“So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the message about Christ.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I have several gentlemen in my church who are members of Gideons International. Gideons members make for wonderful church members. They are faithful and committed believers who contribute powerfully to the Gospel work of the church. You may be more familiar with the Gideons for their efforts to distribute copies of the Scriptures to everyone, everywhere. You’ve probably stayed in a hotel with one of their Bibles in the nightstand drawer. Let’s talk about why their work matters so much.

If you spend much time clicking through the Gideons’ website, you can find story after story of a person whose life was a mess, who encountered a Gideon’s Bible, and once they started engaging with the Scriptures, their life did a total 180.

You can also find story after story of someone whose life was going just fine by every external measure we might use to make such a determination, but who, after discovering the Scriptures by way of a Gideon’s Bible, found that His life had always been missing something. Now that he had encountered Christ through the Scriptures, his life was immeasurably better than it had been.

The stories you’ll find there are different in all kinds of ways, but one thing is consistent: the catalyst for the transformation was an encounter with Jesus that came through the Scriptures. Jesus is the key to a relationship with God, but an encounter with Jesus comes more often than by any other means through the Scriptures.

God can reveal Himself in all sorts of different ways. More than anything else, though, God reveals Himself through the Scriptures. The Scriptures are the means by which faith is given birth and grows and develops into the kind of robust trust in God that has the power to transform our lives. The more we study them, marinating in words that have proven timelessly true over and over and over again, the more we come to see and understand what is real so that we can adjust our lives accordingly. Then, as we make those life adjustments and experience the blessings that come from them, the truthfulness is confirmed to us even further.

That is the kind of faith and trust Paul has in mind here in his letter to the Roman believers. The invitation here is not to simply read some random verses and decide to take a chance on a lost cause. The invitation is instead to test and prove the worth of the message about Christ. We do this by submitting ourselves to the commands we find there.

On the surface, this may seem easy. Love one another. How hard can that be? But then we start seeking to actually put that into practice. We see that Jesus’ command to love one another includes not just friends. Of course that is easy. Even the unbelievers do that, Jesus said. His command goes above and beyond that to loving our enemies, doing good for those who hate us, actively praying for those who persecute us. That’s countercultural. It can also be transformational.

Jesus tells us that we should forgive. Forgiveness is not a commonly practiced virtue. It never has been. Revenge and vengeance are normal. So, we test and prove what we have heard to see if it is true. We actively release people who have hurt us from the debt they owe us because of the offense they’ve dealt us and see what kind of an impact that has on our own lives and the lives of the people around us.

Over and over again we can do this. You pick the new covenant instruction, the same thing will happen each and every time. Test and prove it. Discover that it is true and right. Choose to trust in it – that is, to adjust your life in light of it – and watch as faith blooms. The more we discover by experience the truthfulness of the Scriptures in this way, the more our faith will grow; the stronger our faith will get.

But none of this happens without the Scriptures. Those are the key. Those are God’s primary means of self-revelation. They are where we can encounter His Spirit. Indeed, without His help, we won’t be able to make any positive sense out of them. That was purposeful on His part too. If it was something we could simply do on our own, we wouldn’t need Him. The message, though, sounds on its face like foolishness at first hearing. But when we take that initial risk of trust, the faith follows soon in its wake.

Let me add one more thing here. While the Scriptures are vital to the growth and development of our faith like this, they are not alone sufficient. There are two more elements that are necessary for us to experience the kind of growing faith I’ve been talking about.

The first is prayer. As we engage with the Scriptures, we also engage with prayer. We take that faith experiment to the next level and talk to God. This can feel weird at first as we are talking to what is by all appearances an empty room or to someone who isn’t there by any measurement we could devise. Prayer is itself an act of trust. But when we give it – both talking and listening with the direction and abiding input of the Scriptures – the results quickly begin to speak for themselves. That’s not the same thing as saying they immediately speak for themselves. God’s not a vending machine that will respond promptly to our provocations. But as we seek Him, He will receive us and engage with us.

The second additional element to a growing faith is the church. None of the rest of what we’ve been talking about was designed or intended to happen in isolation from other people. Growing our faith is a team sport. The community of faith, the body of Christ, is where we find help and hope and encouragement in our efforts. It is where we can find wisdom and answers to questions and accountability for our journey. The church can urge us on when we are weary and gently call us out when we start to drift.

If you are at all interested in exploring faith in earnest, this trio of practices will be essential to your success. With the three of these in place, you just about can’t help but grow in your faith. If you remove even one from the picture, that growth will stagnate at best. Try to rely on just one, and you’ll never get anywhere. As you prepare for a time of giving thanks and the beginning of the season of Advent, then, give some attention to your faith. Is it growing or stalling? If you want these seasons to be all they could be, a growing faith is necessary. Commit to engaging with the Scriptures, prayer, and the church, and that’s exactly what you’ll have.

That’s it from me this week. Enjoy your Thanksgiving celebrations with your family. We’ll be back on Monday as we engage together in the season of Advent. See you then!