True Faith

No, not the Anberlin song. No, not the New Order song that Anberlin covered either. I'm talking about Biblical faith.

You know what? Here, let me just post the song for anyone else who's got it stuck in their heads, too. Here it is.  No, seriously. Listen away. It's playing in my head even as I type these words.

Okay then. Now we've all sat through Convo, class, or church where the speaker discusses the importance of having faith, walking by faith and not by sight, and so on. However, it is so much harder in practice than on paper. I'm not making myself out to be some kind of expert on this sort of thing. I've just been having some thoughts here and there and some opportunities to learn and practice it.

One such example was walking up to a friend of mine at David's Place and asking him to help me with a song. I had no idea whether or not he'd even agree to do it or if his idea would be good if he did agree to help. Long story short, he agreed to help and so he walked over with me to the piano and helped me out after all. What he made up ended up being pretty good, too, so I'm going to use it as the outro for my song Whispers (which is nowhere near complete).

Another example was when I spoke to one of my teacher's about a song that I wrote and asked him if he wanted to hear it. I was scared as crap to ask, but he agreed and I showed it to him. That teacher was Scott Bulman. In less than a month, I did eventually show him the song in his office at TRBC.

Heck, most of the times over these last few months when I "took a step of faith" so to speak have just been times when God put me in a normal situation and led me to do something abnormal or even scary.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe the whole concept of having faith is (on the one hand) a lot less of a world changing, sun stand still, once in a lifetime, reserved only for giants of the faith kind of thing (thank God). On the other hand, though, true faith can seem like one of the most terrifying things to do in the world simply because of how it works.

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Hang on. Got that song stuck in my head again.

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Ah, much better.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago, Dan, Jen and I went to the Devil's Marbleyard for our once-every-now-and-then band hike. I, being an agile little weirdo who loves to climb stuff and push his body to the limits, had a blast navigating the boulders (even though I kept leaving Dan and Jen behind, haha). At one point, though, I climbed up a fairly large sized boulder, looked over the edge, and saw that there was a rock a couple yards away and several feet down. You can probably guess where I'm going with this. I jumped. Glad I did because now I have an awesome analogy.

In Hebrews Ch. 2:8-9, the writer says this, "Now in putting everything in subjection to Him (Jesus), He (God) left nothing outside His (Jesus) control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to Him. But we see Him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone." As my good buddy Daryl pointed out to me about a year ago, one of the things I love about this passage is that the author relates with all of us in stating that though Jesus has subjected everything under Himself, we don't always realize or acknowledge the fact that He has.

Obviously, the author doesn't condone this and neither do I, but we're all still guilty of it. May as well fess up. I'm definitely guilty of doing it many times, but I digress. Sometimes faith can feel like I did on the Marbleyard. You're standing on top of a boulder (which, as you look over the edge, seems more and more comfortable every second) and you're looking down. Maybe you can see where you're supposed to land, maybe not. Either way, it's still pretty terrifying, but the voice of Jesus calls out to you, telling you to jump anyway. Unlike the unforgiving 12+ foot deep drop between the place where I jumped and where I landed, we have nothing to fear because whether we land on both feet, tumble and botch the landing, face plant, slip off the landing point, or miss it completely, Jesus promises to catch us.

However, there's more to it than that, not only are we reassured that He'll catch us if we fall, but He also tells us to look at Him the entire time and avoid looking at where we think we'll end up. Obviously, we'd all prefer to know where we're going and when, but I guess that's what makes faith "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). There are so many ways that fear can grip our hearts and paralyze us when we should be following Him, but God provides so much help and so much Scripture for the times when we face it. If I had to put it in a catchy saying of some kind, I'd probably say it like this, "Perfect love casts out fear. True faith looks to the One who casts it out."

Oh, and if you didn't listen to the song before, here's another link to it.

As always, grace and peace be unto you all from God out Father.

Jason Clarke
~Bassist of Generic Music Group