Tag: How to Be Faithful When No One Else Is

What Is Faith?

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For the last several weeks, we have been working our way through the stories of Daniel and his friends. Along the way, we have been driven by a very simple question: What does it look like to be faithful when no one else is? As our culture continues to change such that followers of Jesus are increasingly feeling lonelier than we ever have been, the examples those stories have offered have been a great help. Yet for all our talk of being faithful, we have left out an important and logically prior question: What is faith in the first place? In this bonus episode of the series, we are going to tackle that together. Come with me today on a journey of discovering what faith is and what that means for our lives.

What Is Faith?

The word “faith” is a little bit like a blank canvas. It means different things to different people in different circumstances. Now, this is not at all to say it has no fixed meaning—I think it does—but the way the word is used today would not do a very good job of giving much confidence of that fixed meaning to someone learning of the concept for the first time. Indeed, the way faith is often presented in a variety of places in today’s pop culture would suggest that it is not a very substantive thing in the first place. I mean, think about the last movie or television series you watched when one character or another was waiting on something good happening in the future whose prospects didn’t look very good. What was that character told to do by a well-meaning counselor? He was told to “have faith.” When we are anticipating a particular outcome of a series of events we are told we just have to have faith that it will play out the way we want. 

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Habits of Faithfulness

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With one more week to go in our series (and with this being the final part that I’m preaching), this week we are talking about another critically important way we can stand in our faithfulness to Christ even when we are standing alone. As we look at the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, we are going to talk about the kinds of things we do without having to think about them and what that means for our lives. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Habits of Faithfulness

I want you to think for just a minute about the sheer number of things you do on a daily basis that you feel like you could do with your eyes either metaphorically or literally closed. Given how automated many of the things you do are, that may actually be a tough list to compile. How many things in your life do you do because they are simply what you do? Surely your list includes some pretty basic things. If you use any kind of corrective lens, I suspect putting those on in the morning is automatic. Hopefully most of your personal hygiene routine runs on autopilot. The people sitting next to you are grateful for that. If you are a coffee drinker, your morning date with your coffee machine probably doesn’t require a lot of thought…which is probably good because if you are a coffee-drinker, you may not give a whole lot of thought to much of anything before that first cup starts energizing your system. 

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Live as You Speak; Speak as You Live

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This past Sunday, as we continued in our series, How to Be Faithful When No One Else Is, we were confronted with the fact that if our words and lifestyle don’t match each other, our words will be robbed of any power they might have otherwise held. This matters because speaking the truth is something we are called to do as followers of Jesus. Let’s talk about all of this through the lens of the next episode of Daniel’s story. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Live as You Speak; Speak as You Live

Imagine for a minute that you are sitting in an audience waiting for a comedian to come out on stage. When the guy finally walks out, he looks like a huge nerd. What’s more, behind him comes a stage crew member pushing out a big screen TV. When the audience looks a little inquisitive about the screen, the supposed comedian speaks up and says, “Oh, that’s for my PowerPoint slides.” Now, without knowing anything else, how excited are you about this comedian? Probably not very much. Somewhere inside you are thinking something along the lines, “I have seen comedians before, and you, Sir, are no comedian.” We don’t really want to listen to someone we don’t believe knows what they’re talking about. We’re terribly judgmental like that. And as much as we tell ourselves stories about not judging a book by its cover, we do it anyway. It’s like we can’t help ourselves. If you are presented with someone who does not appear to have any knowledge of the subject he is preparing to address, you’re going to start tuning him out before he even gets started. Now, maybe he earns a hearing in the few seconds you give him to grab your attention, but the odds aren’t in his favor. 

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Loving the Hurting

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This week as we continued our series, How to Be Faithful When No One Else Is, we are turning with Daniel’s story in a direction that may be unexpected. When we imagine ourselves standing in faithfulness as the world around us turns away from such a path, we are often tempted to think in very much cultural terms. We imagine ourselves as warriors battling back the forces of evil. Yet being faithful after the way of Jesus looks very different from this. Let’s talk about how and why as we look at another story about a king and a dream.

Loving the Hurting

Let’s do a quick vocabulary poll this morning. This one is definitely a fifty-cent word. How many of you have heard the word “schadenfreude”? Anyone want to throw out a definition or use it in a sentence. It’s actually a really good word to have in your back pocket. It’s probably worth quite a few points in a game of Scrabble. I don’t think I’ve ever actually played a game of Scrabble in my life, so I could be wrong, but it at least has a lot of letters. Schadenfreude, as you might have guessed, is a German word. While a more robust definition is probably available in German, in English it basically translates to taking pleasure at the misfortune of others. We live today in a world where schadenfreude is a common feeling for a lot of people. 

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Stubborn Faith

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This week, after a couple of weeks off – one of them unexpected – I was privileged to be back in the pulpit. We dove into the third part of our series, How to Be Faithful When No One Else Is. This week we explored Daniel 3 and the well-known story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and the fiery furnace. We marvel at their faithfulness and God’s miraculous rescue of the trio, but something even more powerful lies at the heart of the story when it comes to our challenge to stand on faithfulness even when we are standing alone. Let’s explore this together to see what it is. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Stubborn Faith

When was the last time you did something that left you feeling accomplished? When was the last time you checked something off your list in a way that made you feel satisfied? It feels good to do big things. It feels good to do smaller things too. It feels good to be making forward progress. Some of you know that I enjoy building metal models. They come in a nice, little kit with detailed instructions and sheets of metal that are pre-painted and laser cut so you can snip them out, fold them accordingly, and build things like this Stormtrooper. Putting the last couple of pieces into place and finishing these feels really good. It’s satisfying to finally throw away the empty scraps of metal that used to hold all the little pieces in place. 

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