Unfaithful by Faith

The idea that faith can make us unfaithful is really, really scary. Especially when we believe that faith is supposed to be simple - it's just believing in God, right? Just taking Him at His Word? They say that faith is accessible to anyone, that anyone can come to God, but if our faith can make us unfaithful...how are any of us ever supposed to know? How can we ever hope to have real faith? 

Believe it or not, this question has been around from the very beginning. It's the question that the faithful have been asking themselves from the start. And it's the entire reason that the Pharisees came to exist. 

See, the Pharisees were concerned that they might only understand enough of God to get themselves in trouble. That their understanding might be limited somehow so that even when they thought they were trying to do the right thing, they might not be. That's why (well, it's one reason) that they so painstakingly went through every single command that God had ever given them and tried to figure out what exactly it means. That's why they added thousands of interpretations to the Scriptures. They knew that there would be times they would think they were getting it right only to get it wrong, and they wanted to make sure that they had every little detail right so that they could not possibly mess it up. 

What happened to them, of course, is what too often happens to us: they became a people who obeyed God, but didn't really believe in Him any more. That is, they no longer had a faith that could accept a new Word from God; everything they thought they heard, they passed through the fire of their own understanding until they actually created in their lives the very thing they feared - they became the unfaithful faithful. They became the faithless who claimed themselves full of faith. 

They had created this very extensive, yet completely narrow and small, understanding of God. If they thought they heard the voice of God telling them to do something (like Saul heard Him say to slaughter everything), they'd go back to their books and start thumbing through their indexes and try to cross-reference and find where God had talked about that and then, they'd follow what they think God means when He says that instead of just doing what God actually said. 

They couldn't simply trust Him. They couldn't simply believe what He was telling them. They couldn't just love Him and let themselves be loved by Him. 

And this is the problem most of us face, right? We work so hard to become "faithful" persons that what we end up doing is building this gigantic scaffolding around our faith that actually keeps us from believing God. It's keeps us from just trusting Him. It keeps us from loving Him and being loved by Him. It keeps us from actually living by faith and instead, from the most earnest of our hearts, we live faithlessly, all the while claiming to believe. 

That's what happened to Saul. It's what happened to the Pharisees. It's what's happening to us. 

So...now what? 

Worship the Lord

Saul knew exactly what he was doing, and he thought that it was good. 

Saul looked at all of the good and beautiful things, all of the amazing livestock, all of the goods "without defect," and he knew, without a doubt in his heart, that these things would be an "aroma pleasing to the Lord." He knew this was exactly the kind of sacrifice that God had told His people to bring. And Saul knew that you didn't just have a sheep this good and not bring it as an offering before the Lord. 

We know what Saul knew - which is that God had not asked him for these sacrifices. Rather, God had commanded him to destroy everything. But that doesn't mean that we should just write Saul off as disobedient and faithless. It was his faith that led him to do this disobedient thing. 

It is our faith that often does the same. 

Who among us hasn't wrestled with this at one time or another? Or a lot? We all have our understandings of what it means to worship, of what it takes to live faithfully, of what God desires of us. And sometimes, God tells us exactly what to do, but we let our understanding of faith and worship get in the way of just obeying what God tells us. 

Think, for a minute, about being presented an opportunity. Maybe it's a job or a new house or a better car. You feel this sense of peace in your soul that God is absolutely saying "yes" to this opportunity, whatever it is. You can't get out of your head the goodness of moving forward. All signs point to "go," and you know God is telling you to do it. 

But then your faith kicks in, and you realize that you haven't really prayed about it. You haven't studied your Bible. You haven't thought about this decision while you have worship music playing in the background. So instead of moving forward on every single sign God has given you that you should do so, you decide to "make this decision faithfully" first. You take time to pray. You read your Bible for a few days. You turn off the TV and turn up the radio. You surround yourself with everything that you know God desires of you on any given day...

...and you miss out. The opportunity passes. Someone else gets it. It's gone. 

Now, it's not that praying, reading your Bible, or listening to worship music are unfaithful in and of themselves. In fact, we know that they are not. But in this case, all your effort to live "faithfully" has led you to do the unfaithful thing - you didn't simply listen to God. 

This is Saul's "sin!" This is exactly what happened in Saul's life. He got so caught up in what he knew that God desired of him, got so tangled up in the motions and functions of worship and faith, that he didn't act when God told him to act. He didn't do the very simple thing that God very clearly told him to do. 

He acted on his faith, and it made him unfaithful. 

The strange thing is that when we do this in our own lives, everyone around us is screaming at us the same things we scream at Saul. You dolt! God has made it very clear what you're supposed to do; why don't you just do it? And the truth is that if we could see our situation from the outside looking in, we'd be screaming the same things at ourselves. God could not possibly be more clear about this! Why do you have to muck it up?

But living it, trying to do the faithful thing, having all of this baggage about how to live the faithful life and how we're supposed to operate and what God wants "most" from us leaves us tangled up in our own faith to the point that we often don't do the very simple things that God has made most clear. Because we're very busy doing the very structured things that are not circumstance-specific. 

Trying to live by faith, we become unfaithful. And all of a sudden, we look at Saul and just go, "Whoa." It's that easy. 

An Act of Faith

We're pretty quick to say that Saul was a sinful man because he got faith so dramatically wrong. God told him exactly what to do, and he didn't do it. How much more self-centered and faithless can you get? 

But what if Saul's faithlessness was actually an act of...faith?

This is where things get complicated.

Let's remind ourselves what we're talking about: we're talking about a scene in King Saul's (Old Testament) life where God led him into battle and told him to completely destroy everyone and everything, but Saul brought back quite a bit of booty, including livestock, to offer as a sacrifice to God. This is the point where Samuel informs him that because he is a wicked man, God has ripped the kingship right out of his hands and his entire family will die a horrible, powerless death because of it. The dynasty is over. 

If Saul brought back all that good-looking, shiny, amazing stuff from his enemy because he wanted to keep it, like Achan, then I'd say that what we have here is a sin problem. If he was greedy about it, it's definitely a problem with his heart. If Saul thought to himself that God couldn't possibly want to destroy such good and beautiful things and that he must have misheard the instructions, then yes, we're in trouble. 

But that wasn't where Saul's heart was. Saul's heart saw the good and beautiful things and wanted to give them deliberately to God. He wanted to make them sacrifices. He knew God's law so well that he knew what God desired. Saul looked at that livestock and immediately thought in his heart, "Man, this would make an aroma pleasing to the Lord!" And, well, if you can slaughter something at the altar, it certainly seems strange - by faith - to slaughter it in the field instead. 

In fact, that's what God had told His people on the edge of the Promised Land. He told them He was going into the land with them and would make a place for His name and that from now on, everyone would have to come and make their sacrifices there. No longer could they just slaughter things at home or in the field; they had to bring them to God. 

So what Saul is doing is actually an act of worship. Legitimately. It is the way that he understands the rules and regulations of God in general. It is the way his heart is wired to worship the Lord. He has in him this thing that understands what God desires, and the minute he raises his sword to make a slaughter in the field, something stops him. No. A slaughter like this should be done at the altar. 

It's not because Saul so poorly understands God, then, that he commits this "sin," but precisely because he understands God so well. Because his sense of worship is so strong. Because his connection to the ritual of sacrifice is so strong. 

Saul does what God hasn't asked him to do because he believes that it is the very kind of thing that God would ask him to do. 

And now, what seems like a simple story of disobedience is, in fact, a very complicated story of faith. The same kind of faith that a lot of us have. The same kind of faith that we, thousands of years later, are still wrestling with. 

Defining Faith

One of the things that we ought to love about the biblical story is that it's full of characters just like us. Even characters that we'd rather pretend that we don't really relate to very much, men and women who show their sinful side just a little too easily and, well, at least we're a little more quiet about it!

I think that's where our minds go when we start to look at some of these characters - to sin. We create this dichotomy in which these characters are both righteous and sinners, and then we say that we, too, are both righteous and sinners. We get some things right; we get some things wrong. We follow our own hearts more often than we'd like to admit, and it gets us messed up. 

Then, we talk about redemption and about God's grace and about how beautiful and wonderful it is that God includes men and women like these - like us - in His story anyway, and we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we, too, are written into His narrative. He's doing something with us, just like He did something with all of these others. 

But I think we're missing something when we try to make things so simple. I think we're missing what these very human characters can really teach us about what it means to have faith. 

When we talk about these characters and their faith, what we really talk about is that they had it. That's it. "But David, the murderer, the adulterer, believed in God, so God used him mightily!" "But Daniel, the exile, believed in God, and God rewarded him for that!" "But Abraham believed in God, and it is credited to him as righteousness." (That last one is actually in the Bible.) 

So we get this picture of imperfect persons who just have to believe in God and God graciously redeems them for it. Which is great. That is the big idea of Christianity. But it doesn't feel like much of anything when we are struggling to believe. When we are faced with the weight of our own sin and trying to figure out how we get to glorious from here. When we don't understand what faith really looks like in the moments when we are most desperate to have some. 

The truth is that these characters can teach us about what real faith looks like, but only if we're willing to look deeper than our first instinct and deeper than our shallow understandings and really look at what's going on. 

Take a scene from Saul's life. Actually, we could take many scenes from Saul's life, but let's start with this one: 

Saul engages in a battle that the Lord has sent him into. This, we say, is his faith in action. God told him to go and he goes. Yay, Saul! 

But God tells Saul to destroy everything, leaving nothing behind and taking nothing home. Yet Saul decides to bring back quite a bounty of things with one intention: he's going to offer them to God as a sacrifice. Then Samuel, the priest, shows up and condemns him for not following God's command, and we condemn him, too. Boo, Saul! You blew it, dude! 

Then we create this narrative of faith that says, "Just do whatever God asks you to do." And we sit here saying all kinds of things to ourselves like, "It's not that hard, bro." "God told you exactly what to do, and you couldn't even do it." "You deserve every bit of that smiting for not being able to do the most basic, simple thing." "Excuse me, did God stutter?" 

And just like that, we've determined what faith is. And we've determined that Saul apparently didn't have very much of it. And then, we conclude that God condemned him precisely for this reason - because his faith was weak. Because he couldn't live by the faith that he claimed to have. 

What if that's not true? What if none of that is true? What if there's more going on here, more that we can relate to as human beings trying to figure out faith? 

I think there is. Let's talk about it this week. 

Pray with Me

If you're part of a Christian community, you probably have a whole list of persons you are praying for right now. But let me ask you something: how many of those persons are you praying with? 

It's just a simple word, but the subtle difference is actually huge. 

I am blessed to have a great number of persons in my life who pray for me. Especially over the past almost-17 months as I have been dealing with an extremely difficult battle with Covid and its after-effects, I am constantly reminded by others that they are praying for me. I can reach out at any time and know that my tribe will step up and cover me in prayer. I can send a text and the word will go out and a group of persons who love me will spend time on their knees with our Father for me. And that is beautiful and amazing and incredible. And very much appreciated. 

When I run into these persons in public, they'll ask me - earnestly, honestly - how I'm doing. They'll remind me that they're praying for me. They'll ask if I need anything. They will send text messages and direct messages and Facebook notes; I get cards in the mail on the days that somehow, I most need them, and I know that this group of persons is holding me in their prayer. 

This encourages me. It lifts me up. It keeps me going through some really hard times. It helps me to feel my belovedness even while everything around it is falling apart. It reminds me in the times that I just can't pray any more, when I don't have the strength or the words or the heart, that God is still hearing my story because someone else is carrying it to Him for me. Having a group of persons praying for you is nothing short of beautiful. 

And yet, there are some times when I still want someone to pray with me, too. Actually, I went forward during our invitation time this past Sunday and said this very thing to one of my elders. "Hey, brother. I know you have been praying for me, but will you pray with me?" 

He, of course, was more than happy to do so. 

There's something about us coming together in prayer. About me being there with you when you're praying for me - and about you being here with me. It is part of having this connection where I'm a real human being and not just a name on a prayer list. And it's more than that. 

Jesus Himself said that where two or more are gathered in His name, there He will be. Praying together, then, allows us both to feel the presence of Christ in a way that we just don't when we are on our own. Something about being gathered, being two or more, changes the whole dynamic of prayer and of praying for one another and of being the one who is prayed for. It's so much more than what most of us get when we're just "on the list." 

And there's something tremendously encouraging and overwhelming in all the best ways to actually hear someone loving you like that. To hear maybe even a whole group of someones loving you like that. To listen to someone else love you so much that they carry your name to Jesus. That they stand on the side of the road and cry out for Him so that He will turn and see you, not them. To listen to them believe out loud for God's goodness in your life. 

That's the gift we give to one another when we hear each other pray. It's a gift that...a whole lot more of us could use. 

It changes the way that we pray, too. Praying with someone forms a deeper connection with them for us. It bonds us more deeply to their struggle. It ties us together in a way that simply praying for them never can. As a chaplain who has prayed with others for a living, I can tell you - it changes things every time. It changes me every time. 

So if you're praying for someone right now, thank you. Continue to do so. But if you ever have the chance to pray with that someone, take that, too. It will bless both of you.