Stepping Out into the Void

2 Corinthians 5: 6, 7

Hebrews 11: 1, 2

 

 

           The message starts with a 2 minute film clip from the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The clip is entitled Step of Faith and can be accessed on Youtube.

 

 

          In the movie The Last Crusade, Indiana Jones’ father is dying from a bullet wound. A few hundred feet away lie a chalice and holy water that can heal him. In between lie three challenges, one of which is a chasm far too wide for any man to leap. He looks down and is gripped with fear, for he cannot even see the bottom. Yet he is faced with the certain death of his father if he does not act.

            He reads hurriedly from the old notebook that guides them on their journey. The instructions say this: “Only in the leap from the lion’s head will he prove his worth.” He looks up and sees the image of a lion’s head in the stone wall.  He stands at the edge of the cliff. “It’s impossible,” he says. “Nobody can jump this.”  His friends call out for him to hurry. He looks out across the chasm and sighs. “It’s a leap of faith,” he says.  Several hundred feet away, his father mutters in a voice too soft for the ear to hear, but perhaps just right for the heart to register: “You’ve got to believe, boy. You’ve got to believe.”

          Indiana Jones, the great archeologist and adventurer, takes a deep breath, shivers all over…and steps out into the void. He can see nothing to step on, and yet he steps anyway. In doing so, he must not only believe; he must also accept the fact that he may be taking a step that will cost him his life. Yet he steps out.  Jones steps onto a stone bridge invisible from his angle of perception. It is there, but he cannot see it. You know the rest of the story.  His faith is rewarded.

            Today’s message is a collection of challenges for the New Year. Normally, I like to use one passage from which to build a platform for the message, but today, I am deviating from that method. Please bear in mind that each passage quoted forms part of a larger theme and that I am taking these lines out of their context to form another theme. You may find it instructive on other grounds to go back and examine the passages from which these lines originate.

          In the film clip we saw, Jones reads from an old notebook to get clues for his next steps. He might have been reading about the apostle Paul talking to the Corinthian church. Paul exhorts his friends in the faith. He says that we…believers, are always of good courage. .. “For we walk by faith, not by sight.”  In the context of the passage, Paul is telling the church that the fact that Jesus is not present in body does not make him absent. Rather, the presence of Jesus is changed and present in us through the Holy Spirit. We are still able, and should be willing, to walk in faith. It is not a faith that encourages blindness, but it is a faith that is bigger than just what we see. It is a faith that finds us responding with not only our eyes, but our hearts. We cannot hope to see and hear God if we confine ourselves to revelation which takes place only with the naked eye.

          There are many proofs in this world of the presence of God, but we must sometimes initiate our correspondence with these proofs with our hearts. We walk by faith, not by sight, says Paul. It is not sight that prompted Peter to step out into a raging sea to walk toward Jesus. Sight would have only kept Peter clinging to the boat. Peter stepped out of that boat because he had faith. His eyes were focused on his Lord rather than looking down at his fears.

          In the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, the writer selects some of the greats in the history of God’s people and uses their stories to tell how they were motivated by faith, how they pressed on despite the circumstances or odds. The chapter begins with these famous words: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” [KJV]. The writer is telling us that faith is not just a virtue; it is a living thing, a way of life.  

          Faith is the substance. It is no less material because it is not tangible. If you owe money, you are in debt. Is a debt material? No. Is it real? You better believe it. If you invent something and have it patented, you are patenting a thing or a process. Is a patent material? No. There is a piece of paper that evidences its existence, but it is not a material thing. Is it real? Sure, it is. Even if you don’t quite know exactly how to explain it, you still know it’s real. The law calls things such as these intangible property. In the same sense, faith is a substance, not material, but just as real as anything else.

          The writer of Hebrews goes on to say that faith is the evidence of things not seen. At first, that sounds so heavy, so intellectual. But think about it. Can we see air? Can we see wind? We see only the evidence of these things, but that makes their existence no less real. If we can breathe unseen air and see the evidence of the wind as it cools us and knocks the caps from our heads, can we not accept the fact that faith can indeed be the evidence of things not seen? When someone is diagnosed with an incurable disease and a church body goes to its spiritual knees for that person, what shall we call it when that person is healed through no apparent help from medicine? Shall we not call it the evidence of faith?

          Faith steps out into the void where no one else will go, no one else can explain. Faith moves that which cannot move, softens that which cannot be softened, bridges that which cannot be bridged. In the movie clip we saw, Indiana Jones stepped out into the void. He stepped out on faith and found that a bridge existed the whole time. He just had to trust. Once he took that incredible first step, his faith was rewarded. I’m reminded of something St. Augustine once said, that “Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.”

          We are embarking on a new year. 2015. When I was young, I assumed that by this time, everyone would go to work in his own personal spaceship. Many wonderful things have happened in the last century, the last year. And yet, most of the world is still asking the same questions it always has. What am I here for? What is the meaning of it all?

          There is a reason for you to be here. There is a meaning to it all. It’s not a secret. It’s all written down in a book not dissimilar from that guidebook that Indiana Jones was using in the movie. We call it the Bible and it truly is our map. It can show us the evidence of faith. It can tell us about the substance of things hoped for and how they were and will be delivered.  D. L. Moody put it this way: “I prayed for faith, and thought that someday faith would come deliver me and strike me like lightning. But faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, ‘Now faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.’ I had closed my Bible, and prayed for faith. I now opened my Bible, and began to study, and faith has been growing ever since.”

      In his book Waiting, Ben Patterson tells a story about faith and sums it up with this thought: “To save us, God often tells us to do things that are the opposite of our natural inclination. Is God loving and faithful? Can we trust him? He is. We can.” The thing is, that chasm we face is not really a void at all. It never was. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t make it any less real. This year, like never before in your life, why not open that Bible and study? Why not grow some more faith? Why not just step out into the void? You won’t be sorry. The bridge is there even though you can’t see it yet.