When you’ve lost your faith and hope

You can find a poll for just about everything today.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a debate about “real” or “fake” news.  It’s about the number of polls we find.

Some of those polls point out that we have a loss of “faith.”  It’s not exactly what you think it might be (though there are polls about views on being spiritual but not religious).  In these “faith’ polls, people are indicating that they are losing faith in leaders, role models, the media, institutions, the government, the financial system and so much more.

But, the truth is that what these polls are saying is nothing new.  It’s been going on for years, decades, even centuries.

People lose faith because they are let down by all of the “pillars” of our society.  Leaders and leadership changes.  Institutions change.  Finances go up and down.  Employment rises and falls.  And, we lose faith in things that we were never worthy of true “faith” in the first place.

What should we place our faith in?  Of course, from a Christian worldview, we would say that our faith is firmly rooted in God, in Jesus, in the Holy Spirit.

But, what if we lose faith in God?  What then?

“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things that we can’t see.”

Losing your faith in God can come because life gives you lemons and you just can’t find a way to turn it into lemonade.  Your situation changes dramatically and you ask, “Where’s God in this?” There’s a bad health report, a job ends unexpectedly, you stumble and fall, a relationship ends, the metaphorical rope you are hanging onto starts to unravel.

And, maybe, that’s where the cracks in the foundation of our faith start to form.  You ask, maybe to yourself, does God even care?  Or it could simply be, if God is good, then why would he let this happen?

We can’t find the answers in institutions of faith or, then again, we feel as if they have let us down as well?

All of our assumptions about God come into question.  It could be our assumptions that God blesses people who have faith.  God shows his favor on those He loves.  Maybe it’s the idea that God’s supposed to take us out of this mess and clean up all of our problems. 

And, we still find ourselves in the middle of the storms of life, praying desperate prayers and waiting for God to ride over the hill on a big white horse and save us.

Then, that’s where, with time and patience that we really start to experience God and begin to understand faith.

In Hebrews 11:1, we read that, “Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things that we can’t see.”

Faith in terms of the Bible is the idea of being convicted to the point that we have “hope” in God.  Hope can be described as a confident expectation that God will do what he says he will do.  The issue, though, is that faith relies on God’s calendar and not on our personal timelines.  

Maybe the side effect of a tough season in life is getting the chance to have everything around us wiped away to the point that we must fall back to God.  In that point, we realize that maybe the point of faith is finding a way, despite our circumstances and surroundings, to hope that God is real, that he is in control and that he is fighting on our behalf.

That faith and hope in God becomes our “evidence” of God’s presence even when we can’t see.

It almost seems like a circle.  Hope in God leads to faith which leads to belief in God and the things that can be seen and that leads to having more hope in God.

If we let it, this world can be filled with so many letdowns. If we let it, this world will work to rob us of all of our faith in everything — including God.  Yes, institutions and people let us down.  Yes, we lose hope because we find out that imperfect earthly people and instutitions are truly imperfect.

But, we can still hold on to hope. Hope is that confident expectation that God will do what he says he will do.  And while it hurts at the moment, and it’s emotional, and we don’t really know what to do next, God is working in all parts of the scene to give us more evidence to have faith.

True, we might not be able to, because of the blinders of our own situation, to see God at work.  However, that doesn’t mean that God isn’t very much on the job and working overtime.

So, wherever you are in this season of life, hold on to faith in God, be convicted of hope in God and know that God will do the things God says he will do.  Let that be your evidence to have more faith and that will lead you to more hope.

And, don’t lose your faith.