When Adam knew the nakedness of his soul, God clothed him; when Abraham’s belief in his own potency was utterly dead, he fathered the child of promise; when Israel faced being cut to pieces by the Egyptian army, God opened the sea; when Gideon, humiliated, hid behind vines’ leaves to thresh the only bit of wheat left, God told him to scatter the enemy with three hundred men; when Israel was powerless before the military might of the Philistines, God sent a keen-eyed youth with a bag of stones; when the people of God had worn themselves out for three thousand years trying to create national righteousness, God sent a Man, Who wiped out the sin of the land in a single day.
When your weakness stares you in the face and reveals your hollow soul, faith calls you away from the anxious inward look and turns you outward to Christ.
When sin has floored you, you are exactly where God wants you to be. “For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that He might have mercy on them all” (Romans 11:32).
At that moment you may say, no, you must say, “Father, thank you for revealing that I have nothing, and that Christ is my Everything; In Him I am righteous.” This faith is hardly anywhere in the land, but you may have it.