Model what’s important

Faith is one of the most important words in the Christian vocabulary, but it often comes with a lot of baggage and misunderstandings from how we use it in contemporary English. If we don’t understand something or if there is a lack of evidence, then we should just have faith, right? What we usually mean by that is, “Even though it makes no sense for me to believe this, I’m just going to have to shut down my logic and go with it.”

For so many in the church, this only works until one day they are confronted with much more complex arguments or in nuances of how faith plays out within Christianity and then all their “faith” is destroyed.

The good news is that this isn’t really what the Bible means when it describes faith. But this is something that took several years in my faith walk to move past the cultural understanding of “blind faith” to move into the Biblical definition. And this especially became important to me after becoming a father, which came with it the overwhelming sense of responsibility that now these little lives rest on me and my wife. But more on that later.

One of the most impactful times in my early years of ministry came when Sarah and I first became vocational missionaries. We were in our first missions training school in Youth With A Mission called the Discipleship Training School.

The first three months of the school is loaded with lectures, small groups, one-on-one time, worship, prayer, and local outreach all geared to transform our walk with God to live as missionaries. This is always followed by an overseas outreach of at least two months in order to give you time to practice what you have learned.

While we were well into the lecture phase of the school, one of the visiting speakers took time to invite different students up to have the whole group pray over them and speak any words they felt the Holy Spirit gave them. The topic during that particular week was exploring what it meant to live according to God’s destiny for our lives, so the prayer times gave us a chance to speak God’s destiny out loud as we took the time to listen and pray for others.

It came to our turn and there were several things prayed out that were meaningful, but one has stuck with us throughout the years. This particular prayer said that we were to be an Abraham and Sarah, going wherever God led us.

At the time, we were in our early 20s with no kids and a thirst for adventure, so we were all for a life like that. Plus, doesn’t that sound like you get to live like a spiritual rock star?

If you’re not familiar with the story of Abraham and Sarah, we’re first introduced to their story in Genesis 12 right after the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11. The people of the world had just attempted to coerce God’s presence back with them through the building of their great tower, but God wasn’t interested in playing that game. Instead, he introduces his plan for how he will return his presence back amongst people by choosing one couple – Abraham and Sarah.

The story begins like this (Gen. 12:1-3):

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

In case you missed it, where did God tell Abraham to go? That’s right, he didn’t. He tells Abraham to pick up, leave behind family and his country to a “land that I will show you.”

And how does Abraham respond?

Genesis 12:4: So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.

Abraham hears God say go, so he leaves. Where? He just started moving. Was Abraham acting on “blind faith”? Did he decide, “Well, I have no logical reasoning for this, but let’s just pack up and start moving.”

I don’t think that is what is happening. Abraham’s story is one of the earliest in the Bible that begins to form the picture of what it means to have faith in God, but it’s just his first step. Was he acting on something without any evidence? Not quite. He has a real-life encounter with God, heard the voice of God, and decided that was enough for him to get moving.

If you follow Abraham’s story through Genesis 12-24, you’ll see an up and down journey of peaks and valleys, trust and failure. It’s not a linear line from the starting point to the time that he becomes the “father of faith,” a description that Paul the Apostle uses to describe Abraham in his arguments in Galatians and Romans in the New Testament. It is growth one choice at a time over several decades of his journey.

The Biblical picture of faith is about trust, specifically a trust of allegiance to the person of God. Our faith is not a set of facts that we mentally agree to or a mysterious mantra that we just have to blindly believe, but our faith is rooted in a personal God who revealed himself in the person of Jesus.

What this reveals about faith is that, yes, we still might face life circumstances that we don’t fully comprehend or answers to prayers that we never see fully, but our faith is rooted in the fact that no matter what the outcome of my life turns out to be I trust God.

This came to life for me as a parent who has attempted to faithfully live out a missionary call on my life while also trying to be a parent that models what faith really means. Over the past 13 years, Sarah and I have been to over 20 nations and we have never shied away from going wherever we felt God was leading us. We have spent time in Eastern Europe (in the winter, I might add) ministering to women in prostitution and potential trafficking as well as time in a closed nation in Asia helping to run an underground Bible school.

There are numerous times as a parent when you are asking your child to do something or you have to tell them “No” for the thousandth time, and sometimes all they have to go on is whether they trust that you are good and you have their best interest in mind.

Yet the most important aspect of our faith journey as parents is not primarily on how well we articulate it to our kids, although I’ll never argue against having a good way to explain complex topics as parents. The most important aspect I have found is how we model our faith – the good, the bad, and the appropriately ugly.

We have definitely made our share of mistakes while attempting to hear God’s voice and walk out in faith and obedience, and our kids definitely do not have an inflated view of their parents as “spiritual rock stars.” But I know that each of my kids knows the value of pursuing God and living out his call on your life above all else. And that has been worth every mistake.