Dear friends
We’re three-quarters of the way through our Year of Faith, which seems like a good point to pause and reflect. Building on last year’s Year of Prayer, we’ve been encouraged throughout the year to develop our confidence in our faith, and in the fact that people are actually hungry to hear the stories of our faith and what it means to us.
Of course, by the grace of God we’ll carry on growing in faith and confidence as we go into 2025, just as we’ve carried on growing in prayer in 2024.
But what is faith, really? I reflected on this with Churchwardens at the Visitations in the Ludlow Archdeaconry in the summer. Faith isn’t believing six impossible things before breakfast. Faith doesn’t require us to remove our brains as we enter church, leaving them in a box ready to collect on our way out of church and back into our everyday lives. Faith isn’t a vague nebulous matter – faith has to be in something or someone.
Faith is, according to the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” There’s a paradoxical firmness in that. We can’t physically see the outcome of the promises we receive by faith, but we can have an unshakeable conviction that they are true, and that what we now receive by faith we shall one day know by sight.
We can be so certain because we know and trust the one in whom our faith is placed. We know God’s character and faithfulness. We know, as the well-loved hymn puts it, “As Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be.” God has proved it time and again in the pages of Scripture, in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and in our own lives.
When we know the one in whom our faith is placed, we know our faith is not in vain. When my children were young, my very adventurous daughter climbed the tree in our back garden. She got stuck. She was only two, and she became scared. She called to me for help, but first on the scene was her older brother, aged four. “Don’t worry,” he soothed his frightened sister. “I’m here. I’ll help get you down.” My daughter paused momentarily from her crying and then resumed her loud pleas for help. Not because she didn’t trust her brother, but because she knew he didn’t have the height or the strength to deliver on his well-meaning promise. Only when I rushed down the garden did she begin to calm down, because she knew I could actually help.
Our faith is not in vain because we know the one in whom we have trusted. We know that he is at work in the seen and in the unseen, and that he is at work building his Church whether we shall ever live to see that time of growth and harvest or not.
So let’s keep telling one another and those we meet day-by-day the stories of faith, and of the utter reliability and certainty of the gospel and of the God who makes it all possible. For faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not [yet] see.
AD Fiona