Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1
If you just took this verse all by itself, you could slap it on any Hallmark card in the world, as many people have. By itself, this verse could make you believe that faith is just positive thinking. If you just hope for the best, God will make sure everything turns out OK.
I have a friend who went to a church where they believed this wholeheartedly: if you just have enough faith, God will give you everything you ask for. In a small group one night, he made the mistake of making a joke about how his hair was thinning out. The small-group leader stopped the entire discussion, and rebuked him. “Don’t say that! You need to rebuke that spirit of baldness and claim God’s victory over your scalp!”
God may want to do a lot of things in your life, but I think styling your hair is at the bottom of his list. Faith isn’t the hope that God will give you everything you want. It’s the unshakable belief that God is in charge no matter what happens to you, and it’s based on solid evidence, not wispy hope.
When the author of Hebrews talks about conviction of things not seen, he’s using an academic term. The word for “conviction” could be defined as a proof or a verification.
Remember high school geometry, when you had to prove that the side of this triangle was the same length as the side of that triangle? You said to yourself, “I’m looking at ‘em right here, and they’re the same length! Why do I have to go through 38 steps of logic? Can’t I just take out my ruler and measure ‘em?”
But your teacher wanted you to be able to evaluate something by taking the evidence around it and coming to a logical conclusion, so that even if you never physically saw the triangles, you could still prove it.
That’s the idea here. You can’t see God. You can’t see the things he’s going to do in your life. You can’t see the rewards or costs there might be in following him. But you’ve seen the evidence all around you that God is powerful, and also that he’s good and loving. Faith is being sure of things that cannot be known for sure, if we depend only on our eyes and ears and nose and mouth.
More tomorrow.