Sermon, August 4, 1996

Title: "Faith & Temptation", preached August 4, 1996 by Jeffrey Lomicka at the Acton Christian Community Church

Go to Acton Christian Church Page, where you can find the RealAudio recording of this sermon.

Purpose: Encourage the congregation to have a stronger faith in God than in the world, and use that strength to flee from temptation and live a more godly life.

Reading: Matthew 14:24-33

The boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it. During the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. "It's a ghost," they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: "Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid." "Lord, if it's you," Peter replied, "tell me to come to you on the water." "Come," he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came towards Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, "Lord, save me!" Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. "You of little faith," he said, "why did you doubt?" And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshipped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God." (NIV).

Points:

The source of faith is trust
real faith comes before the demonstration of the truth.
Our strongest faith controls our actions, so our faith in God is the best defense we have against temptation

Text:
Do you have faith in God? Do you have faith in the United States Government? Do you have faith in your grade school teachers or college professors? What are you saying when you declare that you have "faith". What about such christianease statements as "walking in the faith", or "living the faith"?

Our behavior is shaped by the faiths we hold to be true. I say this as a general truth about faith, not just faith in the word of God, but also on the mundane faiths that we have developed over years of teaching and experience.

What I want to talk about today is what faith is, how it affects us, and how we can use our faith to help us to resist temptation, and keep us in line with God's will.

I want to know what it means to have faith in God, and since I can't easily grasp the concept of Godhood, I need to bring this concept of "faith" down to Earth. When I can see how these mundane faiths that I hold to affect me, I will be better equipped to understand how my faith in God should, and does, affect me.

I feel uncomfortable when the Church seems to use a private vernacular, a jargon that has little meaning outside these walls. Words like "baptize", "atone", "disciple", and "evangelize" are rarely used outside the context of the church. want to be able to describe the precepts and concepts of our religion using words that are in our common language, and for the language inside the Church to be useful outside as well. I like hearing about how Guy Kawasaki is an Apple "evangelist". His full time job is to travel from place to place, preaching the merits of the Macintosh over other computers, convincing them to convert to his company's product. This is a mundane use of the word "evangelist", borrowed from our ecclesiastical vernacular, but applied well in the workplace.

Like "evangelist", "faith" is one of those words that we usually hear only inside the walls of a church building, but it also has mundane applications, and those can help us to better understand the heavenly application of the faith we have in God, in Jesus, and in the Bible.

I'm going to attempt to define faith today. I find defining faith to be difficult, so like the Olympic athletes that need to warm up a bit before they compete for the Gold medal, I need to start out with a warm-up definition. Already four times today I've referred to "mundane" faith. These days, we tend to use this word, "mundane" to describe things or activities that are ordinary, boring, and drab. However, the word derives from Latin and French roots that mean "of the world", and in dictionaries published as recently as 1966, the word is defined only as an adjective for the "worldly, as distinguished from [the] heavenly". I think that "mundane" is great word for separating the earthly applications of words and concepts from the spiritual ones. These don't have to be boring or drab to be mundane, but they are worldly faiths, some good, and some bad.

I need go no further than the nearest elementary school for an example of mundane faith that has shaped all of our lives. We learn an enormous amount about the world around us with little more evidence than some printed books, perhaps some visual aids, and an unquestioned trust in our teachers. How much of what we believe to be true about the world do we accept with little or no direct experience? That the world is round? That there are nine major planets orbiting the Sun? The revolutionary war, or any other historical event? We accept these things to be true because we trust the source.

Some of these faiths can be tested. In a high school Physics class, I was taught how to compute mathematically the effect of gravity on simple objects, such a marble rolling down a ramp. Initially, we accepted this on faith alone, but in a physics lab, we found that we could predict the location on the floor where the marble would land, when rolled down the ramp and off the edge of the table. We placed a paper cup on the floor in the computed position, dropped the marble on the ramp, and *plunk*, it dropped neatly into the paper cup. This, for us, was evidence that our teachers and textbooks were trustworthy, and strengthened our faith in the material we were learning. Living here in Massachusetts, we can gather evidence for the Revolutionary war, by visiting the sites where these events occurred, and the graves of the people that are spoken about in the history books, and this adds credence to the historical accounts, strengthening our faith in what we are learning.

Some of what we learn in school we cannot easily test for ourselves. There is the chapter in nearly every Physics textbook on a subject called "relativistic mechanics", which describes phenomena that only occur when objects are traveling near the speed of light. This whole chapter I have to accept only on faith, without the benefit of direct observation. We have no vehicle that will travel at such speeds. However, with the trust that is earned and tested in other areas, I have faith that this chapter is also correct. Our faith comes from trusting that the textbooks and the teachers are teaching the truth.

So the first part of my definition of faith is that it comes from trusting the source. the more your source is trusted, the stronger will be your ability to believe even in those things you cannot see or experience yourself.

The Bible says this in First Peter 1: 21 which says that "Through [Jesus] you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God." (NRSV) If we are going to have Christian faith, we need to trust the Word from which it derives. We need to trust the Christ who is the source of the faith. We need to trust in the Gospels and Epistles of His word.The more we learn about the Word, and the more we can truly, inwardly trust the reliability of our Bible, then more our faith will naturally follow.

Also, like the science I learned in high school, we cannot personally test all of the truth that is contained in the Bible. There are many things said by Jesus and the prophets that we have to accept as true based only on our trust in the source. Some of these are basic to our faith, such as the ressurection of Christ, the forgiveness that is extended to the faithful, and our subsequent eternal life in Heaven with God.

In my mind, real faith occurs when we are willing to take action based only on our trust in those whom we have faith, and not relying on our personal experience. This is a key component the way the Bible defines faith in Hebrews 11:1 which reads "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." [NIV]

If I see a chair with four strong wooden legs, I don't need to take a leap of faith to sit on it, because I have sat in wooden chairs hundreds of times, and they have never failed to hold my weight. If, however, you ask me to test a chair that you have just suspended from the ceiling - remember, they had these in the 60's, wicker chairs that hung from a rope - I'm going to have to evaluate my faith in your ability to install that chair. Do I know you well enough to know you will attach the hanger firmly in to a joist, or would you have carelessly suspended the chair from a plaster board that will give way under my weight? If I trust in your ability, I will have no qualms about leaping into that chair. If Jesus had hung the chair, I'd jump right in, since we know he was a carpenter, and would know about these things.

This is the kind of faith that Jesus was asking of Peter in our reading today. Jesus was saying "Peter, walk on water, trust me, and you won't sink". For a few moments, Peter had the faith, and stood on the water as Jesus did. Never before had the water held the weight of Peter's body, but he stepped out with the faith that it would.

This is the story out of the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 14, starting at verse 24:

The boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it. During the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. "It's a ghost," they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: "Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid." "Lord, if it's you," Peter replied, "tell me to come to you on the water." "Come," he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came towards Jesus. (NIV)

What is it that gave Peter the faith to go perambulating about on the surface of the lake? Was it his years of experience wandering the waterways of Galilee that gave him assurance that the water would support his weight? Just the opposite! Peter was a fisherman who spent a lot of time on a boat, and he surely knew the dangers of falling into the lake when you were a "considerable distance" from shore, particularly during a wind storm. Despite what he knew to be true about the water, Peter walked out on the lake because he trusted what Jesus was telling him.

But, we go on, picking up again in verse 30:

But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, "Lord, save me!" Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. "You of little faith," he said, "why did you doubt?" And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshipped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God." (NIV).

Once he was out on the water, a balancing act starts going on in his head. The question in his mind is this "What is the greater truth? Do I really have faith that what Jesus tells me is true?, or do I have greater faith in what I know about the lack of buoyancy of human flesh in lake water that's been kicked up by the wind?" Surely if Jesus is the Son of God, and is Himself walking on the water, he can extend this miracle to Peter as well. For Jesus, this is a "teachable moment", where he can demonstrate what faith in God is all about.

Peter's faith in the world soon outweighed his faith in Jesus, and that weight brought him down. Jesus remarks about this - by saying "you of little faith", he was not insulting Peter, so much as teaching that where we place our faith will determine what we do. As long as Peter's faith in the words of Jesus were strong enough to override his faith in the rule that humans mostly sink, he walked.

What was true for Peter will also be true for us. When our faith in the world outweighs our faith in God, we sink into sin. Our strongest faith controls our actions. When our faith is in God, we are led to Godly action, but when our faith is in the world, we soon flounder, sinking into sin, sinking into depression, and sinking into the ways of the world.

Let me tell you another story about how much our faith influences our actions. This is a true story about how I was affected by one of my "mundane" faiths when I was young.

Rochester, New York, is a divided city. In this case, I don't mean by race, or social class, or religion, but literally, the Genesee river runs through the center of it, and parts of the city are divided by deep gorge, which is crossed by a collection of impressive bridges. These bridges are massive feats of civil engineering. Of course, as an impressionable young lad, I believed what I was told, and I had faith in the news reports which said that the Driving Park Bridge, sort of a smaller version of the famous Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, had to be inspected, and might be closed, because the authorities were not sure if the bridge was still safe.

From this story, I gained a faith - a faith that the bridge was going to collapse. On no more evidence than a few news reports, I developed a faith that the bridge was unsafe, and I would cringe every time I crossed that bridge in the back seat of my parent's car, sure that each crossing would be my last. It didn't help that it was a steel deck bridge that caused the car to sway a little from side to side as we crossed, making me sure that I, and the bridge below me, were about to fall into the river just like the London Bridge of my nursery rhymes.

That was faith. I heard the words, and I believed that the Driving Park Bridge was my path to the afterlife. Fortunately, in this case, my faith was not based on a true foundation. The bridge, as it turns out, was fine, but I cannot deny that my faith had a profound effect on every part of my being. I avoided the bridge, felt fear when I was near it.

This was just a bridge. How much more so, then, will our faith in God affect us?

If we have faith in God, and in Jesus, his words should strengthen us. Say there's a pile of money lying unattended on a table, do we listen to the world that says "more money will give you more things and more power", or to God who says "You shall not steal."

When the grass is greener next door, do you listen to the world that says "if my grass were greener than his, I would have more glory in my neighborhood", or to God who says "You shall not covet your neighbor's house."
When we trust the word of God, and hold to our Christian faith, we can resist these temptations. When you know God's word, and have faith in it, it will guide you. Look at how Jesus dealt with temptation in the wilderness. This is from the beginning of chapter 4 of the Gospel of Matthew:

When Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. 2 After fasting for forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 The tempter came to him and said, "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread." 4 Jesus answered, "It is written: `Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"

With this and the two other temptations recorded here, Jesus was ready with scripture that would lead Him down God's way, rather than the devil's. His unswerving faith in God kept him safe.

Once I understood this, certain phrases in Christian-speak finally began to make sense to me. Statements like "living the faith", and "walking in the faith", and "keep the faith, brother" - "walking in the faith" is what Peter was doing when he walked on the water. These phrases mean that we are keeping God's perspective, allowing the principles that God revealed in the Bible to to dominate our actions and our decisions. We trust in the promise of grace to those who confess Jesus as their Lord, we trust that there is forgiveness of sin, and we can trust the Word to guide us in our mundane walk on land, as well as our spiritual walk on water.

For every decision we need to make, there is God's wisdom, and man's wisdom. Sometimes we are surprised, and they agree. More often, however, we find them in conflict, and we have to decide to what, or to whom we owe the greater faith. We ask ourselves "What does Jesus say about it?", if we trust the answer, we act in faith, or we choose not to trust it, and go the world's way.

You know as well as I do that this is not going to eradicate sin from our lives, for only the never ending grace of God will do that, but every little bit helps. Even Peter had to be rescued by Jesus when he lost his faith and began to sink.

When we go back into the world this week, we need to think about Peter, walking on the sea of Galilee. Picture him teetering on the waves, contemplating which to follow - the words of Jesus, or the wisdom of man. Which is it going to be? Jesus? or Drown? Peter didn't have to sink that day, and neither do we. For every step where Peter chose to trust Jesus, he came one step closer to him out on the sea. When we choose Jesus over the world, we come another step closer to the standard He set for us.

Amen.