What Faith Is Not

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. HEBREWS 11:6

He Holds My Tomorrows opens not with a definition but with a wound. Evans tells of a woman he visited during a long and baffling illness, a faithful believer who could barely leave her house. One day he found her in tears. A friend from her church had telephoned to say that the prayer group had decided to stop praying for her, because if she had enough faith she would have been healed by now. Evans saw at once that something had gone badly wrong in that church’s idea of faith, and he wrote a whole book to put it right.

That opening tells you why the subject matters to him. Faith is not an abstract doctrine for Evans; it is a pastoral emergency. Wrong ideas about faith do real damage. They load the sick with guilt, push churches into foolish decisions and send disappointed believers away from God, convinced that He has failed them. Before he says what faith is, then, he clears the ground by saying what it is not.

Faith is not mere belief

The first confusion is between faith and belief. Evans does not mean that believing true things does not matter; he means that assent in the head is not the faith that saves or pleases God. James makes the point with some bluntness:

Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. JAMES 2:19

Surveys, Evans observes, regularly show that large numbers of people in countries like Canada believe that Jesus rose from the dead. It makes no visible difference to how they live. A belief that leaves the life untouched is not what the New Testament calls faith.

He recalls how, at the Jewish school where he taught in Toronto, the senior rabbi once confided his sorrow that his students believed in God only with their heads. Evans, in He Holds My Tomorrows, turns the rabbi’s lament back on the church. Many who sit in our pews, he suggests, are exactly like those students: they have head knowledge but no living experience of Christ.

Faith is not presumption

The second confusion is between faith and presumption. Evans tells of churches, in more than one of his books and sermons, that decided to build far beyond their means because God was evidently blessing them, and branded anyone who hesitated as lacking faith. When interest rates rose and a local employer closed, the debt crushed them, people left, and many ended by blaming God. They had mistaken, in his view, a religious gamble for faith, quietly assuming that if the gamble failed the fault would be God’s.

The clearest example of the difference, for Evans, is the temptation of Jesus. Satan invites Him to turn stones into bread and to throw Himself from the temple, quoting Scripture to prove that angels will catch Him. Jesus could have done both. But to act on a promise outside the Father’s will would not have been faith; it would have been presumption.

And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. LUKE 4:12

Evans is careful here. He does not despise those who build their lives on the promises of God; he says plainly that there is much good in teaching people to stand on the Word. But he insists that we must read the Word rightly, claim only the promises that apply to us, and meet their conditions where conditions are attached. Some promises are unconditional: nothing can separate the believer from the love of God. Others, such as the peace and joy Jesus promised in the Upper Room, belong to those who keep His word.

Faith is not hope

The third confusion is one Evans returns to again and again: the confusion of faith with hope. Much of what is called faith in popular teaching, he suggests, is really hope. When a Christian says, in effect, that God has said it, he believes it and that settles it, he is expressing confident expectation of what God has promised. That is a precious thing, but it is hope. Evans sums up the distinction, in several of his books, in a simple contrast: hope belongs to the mind and shows itself in confidence; faith belongs to the heart and shows itself in obedience. He finds a hint of this in Paul’s picture of the Christian’s armour:

But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:8

The breastplate guards the heart, and it is faith and love; the helmet guards the head, and it is hope. Chapter six of this book will return to hope, which Evans thinks the church has badly neglected.

Faith is not positive thinking

The fourth confusion is with positive thinking. The business world, Evans notes, has long taught that what you think you are, you become, and much of the church has borrowed the idea. He is sharpest here about teachers who tell the sick to deny their symptoms and the poor to confess prosperity, and about the use of visualisation techniques in prayer for healing. You cannot, he says in effect, think yourself into health or into answered prayer. Such teaching is not faith, however much Scripture is quoted to support it.

Yet even here he is fair. He believes in divine healing, as the Alliance tradition in which he served has always done, and he regards healing as one of the riches won at the cross. He has himself known God to heal. But he insists that there is no formula for obtaining it, that God remains sovereign in giving it, and that no quantity of believing, praying or weeping can oblige Him. The man who cried to Jesus for his son is, for Evans, a far better model of faith than the confident claimer:

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. MARK 9:24

Weighing the distinctions

Evans’s four negatives are pastorally wise, and a great many believers have been freed by them. It is worth adding, gently, that the New Testament does not always keep the words as separate as he does. The Greek noun for faith and the verb for believe share the same root, so that in John’s Gospel to believe on Christ is simply to have faith in Him. Hope and faith are also closely woven together in Hebrews 11:1. Evans himself acknowledges that saving faith begins with believing, and his real target is not believing as such but a believing that never reaches the heart or the will. Read in that light, his distinctions are a help rather than a new vocabulary to be enforced.

The deeper point stands firm. Faith is not a quantity we generate, and its absence is not the explanation for every sorrow. No believer should ever tell a suffering brother or sister to have more faith, as though the matter lay in their hands.

Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. HEBREWS 10:38

The just live by faith; they do not live by feelings, formulas or forced confidence. What that faith is, positively, is the subject of the next chapter.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of a time when you, or someone near you, was told that a problem was caused by lack of faith. How did it affect you? Bring that memory honestly to God.

2. Ask yourself which of the four confusions, belief without life, presumption, hope mistaken for faith, or positive thinking, you are most prone to.

3. Look back at a decision you once called a step of faith. Was it an obedient response to God, or was it presumption? What would you do differently?

4. If you know someone who is ill or struggling, resolve not to comment on the size of their faith. Visit them, pray with them, and simply be present.

5. Read Luke 4:1–13 slowly and notice how Jesus answers each temptation with Scripture rightly understood.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You refused to presume upon Your Father even when You were hungry and alone. Keep me from treating Your promises as tools for my own will.

Forgive me for the times I have confused confidence with faith, or belief in my head with trust in my heart.

Where I have wounded others by suggesting that their suffering was their own lack of faith, forgive me, and make me gentle.

I believe; help thou mine unbelief. Amen.