The Faith House
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
(Hebrews 11:1 NKJV).
Jesus is the foundation of our faith
Faith is how we know that God exists. As we seek to build our life around this thing we call faith, we have to start with the foundation of Jesus Christ. Jesus said that the foolish man built his house upon the sand, but the wise man built his house upon the rock. Jesus is the rock of our salvation and it’s upon Him that we build our life. Before you pour a foundation to build a house, you level the ground and put forms in so the concrete doesn’t crack. We can’t just pour Jesus over the dirt of our life, we have to let Jesus reformat our life as He becomes the foundation for our faith house. We build our Faith House upon Jesus Christ as the rock of our foundation, and that leads us to evidence as to the first wall of our Faith House. This “evidence of things not seen,” is the fact that the gospel is true and that the things that the Bible says happened actually happened.
Our faith is built upon evidence
Our faith is built upon evidence. The first wall of evidence is the evidence of the gospel. There is overwhelming evidence that what the Bible says is true. What we believe as Christians is based on evidence much the same as a mathematician believes 1 + 1 is 2. Once we have evidence that something is true, we can believe it - have faith. But we can’t build our Faith House with only one wall. We need two walls of evidence. The second wall of evidence is the evidence of a changed life. This is where the book of James comes in, James says that faith without works is dead. So if we don’t have the second wall of evidence of a changed life, then our faith is dead and cannot stand. Our Faith House stands firmly on two walls of evidence. It has to have the wall of the evidence of the gospel and the wall of the evidence of a changed life. Once we have these two walls of evidence, then our Faith House can stand firm and complete.
Faith is the connection between the evidence in the Faith House
Our Fatih House is built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ, and as we look at the evidence about Jesus, it gives us an assurance and confidence that leads to our faith. But, our faith house doesn’t end there; our faith isn’t stagnant; our faith then produces a changed life - the second wall of evidence. Corinthians tells us that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, so this simple Faith House structure of our Christian life is the dwelling place of God. When we build our house of faith, we are expanding the temple of God. Unfortunately, we can’t simply expand the temple of the Holy Spirit by eating cake and cookies. We grow our Faith House by expanding the foundation of Christ in our lives, building upon the walls of evidence, and stretching our faith. Faith isn’t believing something that doesn’t have evidence; faith is connecting evidence to believe and belief to change. Our Faith House isn’t composed of individual building blocks; it is a complete structure that is welded together from the individual parts. You cannot have faith without evidence - that is foolishness to believe something that isn’t true. You can’t have faith without works - even the thief on the cross had to do the “work” of confessing Jesus as Lord. And you can’t have any of this house without the foundation of Jesus Christ.
Christian faith isn’t built on a fantasy, like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. We have faith in the Bible because it is a historically documented fact that the events in the Bible happened the way the Bible says it did.