Imperfect Faith

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Some of you have mentioned that you saw the interview that Bob and I did with the news, whatever day it was, this week. And I can tell you, as we took a break from our study of 1 Corinthians, to spend some time talking about faith, I always hate it when I tell you all something out of God’s Word on Sunday, and then that following week, I’m presented with some kind of challenge that I have to live it to. We should always live according to God’s Word, but what I’m saying is I hate when I’m hearing my voice and what I’ve told you on Sunday.

I’m like, oh, I have to do that. I struggled with the faith issue this week because whatever day that was, I came into the office. I was late getting here because of a doctor’s appointment with Charlie and trying to get him situated, and I walk in, and Stella tells me, KSWO has emailed us.

They want somebody to come out and do an interview. you. Okay, great.

One more thing to try to work around this week. Okay, there were several miscommunications, and just when I got okay with the idea that they were going to come out to the park and do it on scene, I realized, no, no, we’ve misunderstood. They want us to come into the studio.

Well, that’s even more uncomfortable. And oh, and by the way, the only time they can do it is today, this afternoon. And everything within me is looking at my calendar to see if I’ve got some last-minute dental surgery I forgot about, because I would rather, I mean, most of you know me, I’ve had to get okay with the preaching aspect of pastoring over the years, but I’d much rather be working in the background doing something.

That’s just the way I’m wired. And so there was, I don’t want to say an argument, but there was some tense back and forth in the office about whether I was going to do this or not. And finally, I think it was Bob said something along the lines of this, the church needs this.

You know, we’ve been praying about how we were going to get the word out about live nativity. We’ve been praying for God to give us more opportunities to reach people, not just at live nativity time, but to reach people in the community in general. And then he just kind of plops this in our laps. Like, okay, Bob, you’re right.

I still don’t want to do it because it’s uncomfortable, because I’ve never done it before, because I’ve seen far too many clips of things where people go to do things like this and it just goes awry and turns into a catastrophe. I’m thinking of all the ways I could mess this up, kind of having a Moses moment. I can’t talk in front of people.

And as we were on the way out to the TV station, we were talking again. I’m just going to have to trust God and cowboy up and do this, even though I don’t want to, and trust that he’s going to take care of it And Bob kept reminding me, God’s doing what we asked. I said, but I want God to do what I ask in a way that’s comfortable for me, right?

But if it was always comfortable for us, it wouldn’t require faith. So my faith was not anywhere near perfect this week. I believe God, I trust God, but when it comes to actually having to do something about it and do something with it, sometimes it’s still a struggle until you get to the point of saying, okay, God, even if I blow this, it’s in your hands, so you’re going to do what you want to do.

And so we went, and God worked it out. And if you didn’t see it, the Holy Spirit got hold of Bob. He was dropping truth bombs.

It was great. Anyway, so I’m glad we had that opportunity. But how much of my day I spent arguing with God and arguing with other people just because I didn’t trust Him quite as much as I ought to.

And I want to share with you a story from God’s Word this morning about a group of people who dealt with the same. . .

I mean, they weren’t going on TV, but they dealt with the same issue of an imperfect faith. And so we’re going to be this morning in Acts chapter 12 as we continue our study of faith over the next few weeks. Acts chapter 12 this morning, if you’d turn there with me.

And once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, If you can’t find Acts chapter 12 or don’t have a Bible here with you this morning, that’s all right. It’ll be up here on the screen. And let’s read together and see what God’s word says.

Chapter 12, verse 1 says, Now about that time, Herod the king laid hands on some who belonged to the church in order to mistreat them. And he had James, the brother of John, put to death with a sword. And when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also.

Herod sort of had this troublesome relationship with his Jewish subjects, and his Roman masters wanted order, and so he was kind of stuck between the people in the streets and the people in Rome and trying to keep everybody happy. And when he saw that he persecuted the church and it made the people in the streets happy, he said, well, let’s just do that some more. And so he goes to arrest Peter.

Now, it was during the days of unleavened bread. And when he had seized him, verse 4, He put him in prison, delivering him to four squads of soldiers to guard him, intending after the Passover to bring him out before the people. So Peter was kept in prison, but prayer for him was being made fervently by the church of God.

And verse 5 is key to keep in mind as we go through this story. They are there knowing that Peter is imprisoned. He’s facing execution at any moment.

And unbeknownst to them, it’s scheduled for that night. They are praying fervently that God would do something, that God would intervene on Peter’s behalf. So verse 6 says, on the very night when Herod was about to bring him forward.

So the very night, he’s about to be taken and executed. Peter was sleeping between two soldiers bound with two chains and guards in front of the door were watching over the prison. So they have kept Peter in a very secure area like he was some major threat.

He is chained. He’s not just locked up. He is chained to guards and there are more guards out front.

And behold, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared and a light shone in the cell. And he struck Peter’s side and woke him up. It’s like, hey, time to go.

Saying, get up quickly. And his chains fell off his hands. And the angel said to him, verse 8, gird yourself and put on your sandals.

And he did so. And he said to him, wrap your cloak around you and follow me. Sounds like what takes us all morning to get out of the house at home.

Where are your shoes? Why do you not have a coat on? He’s telling Peter, get ready, we’ve got to go.

And he went out, verse 9, and continued to follow, and he did not know that what was being done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision. When they had passed the first and second guard, they came to the iron gate that leads into the city, which opened for them by itself. And when they went out and went along one street, and immediately the angel departed from him.

When Peter came to himself, he said, Now I know for sure that the Lord has sent forth his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting. And when he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John, who was also called Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying. So they were having their prayer meeting even while this was going on.

When he knocked at the door, verse 13, when he knocked at the door, a servant girl named Rhoda came to answer. When she recognized Peter’s voice, because of her joy, she did not open the gate, but ran in and announced that Peter was standing in front of the gate. They said to her, you are out of your mind.

But she kept insisting that it was so, and they kept saying, it’s his angel. But Peter continued knocking, and when they had opened the door, they saw him and were amazed. And we’re going to stop right there, and you can be seated.

So as we look at this story, it’s evident from the beginning that the church has faith in God. They have some trust and some belief that God is going to do something. They don’t necessarily know what.

And as we talked about last week, faith is not the same as blind faith. Faith is rooted in evidence. And for us in situations like this, it’s always God’s track record.

When we look at a circumstance in our lives that we don’t know how this could possibly work out, one of the things that I typically will do to try to bring myself back to reality is to stop and think about all the ways God has handled situations before and to see that track record. And so even though I don’t have the answer to this situation in hand already, I don’t have a signed contract from God about how this is going to work. I can look and see what he’s done up to now and know that I can trust him with the circumstances.

And that’s sort what they were doing. We don’t know what God is going to do, but we know God. And so we’re going to trust him.

We’re going to put our faith in him because there’s nothing else we can do. There’s no way the church could go storm the Roman jail and try to spring Peter. There’s no way they could fix this.

So they did the only thing they could do, which makes it sound like a last resort, but really should be their first resort and should be our first resort. They sought God’s intervention. They was being made fervently by the church to God.

And to say that it was made fervently, it means that it wasn’t just something that was on the prayer list and they prayed real quick and checked it off so they could move on to the next thing. They were spending serious time in focused prayer, pouring out their hearts to God, begging Him to do something to rescue Peter. And at that moment, they were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

They were walking by faith. We can’t fix this. We don’t know how it’s going to be fixed, but based on everything we’ve seen God do up to this time, we believe that God can fix it.

And this group of people had seen God do some pretty miraculous things. It mentions that it’s at the Feast of the Unleavened Bread. This is not too many years after the other Passover where Jesus was crucified.

And many in this group were among those who saw Jesus crucified and later saw that the tomb was empty, later saw the appearances of Jesus, saw the changes that took place in people that we can’t explain other ways other than the resurrection of Jesus. Once you’ve seen God raise Jesus from the dead, I assume it changes your perspective on what God’s capable of. Not only that, but many of these people had borne witness to Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit had just overwhelmed the disciples and they began to speak in languages that they had never studied so that people from the far corners of the earth gathered in Jerusalem for a festival could understand the gospel in their own language.

They had seen the Holy Spirit working, changing hearts. They had seen the Holy Spirit do things to protect the disciples. They had seen incredible things.

And looking back over all of those experiences, they could say, we don’t know how the circumstance works out, but we trust God. And that’s what faith is. It’s trusting God.

It’s were acting like it. They clearly had some faith in God because in this hopeless situation, their response to what they were dealing with was to pray, was to commit it to God. So we know they had faith in God, but we also know that their faith wasn’t perfect.

And I may have given Jack the wrong slides. That’s all right. Their faith wasn’t perfect.

Their faith had some limits. And we see this through the story, all the ways that they responded. One of the things I do is I’m working through a passage of scripture to prepare a message, I’ve put together a worksheet of questions I ask myself to dig deeper into the text.

And one of the things is to look at the people in the story and say, what are the good examples that they set? What are the bad examples they set? And for the church here, for the good examples they set, I wrote down, they prayed to God first off.

What are the bad examples they set? Literally everything else they did in this story. I mean, everything else they did was a lesson in what we should not do.

Look at some of the ways that they responded. When God freed Peter. Notice that.

When God did the thing that they were asking God to do, here’s how they responded. In verse 15, Rhoda comes with the message that Peter was at the door and they said to her, you’re out of your mind. There can’t possibly be anybody at the door.

You’re And when she came and said, Peter’s been rescued, they said, you’re crazy. You’re out of your mind. But she was insistent.

And she evidently had some credibility with them. Maybe they could even hear the knocking outside because Peter’s still out there in the street. Hello, Romans could be here any minute.

Hello, somebody let me in. When they realized, well, maybe she did see something. Maybe she did hear something.

Verse 15 said, when she kept insisting that it was so, they said, it’s his angel. Maybe you did see something, but it’s not literally him. They tried to explain it away.

And there were some traditional beliefs at that time that people had guardian angels that looked just like them, or sometimes angels would take on the image of somebody that they were conveying a message for. And so they thought, Peter can’t possibly, by the way, that’s not, there’s no biblical basis for that, as far as I can tell. That’s just part of their traditional customs. So when she says, no, no, Peter’s out there.

You’ve been praying for God to rescue Peter. Peter’s been rescued and he’s out there. And she was insistent about it.

No, it can’t really be him. We’ve got to be seeing an angel or a spirit that looks like him. Maybe his guardian angel has come to bring us a message from Peter.

Years ago, I think it was Norman Geisler wrote a book called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. And I’ll tell you, there are many circumstances where in my mind it takes more faith to believe that God didn’t do something than to believe that he did. And this is one of those. They’re having to make way more leaps of judgment to get around the idea that God did something than it would just to believe that God set Peter free.

And I don’t want to fault them for that. I would probably be in the same boat with them. A lot of us would probably be trying to make those same explanations.

No, it can’t be this. It can’t be that. But they’re having to jump to all these explanations and come up with all these bizarre theories rather than just believe what the evidence in front of them was that, hey, Peter’s out there knocking and he wants to get in.

God’s done what you’ve been asking him to do. And then their third response is when they finally laid eyes on him, when somebody finally goes and lets him in, verse 16 says, Peter continued knocking and when they opened the door, they saw him and they were amazed. That word amazed doesn’t mean just, oh, what a nice surprise.

It means one of those situations where you’re looking at something, am I really seeing what I think I’m seeing? We were home the other day after live nativity and one of my kids saw something out of the corner of their eye down down by the dollar general near the house a guy getting down on one knee in front of a lady wait a minute are our eyes really seeing somebody propose at the dollar general do you ever have moments like that when you think am I seeing what I think I’m seeing then we played a game worst places in the world to propose anyway that was fun but sometimes you’ll just see things Sometimes my kids will do something and I’ll look at it and think, am I really seeing this? That was their response to Peter.

This can’t possibly be what I’m looking at. They were amazed. And it’s not just the people at the church, even Peter, even one of the apostles.

This man who had walked with Jesus, saw him crucified, saw him risen from the dead again, had numerous experiences with him, and had this incredible faith that he was able to stand up and confront the entire city of Jerusalem at the day of Pentecost. This man even had some difficulty believing. Rather than believing God was actually answering his prayers, verse 9 tells us he thought he was seeing a vision. When the angel showed up in the prison and says, hey, we got to go, he thought he was seeing a vision.

And verse 11 tells us he only came to himself later. He only realized later on that what he was seeing was real. The problem for Peter and the early church in Jerusalem, and again, I want to cut him a little bit of slack because I think myself and a lot of us could be in that same boat given the right circumstances. It’s just our human nature.

But the problem for Peter and that early church at Jerusalem was not that they didn’t believe God. Clearly they did because they were praying for him to intervene. But that their faith wasn’t strong enough to follow through.

Their faith didn’t actually expect God to do something when they asked him to. They didn’t actually have confidence that God was going to do something. And that doesn’t mean that we should have rock-solid confidence in just getting whatever we want out of God.

We’re told to ask things according to His will. We’re told to ask things in His name. We were never given a blanket promise that He would supply every want that we had.

And I think it was Adrian Rogers who said it better than I ever could, that faith is not believing that God will do what you want, it’s believing that God will do what He said. They believed to an extent, but they didn’t actually fully expect God to do anything. But here’s the silver lining in this.

Because as I’ve said repeatedly, you and I are capable of similar things. The silver lining in this is that even when their faith wasn’t perfect, God was perfectly faithful. Even though their faith didn’t actually fully expect God to do anything, even though their faith was astonished that He actually did what they prayed for, God still acted.

God still took care of His people. So not only did God act when they prayed, verse 5 tells us how they prayed, but verse 6 tells us that God acted just in time. If you go back to verse 6, and I think I pointed this out earlier, it says on the very night when Herod was about to bring him forward, as far as Herod’s schedule and the Romans, Peter was not scheduled to live to see another sunrise.

God got him out of there just in the nick of time. God showed up and acted just in time. And he acted in ways that defy explanation.

Verse 7 says when the angel came and told him to get up quickly, It says his chains fell off of his hands. I can’t explain from a naturalistic standpoint why his chains would just fall off of his hands. The Romans were not known for being slipshod about things like that.

And then as we were reading again, I noticed reading again just this morning, I noticed something else that God did that defies a naturalistic explanation. Verse 10 says that the iron gate that led out into the city opened for them by itself. God was at work.

God was showing up and doing things just when they were needed. He was doing things that they could not explain, that they could not have made happen themselves. And He did this.

Get this. He did that. He did all of that for Peter, even knowing how Peter and the church and their faith were going to fall short.

Later on, when the church says, God couldn’t have done that, it must be this. When Peter said, oh, I must be dreaming. None of that caught God by surprise.

God was not looking at them saying, are you kidding me? I expected you to do this and this. God knew how they were going to react before he ever acted.

God was faithful even when their faith fell short. And that leads me to what I think is a key takeaway from this passage, is that the key for us is not having perfect faith, but having faith in a perfect God. Because as important as faith is, as important as it is for us to trust God, as important as it is for us to believe God when He speaks, as important as it is for us to trust what God says in His Word, in our human condition, there are going to be times when even our faith falls short.

There are going to be times when we struggle to believe that God will do what He said. There will be times that we struggle with doubt. We all have, we all will, but it’s not the strength of our faith that makes the difference.

It’s the God we put our faith in. And I realized this years ago. I wish I’d realized it even more years ago than I did.

I wish I had realized it sooner. But this made a tremendous difference in my walk with the Lord. Because I trusted Christ as my Savior at a young age.

And I would look back on that, and as so many people do, I would question or doubt, and I would think, well, did I say the right things? By the way, that’s not part of it. Did I say the right words?

Did I mean it enough? I don’t know how you mean it enough. You either meant it or you didn’t.

When I finally got it through my head, I knew I couldn’t earn it or deserve it. Jesus paid for it. I knew that much as a child.

But once I really got it through my head that God offers this by faith, once I got it right here that He offers salvation by faith, by grace through faith, then my mind started going to, well, did I believe hard enough? To the point that you could almost make the argument I was putting my faith not in Him, but in my own faith. Like it was the strength of my faith that was the condition.

No, no, what I’m relying on is not how strongly I believe. It’s what Jesus did. It’s what Jesus promises.

And I either believe that or I don’t. And some days, that belief is rock solid. Some days, I’m ready to go face the lions.

Some days, I’m ready to answer any question anybody has because I believe. And other days, I believe, but I don’t feel it. Have you ever been there?

And our feelings start to raise questions in our minds. And you start to think, well, how do I know? And there are ways we can know.

But folks, I am so thankful that my salvation and my walk with God are not dependent on how perfect and flawless my faith is. And they’re not dependent on me being rock solid every day and ready to charge hell with a squirt gun. My salvation and my walk with Him are entirely dependent on the fact that Jesus suffered, bled, and died on the cross to pay for my sins.

And even on the days when I fall short, God is faithful. Even on the days when I feel like my faith is not strong enough to do much of anything, He’s still faithful. And I’m not telling you that doubt is never a problem, that doubt is a place we should hang out, but I think God understands our shortcomings and our questions and our doubts.

Because I see the church believed, but even when that belief and that faith weren’t always strong enough to do something with, God was still faithful. If you believe that Jesus died to pay for your sins, if you believe that God has forgiven you as He promised, if you believe that your hope and your future are secure because He said so, because of what Jesus did, there may be days when that belief is not forceful enough for you to go out and do anything with. But on those days, we can still rely on the faithfulness of God.

What I’m telling you is He is a God who keeps His promises even when we fall short. So if you’re a believer this morning, if you’re somebody who’s trusted Christ as your Savior, I want to encourage you because there are going to be days when your walk is stronger than others and days when your walk is weaker than others. Press on trusting God, believing Him, even if you feel like my faith is not up to par today.

Keep trusting Him because God is good and He’s faithful even when we fall short, even when our faith is imperfect. We may have imperfect faith at times, but we have faith in a perfect God. And if you’re somebody who’s never trusted Christ as your Savior.

Maybe you’ve heard the message of what Jesus did and you understand, but you just don’t think you can do enough or be enough or believe hard enough. You’re not 100% sure you still have questions. You still have doubts.

No matter how long you’re on this earth, you’ll still have questions. That’s one thing I’ve learned. The more I studied the Bible, for every question that gets answered, two more pop up.

At least. Blanche is right. If you’re thinking, well, I can’t trust him because of these lingering questions, deal with the questions you need to, and our church would love to help you walk through those questions and find answers from God’s word. Deal with the questions you need to, but don’t let the fact that there are questions, don’t let the fact that your faith will never be perfect keep you from coming to faith in a perfect God.

Jesus Christ died to pay for your sins in full so that you could be forgiven, so that your slate could be wiped clean, so that you can have a relationship with God and eternal life with Him. And then three days later, He rose again from the dead to prove it. And all He expects from you is that you put your faith in Him.