Faith in God

Welcome to the brand-new blog of Wascana Fellowship. 

We’re just learning this technology, so please bear with us as we learn and grow into being a blogging faith community.

We are a small-group “church” in Regina, Saskatchewan.  We believe that the whole Christian life is a conversation with God which includes living and communicating with fellow human beings.  For this reason we have deliberately made our “sermon time” a conversation in which we talk about our Lord Jesus Christ and his grace for us over a cup of tea or coffee or juice.

This week’s conversation was sparked by our friend Rick Konvitsko‘s (alias “qpen”) comments to me earlier in the week about faith. He suggested that faith is really important to God because it is part of God’s own makeup. God is supremely confident in his ability to make happen whatever he wants to happen. He would like us to share that confidence in his will and ability to make things work out for us in the long run.  Note that we’re talking about eternity as the “long run”  here. 

Each of the people mentioned in Chapter 11 of the Letter to the Hebrews in the Bible seems to have understood this.  In a sense, that understanding was all the motivation each of them needed to do the heroic things that are mentioned about them.  So far as Rick is concerned, faith is really God’s own optimism about the future.  Anybody who wants to get along with God needs to partake of that optimism or they can’t possibly be on the same wavelength.

I wondered about that until I remembered that Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians talks about how many things that we take for granted in the present, such as prophecies or various gifts of the Holy Spirit, will no longer be necessary when the things they announce become history or reality.  Yet, even in that perfect future three things will remain: faith, hope and love.

It’s easy to understand why we might need love forever even in a perfect world.  But why would you still need faith and hope – unless God keeps planning even bigger and better things?