What Is Your Faith “Propped Up” On?

How does faith really work? If your prayers aren't answered, is it because you didn't have enough faith? What does it mean to lose faith? Does your faith waver depending on your circumstances? Or is your faith supposed to be in something beyond your control, so that it isn't swayed by the circumstances of your life? Your faith is resting against something. Is it something that changes day to day, or does it endure through time?

Do you believe that most everyone falls out of faith at some point and most people fall out of faith many times in their lives?

Faith often comes and goes as our circumstances change. Sometimes it only takes a bad turn of events to challenge our beliefs.

When someone says they have lost their faith or lost their ‘religion” it usually boils down to one of two things – lifestyle decision or unexplainable circumstances. These two things do more to erode and chip away at our faith foundation, which was probably had weak to begin with, more than anything else.

What do we mean by a lifestyle decision? Let’s say you were raised in a Christian home where you were taught that cheating and being dishonest was a bad thing. You might have cheated and were dishonest but you still believed it was bad thing. This was part of your belief system. This was fine but then you got out of school, went to the “big city”, got a job and became part of a company. At this company cheating and being dishonest was a business practice. It might not have been really overt but this is just how business was done. Now you get this feeling inside. You were raised to believe this was wrong but it didn’t seem to bother anybody else. Now you had a dilemma. You have three choices: work here and feel guilty all the time, I can quit but that’s not a good option, or maybe what I have always believed isn’t true. Maybe in an environment like this being a little bit dishonest and cheating a little is not all that bad! Maybe I am being too hard on myself. Maybe my conscience is to ‘strict”. And over time, and most have experienced this, because of a lifestyle decision we began to change what we believed. You decided to stay in this company and become a part or it. Suddenly your beliefs have shifted. This is a lifestyle decision.

Another example of a lifestyle decision is you always said you'd never live with someone to "try it out" before getting married. Then you move to “the big city”, meet someone awesome and she/he wants to "try it out". Well you obviously want to keep this person around because they are so awesome, so you change your belief system and move in together to "try it out". Again you have shifted your beliefs to suit your lifestyle.

Now let’s look at unexplainable circumstances. You were raised in a Christian environment and you were taught that “God would never...” but then it seemed “that God did anyway”! You were raised to believe that “God would always....” but then it seemed that ‘God didn’t”! You were raised to believe that if you did “A, B, and C”, then you could believe or trust God to do “D, E, and F”. So you have done A, B, and C consistently but God didn’t do D, E, or F. And all of a sudden there is a life circumstance that doesn’t line up with your thinking about God and your faith is shattered. This happens all the time.

These two things basically boil down to something we can call "Circumstantial Faith".

This means our faith in God often depends on God’s activity or inactivity in our everyday life experiences. When our prayers are answered our faith in Him soars but when it appears that God is silent, it becomes difficult to have faith in Him. Or our faith may depend on how well it fits in with our lifestyle.

Many of us have this “circumstantial faith”. This kind of faith attempts to see God in the circumstances of our everyday life. Not all bad, because it is not uncommon to have certain events launch a person’s faith but we must not allow these events to be the foundation of our faith.

When God is doing all sorts of cool things in our lives we say: Yea God! Then when things are not quite so good we say “where is God? And when things get really, really bad we think "is there a God"? Our faith kind of goes on our ability to see God in our everyday life circumstances. So the defining factor of our faith depends on God showing up or not showing up on our time table.

So for example let's say you have a friend, family member, etc., who comes down with an illness. The prognosis doesn't look good so you pray for this person’s health. Well lo and behold a few days / weeks / months later they are "miraculously" cured. This of course instills a strong faith in you and God’s power. You spend the next weeks / months / years continuing down this path until one day something happens which causes you to doubt God.

Another ‘circumstance’ occurs in our lives – we lose our job, another friend gets ill or someone has some other issue or problem. We again prayed but God didn’t answer the way we thought he should and “BOOM” our faith in Him plummeted. Because you based your faith on the first event and then had a negative experience with the second event, your faith is now "shaken". This is because our faith was ‘propped up” on our ability to only see God in the everyday circumstances of our life. Circumstantial faith is very “fragile” because sometimes you see Him and sometimes you don’t. You are always trying figure out why circumstances happened because I did this or Momma said ‘so and so” or I didn’t pray hard enough. This is very fragile because things do happen that don’t fit into the framework of our view of God

We are horrible, yes horrible, at interpretation of events and circumstances in our lives. God speaks in many ways to us and we, being the smart humans we are, love to interpret these "signs" or "feelings". The problem is we typically interpret them as a positive thing for us. But when those same "things" go negative either now or later on down the road it causes us to lose our faith. Again because we based our faith on something or some event.

Whenever you adapt a faith foundation to fit your life, it will always end in tragedy.

So what is the foundation of our faith? The foundation of FAITH is a person. It is not an answer to a prayer, not something that happened to us when we were six, the foundation of our faith is a person - Jesus Christ. God sent Him into this world. Jesus walked on this earth; he lived a perfect life, predicted his death and resurrection, was crucified, buried and rose from the dead. He was then seen by hundreds of people who said: “I saw this happen” and they gave their lives to him and told people what they saw. As Christians, if God never answered another prayer, if God never showed up in our circumstances, if God didn’t do anything for us lately or ever again, zilch was quiet from now on, we still should wake up everyday with extraordinary confidence in God because of what he did for us back in history, back at the Cross. Because Jesus came into this world to die for our sins, which is God’s way of saying throughout the ages that “I LOVE YOU”, YOU ARE IMPORTANT TO ME!!!! We can go through each day of our lives with our faith based on what he did for us back in history and not have our faith propped up on circumstantial faith.

So what is your faith built on?


This lesson is based on a sermon by Andy Stanley


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