20/20 Faith » Ken Boa

7Jul10 20/20 Faith

This is another installment in a series that has been adapted from my 11-part CD teaching series on A. W. Tozer’s spiritual classic, The Pursuit of God.

The person who reads the Bible with an open mind soon discovers that one of its prominent themes is that of faith. It seems that every page contains an encouragement to use our faith in seeing the unseen God. In Psalm 34:5 we read, “They looked up to him and were enlightened. And their faces were not ashamed.” Or in Psalm 123: 1-2 we read, “To you I lift up my eyes. O you who are enthroned in the heavens. Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress; so our eyes look to the Lord our God for He is gracious to us.” Or in Hebrews 12:2, the verse Tozer selects for this chapter, “. . . looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”

As Tozer says, “Faith will get me anything, take me anywhere in the kingdom of God, but without faith there can be no approach to God, no forgiveness, no deliverance, no salvation, no communion, no spiritual life at all.” Faith is the indispensable “must” in the pursuit of God and everything that pleases God is always related to it. But the “must” has little to do with a precise definition of faith. In fact, in Scripture there is little effort made to define the nature of faith outside of a brief statement in Hebrews 11: 1: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” As Tozer notes, this is more a functional definition of faith than it is a theological definition: “. . . it is a statement of what faith is in operation, not what it is in essence.” So, we understand that faith operates in the “not yet” and in the “not visible.” As the writer of Hebrews goes on to say in verse 3, “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.”