Faith & Fracture Points
Pastor Marq Toombs • March 14, 2021
Sermon Overview
HABAKKUK 2:1–4
The righteous shall live by faith. That phrase shows up four times in the Bible and it first was spoken to Habakkuk as he looked around and saw his world falling apart. What did this mean for Habakkuk and his moment of distress and what does it mean for us in ours?
Sermon Transcript
Grace and peace be with you from the Lord Jesus Christ.
It is wonderful to be with you today.
As you can tell, we have experienced a variety of setbacks today. Even as we tried to spring forward, we have stumbled out of the gates. I told Zach that this is one of those days where I thought I would just obey the Apostle Paul's instruction to Timothy, devote myself to the public reading of Scripture, not preach a sermon, and go straight to the Lord's table. But I can tell by the eager looks in your eyes that you really want to hear this sermon. And so I will indulge you once again and give you what you asked for.
We're beginning a new series today on faith. In fact we're calling it By Faith, and it's based on the passage we just read. “The righteous shall live by His faith.” And so we want you to know that whether you are a believer, a doubter, a skeptic, or an explorer, this series is for you. And here's why.
It's because everyone lives by faith. No one is not a believer. No one lives apart from faith in someone or in something. The trouble we have is that not everyone or everything we believe is stable or secure.
So get this fixed in your heart and mind that your faith is only as strong as the person or thing which you rest upon. It doesn't matter how much you believe. It doesn't matter how much you think something's going to happen. If it's not strong enough to hold you up. If it's not strong enough to lean upon - when you lean upon it - it will collapse. So your faith is only as strong as the person or thing you are resting on.
Well, today I want us to go to the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament and listen to a story about one man's faith struggle. And keep in mind that this man is not just any old man. He is not just some guy on the street. He is a prophet of God. He is a minister of God's word, what we would call an ordinary pastor.
His name was Habakkuk, Habakkuk. And his name means embrace. And when you hear that, you might think, "Oh, how warm and fuzzy." But no, his name does not mean comforting hug, but it means something more like combative wrestler. He was a struggler, he grappled with God. He was a faith struggler, like you and like me. And so this idea of embracing was not, I'm just gonna cozy up to God. No, it was more of we're gonna lock horns and we're gonna grapple together.
The story goes that Habakkuk was crying out to God and complaining about all sorts of things. I like to imagine that that happened on a Monday morning after a Lord's Day service. That's when he fell into his brooding spirit. Manic depressive Monday. What am I doing as a pastor? What are we doing as a people?
And he complains to God and tells God all of these things about the church that he's serving. Look at how the law is paralyzed! Look at how people disobey you! Look how they're breaking your covenant! Look at all the fighting and combat and division. I can't take it anymore.
And on top of all of that, he says to the Lord, "You're just not doing enough to fix this."
And so the Lord comes back to him and answers his prayer and says, "Well, I have plans to take care of it, but I don't think you're gonna like what they are." And so the Lord tells Habakkuk his plans - and his plans involve sending a godless, evil, wicked people to come and bring judgment on Habakkuk's community. It's gonna cause a lot of pain and heartache. People are going to die, they're gonna be taken off into captivity. It's going to be a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day. And Habakkuk says in response to all of that, "You know, this doesn't sound like you, it doesn't sound like something you would do. I'm not sure that I like this plan." And so he began to grapple with God and wrestle with him over this.
And God comes back to him and says, "Okay, one more thing: I'm gonna do something that even if I told you what I was going to do, you wouldn't believe it. It would so blow your mind and blow your expectations that you couldn't get your heart and mind around it." And the Lord doesn't actually tell Habakkuk what it is, he just simply says, "You gotta wait for it. And even if you have to wait for a long time, and you think it's never ever going to happen, you gotta keep waiting because He will surely come and He will not delay." Very confusing to Habakkuk.
But what all of this does is it pushes the prophet to the edge of a faith crisis. And this is why. It's because he got to see a little bit behind the curtain and catch a glimpse from God's point of view of the way things really and truly are.
What this does is it blows up his idealism, but it begins to nudge him towards a kind of cynicism.
Some of us have been there and done that. And you know what I mean before I even say it out loud. And before I even give you a few examples, you're already starting to load them up in your heart and mind. You know what I'm talking about, don't you?
You've cried out to God over the condition of the world, but nothing seems to change. The rich still crush the poor. Political corruption still wreaks havoc on the nation. Natural disasters ruin communities. Things fall apart.
You cried out to God to change your heart to help you with your anger, to help you break your porn addiction, to help you turn the bottle down instead of turning it up again. But help just didn't come. At least not yet. And you began to think that maybe prayer just doesn't work for you.
You cried out to God over the state of your marriage. Why has our love grown cold? You cry out to God over your children? Why do they drift away? Why are they indifferent? What has happened? Where did I go wrong? You cried out to God for better opportunities, a fair shake, a second chance. But here you are stuck, you're still trapped.
You feel frozen in time. And for what? You cried out to God over the condition of your church or the needs of your ministry only to watch it turn to dust and blow away. Where was God?
You cried out to God to spare your child or to heal your wife. But he must not have heard you. Or maybe he misunderstood your prayer because they died anyway. And the grief weighs heavily upon your heart.
These are just some of the many fracture points that can splinter and shatter your faith.
So like Habakkuk some of us feel caught on the horns of a dilemma. We're stuck between a rock and a hard place, and that rock and hard place shapes out like faith and doubt or doubt and unbelief, and we're caught in between these worlds. Cynicism begins to creep in. And perhaps like CS Lewis, some of us wonder if God is more like a cosmic sadist than he is like a compassionate Savior.
As Andrew Byers puts it in his book "Faith Without Illusions" the most cynical people in our society toward Christianity and the church are not just polemical atheists and secular academics. They are also Christians, pastors, seminary students, godly homemakers, and Bible study and business leaders. Within the ranks of the church there seems to be a growing number who are disenchanted with Christianity and disgruntled with their faith communities. For many young believers, including evangelicals, cynicism is becoming characteristic of a hip new way to be "spiritual" - but not religious.
All of that to say, faith is messy. Faith is a struggle and the struggle is real. And I want all of you to know that you are not alone in that struggle. I want you all to know that no matter how thick or thin your faith is, no matter how weak or strong your faith might be, no matter how many doubts or fears rob your asleep, crush your peace. You are not alone. You are welcome here among the rest of us who stand at the crossroads and grapple with faith and grapple with God in the dark, and struggle to live by faith.
So what I'm saying is this, whether you're young or old, hear me out. We want you to ask all the questions. No matter how hard, no matter how soft, no matter how weird, no matter how ordinary. We want you to know that you have permission to express your doubts, your fears, your worries. Like Planet Fitness, this is a kind of judgment free zone, a safe place for you to work out the kinks and the wrinkles of your faith with others. And you just might be surprised to learn that others think the same thoughts and feel the same feels as you do, including your pastors. Like Habakkuk we embrace God, and we wrestle with God, and we ask the hard questions and walk away with answers that don't always make sense. Answers that don't always satisfy. Answers that leave us wanting for more.
As one pastor in our denomination put it this week, baring his soul in a blog post just a few days ago. He said what many pastors I know could have said, what many Christians I know could have said, when he wrote, "As it turns out, I am less whole than the optics of my life suggest. I have good health, a wonderful wife, two beautiful daughters, a congregation that loves us, some excellent friends and more opportunity than I ever dreamed possible. But behind the curtain of this wonderful looking life of mine, there also exists a small, sometimes scared, self-doubting man whose story includes the loss of my mother to a demoralizing, dehumanizing disease, ministerial trauma, and many other hard realities. I am a mess, a busted up sinner who is dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly needs mending."
I don't know how many of you can relate to that, but I know that I can. It's just a reminder that faith is a struggle, and the struggle is real. And you are not alone in this struggle.
In the cold, hard face of life's biggest questions and baddest experiences, some people have been tempted to let go of the faith, to abandon walking with God, to turn aside, to stop believing that God exists or just to stop trusting Him. In his painful yet beautiful book "Enduring Divine Absence," Dr. Joseph Minich describes people who lost their faith because it was like a wind they chased but could never catch. It just got away from them. Or they just couldn't bring themselves to believe or they just couldn't get themselves into the place where they felt comfortable with the faith. Some of them blame their loss of faith on God's silence. Others blame their loss of faith on God's absence, and others blame it on his indifference. But the common denominator running through this is that people who have lost their faith in God continue to blame God for their experience - just as Habakkuk did. "You're just not doing enough, you're sitting idly by, you're not engaged, where are you?"
And yet Habakkuk the Prophet wrestled with God at the crossroads of faith and doubt.
Not because of God's silence. After all the Lord answered me, "Write the vision, make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it."
And not because of God's absence, "for the vision awaits its appointed time it hastens to the end, it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it, He will surely come, He will not delay."
And not because of God's indifference, for God distinguishes between people when He says, "Behold, his soul is puffed up, it is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by His faith."
Habakkuk wrestled with God precisely because God was not silent, absent, or indifferent. Rather, God was present with him, and in Him Habakkuk lived and moved and had his being. And so what you find in this story of the prophet and God is that Habakkuk took God very seriously. We also see God taking Habakkuk very seriously. And that is why they're able to embrace each other and engage in combat and wrestle together and to hug it out.
In his novel "In The Beauty Of The Lilies," John Updike tells the gut-wrenching story of the Presbyterian minister Clarence Wilmot. And here's how the story goes in the novel, "Reverend Wilmot felt the last particles of his faith leave him, the sensation was distinct of visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. Oblivion became his singular companion. And yet without biblical blessing, the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting."
Unlike Habakkuk, Reverend Wilmot discovered that losing your faith and finding faithlessness is not a gain, it is a totally devastating loss in every way - spiritually, emotionally, and relationally. Believe me when I say you don't want to fall into the emptiness and nothingness of that cold, dark abyss, where there is nothing but weeping eyes and gritting teeth.
There are many people in the world and in the church, perhaps there are some among us today, or in your family, that drift towards that abyss for various reasons. Not very good reasons, but reasons that seem good enough to people who do that. Reasons like boredom, curiosity, despair, empathy for others. Many people are disappointed with God, or dissatisfied with him, disillusioned by him, and perhaps that describes even some you. Have you ever been there, felt that?
Disappointed because life doesn't always play out the way you hoped?
Dissatisfied because the things of God don't quite excite the way they used to? Other things are more exciting.
Disillusioned because you look around and you see all of the inconsistencies and the hypocrisy of the church - while conveniently overlooking your own.
People believe they know better than God and can do better than him. But Habakkuk was not one of them. He was humble. He was poor in spirit and meek. And he lived by faith. Undoubtedly, like you and me he felt the initial jolt of doubt and despair when he saw what was happening around him and what God intended to do about it. But notice that he never ever let go of God, he continued to wrestle him, to draw close to him, to engage him. He believed and yet God helped him in his unbelief. Why? Because the righteous shall live by His faith.
And I wanna unpack that phrase, His faith, for just a moment because it might lead you in the wrong direction. You might think, well, the righteous shall live by his faith, meaning the faith that he generates from within himself, or the faith that he cultivates for himself. But that is not what is in view here. The faith that is in view here is not the righteous shall live by his [own] faith. But the righteous shall live by His faith, by the faithfulness of God. Faith is a gift. Faithfulness is a fruit of the Spirit. And we learn from Paul that God is faithful, even if we are faithless, for he cannot deny Himself.
And so when we asked, What does Habakkuk 2:4 mean? It means that we live by faith, we live by the faithfulness of God, we live by faith in the faithfulness of God.
And God is faithful. He makes promises that he intends to keep, and he can only keep them by his power. So God told Habakkuk the prophet that he's going to act, and he's gonna put the world right. Sooner or later, he's gonna fix things and make it right. And he's gonna do it in a way that Habakkuk would never imagine, couldn't get his heart and mind around.
And so what's happening is the question shifts away from, "Why is all of this happening?" to "Who will make things right?" And as we walk by faith, it helps to learn to ask this question "Who?" more than asking "Why?" When you ask Who? you begin to center on the personal and relational God, rather than on the propositional informational doctrines or teachings about God. In other words, you're exchanging a person for ideas.
The Prophet has to shift gears, and he has to do the same thing that we have to do every day. And that is this: He has to take the promises of God in one hand, then he has to take all the problems of life in the other hand, and he has to hold them in tension. He has to weigh them out. And sometimes the problems way more than the promises, and sometimes the promises way more than the problems, but he's looking for some kind of resolution, some way to fix this or to work out the wrinkles. How is this going to play out? And then what does he discover? It’s not going to happen through his own power, through his own efforts, it's going to happen through the power of God. And this is what God has revealed to him.
And so unlike that Presbyterian minister who feels the last particles of his faith leave him. Habakkuk the Prophet, feels the life-giving presence of God, he hears the promises of God, and then the power of God's faithfulness lifts him up out of the problems of his life. And so that at the end of the book of Habakkuk, the Prophet can draw near to God and sing what we have already confessed in our service today.
"Oh, Lord, I have heard the report of you and your work.
Oh, Lord, do I fear."
But then he says something interesting, and I'm summarizing a long section when he says,
But even if death and destruction come to our community,
even if all hell breaks loose, and my world falls apart,
"yet will I rejoice in the Lord,
I will take joy in the God of my salvation!" Why?
"Because the Lord God is my strength."
Now we have the power that resolves the tension between the promises of God and the problems of our life. And this is precisely how the faithful enter into these things. The righteous shall live by faith. It does not mean that they will live with absolute certainty. Never a doubt, never a worry, and never a fear. No! "the righteous shall live by faith" means that they will live by steadfast loyalty to the Lord who lives in steadfast loyalty to them.
Faith is allegiance to God that grows in confidence towards God, and ultimately ends in obedience to God. But it's a growth, it's a process. And it might take a while to get from allegiance to obedience, but you gotta start somewhere.
I know some of you are standing at the crossroads between faith and doubt, even now. And it's likely that even some of you or people you love feel like the faith has already left you, that you can't quite catch it or hang onto it. That you can't let yourself go there.
You're trying to decide whether you should throw away your confidence or tighten your grip on Christ.
You can shrink back in shame or you can step forward in hope, you can waver in doubt or you can walk by faith.
You're struggling with God, you're struggling with yourself, you're struggling with your faith, you're struggling with your life, you're struggling, you're struggling, you're struggling.
Welcome to the club.
Before you decide anything, let me urge you with all your heart to take a look at Jesus again for the first time. For it is in Jesus that we see the amazing thing that God planned to do that he couldn't even bring himself to tell Habakkuk the Prophet, who wouldn't have believed that if he had been told.
It's in Jesus that we see the true and better righteous man who lived by faith in God's faithfulness.
So look to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who endured the cross and despised it's shame for the joy that was set before him, and then sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Look to Jesus who experienced the miseries of life just as you do so that you will not grow weary or faint hearted.
Look to Jesus and lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees and make straight paths for your feet. So that what is lame may not be broken, but rather healed.
Look to Jesus, the one who fulfills God's promises in God's power to overcome sin and death. And to put the world to right.
Sooner or later we know that all who come to live by faith in Jesus discover that even the smallest faith is big enough to save. And even the biggest faith is still small enough to struggle.
But our faith struggles are not problems to be solved with simple formulas or spiritualized platitudes. They are not sicknesses to be treated with medicine. They are weird, complex, signs of life that God wants us to work out and wrestle with, in community with other strugglers.
And so I say it again friends, you don't have to go it alone. Your faith might be weak or strong, it might be thriving or fading, it might be absent or present or somewhere in between. So whether you are a believer, a doubter, a skeptic, or an explorer, this series is for you. This sanctuary is for you. These strugglers sitting around you are for you. And above all, the Savior is for you.
Calvin says something we must always remember and never forget. And that is that "faith is more a matter of the heart than of the head. It's more a matter of affections than intellect."
And believe it or not, it's more about how you feel than what you know.
And that's good news indeed.
Let us pray together.
