Real People of Faith: Conclusion

Hello,
welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We are finishing up a series that we’ve been doing called The Real People of Faith.
It’s taken us all throughout the Old Testament and New Testament.
And we thought at first that we were going to finish this conversation,
looking at some of the lesser written about characters of the New Testament.
And as we looked at that,
we realized pretty quickly,
you know, it was going to be impossible
to really say much about those individuals without making up backstories.
And that was a thing that from the beginning,
we tried to look at these characters from the
perspective of what it looked like for them to be real people,
but to try to not add too
much outside of scripture kinds of things.
So as we thought about it,
we thought, you know,
maybe it’s good to look backward to
see this whole range of people that we’ve encountered thus far and see what kinds of
themes and different arcs in their own story that may be both comparisons and contrast
between them.
So we sit here looking backward at some of these real people of faith we’ve studied.
Yeah, as we look to the New Testament for minor characters,
we realize that there is
such little backstory even on the major characters that really all we could do is highlight some
of the characters like Zacchaeus or Titus or Timothy,
but we couldn’t say much substantial
about them.
And so instead, we thought it might be helpful to look back through the entire study for some of the
common themes and the consistent threads throughout and to see what we could
mine out of the interweaving of all of these various real people’s story into God’s story
or the story of scripture.
And probably, Michael, the place we could start would be particularly,
I suppose, in the Old Testament where we have more of a story,
maybe with the exception of Jesus in
the New Testament, but we could look to family.
It’s surprising how messy particularly that Genesis chunk of stories and some of those
patriarchs of the faith and matriarchs of the faith.
One of the real consistent things that we see in their story is how often those families
were significantly messy.
Yeah,
each and every one of those major characters have significant challenges at home.
And I think one of those themes that maybe in some ways it may not be as relevant to
our current sort of culture,
but this theme of not being able to conceive is a significant
arc throughout the Old Testament,
that idea that God keeps God’s promises to keep generation
to generation moving.
And when you can’t seem to make that happen under your own will,
under your own decision making,
I think that this becomes this prominent theme.
How can you trust God?
Well, you have to know that God is going to be faithful.
Abraham and Sarah are great examples of this.
God promises to make their generations go on even to the grains of sand.
And God doesn’t seem to be keeping that promise.
So they sort of push the matter a little bit.
And then it turns out that in the end,
they really make things more complicated.
And God does keep his promise.
And that we see that in multiple different variations.
But I do think the idea of us being able to trust not only God,
but being able to
trust one another is something that we see often,
especially in the Old Testament.
Yeah, and I think we understand that some of our most powerful and therefore,
potentially some of our most painful relationships are those that we share life with early on,
our families of origin,
who we grow up with,
how we grow up with them,
how we relate to siblings
and parents and our extended family.
And this is the fertile ground that many of these Old Testament stories grow up from.
And so in many of those stories,
there are instances of conflict or animosity between characters.
We start there even Cain and Abel,
which we didn’t look at.
But immediately,
the human story becomes one in which the family unit,
which should be a place of
encouragement and nurture and support, becomes conflicted,
becomes even dangerous in some instances for, say,
Jacob in his moments of running from Esau or Joseph when his brothers attack him.
So there is that sense of the ways in which brokenness comes into our family.
And I think, unfortunately,
all of us, to some degree, have that experience.
And we resonate with the reality of the ways in which family relationships can be both wonderful and nurturing,
but also painful and can take us a long time to heal from.
Yeah, I do think there’s a mistake that we sometimes make of comparing our
families of origin to other peoples.
That is an especially tempting thing if you get married.
And in the midst of that exchange with another person to discover how different another person’s
family is, both for good and for bad and for no value at all,
to be quite frank.
I think whenever we allow our narrative to be that we are somehow restrained or locked in by
a single family experience,
we miss what is the thing that God does over and over again,
regardless of where you started.
God is able to bring you to a new place.
That’s the fundamental story of Abraham and Moses, right?
Both of them grew up in relatively stable, well,
Moses, of course, the beginning of this story.
But Moses grows up in the palace in Egypt,
and God is able to move these individuals
from where they were to where God desires them to be.
And we should be able to trust that in our own life.
There’s no baggage that we carry too great for God to take and make into something meaningful.
Yeah.
And so, again, we would see that.
And, you know, I think when we do comparisons,
the risk we run is missing the fact that
every family has brokenness in it.
It may not be outward.
It may not be apparent.
But none of us escape the reality of brokenness from our families,
and certainly the characters
of the Old Testament that we looked at
are no exceptions to that rule.
And so the idea that these are real people with real families and within those families,
real struggles, I think, is an invitation for us to have a point of contact with them.
I think, you know, the other thing that we see that’s interesting in the characters,
some of these characters,
we’ve been living with these questions,
what did they get right and what did they get wrong?
And the very nature of those two questions,
I think, is helpful.
Because there are moments when we look at characters of Scripture,
important figures in the Bible, and they’re faithful.
They have moments of success.
They have moments of obedience.
They step out in faith.
They take risks.
They face danger.
David marching out to defeat Goliath.
We see in those moments this wonderful sense of accomplishment and an ability
to rest within the promise of God’s strength and to follow through.
And yet then just as often,
they will get it wrong.
Sometimes the same characters will get it right and then get it wrong.
But as we continue to do,
faith is lived out between those two realities.
When we are faithful and obedient,
when we are able to discern what God wants for us
and then actually act upon it,
and those other moments when we follow ourself,
when we follow our own self-interests,
our own pleasures, our own detours.
And those are the two poles,
Michael, that we continue to live out our faith between.
Yeah, I think it’s interesting when you look at the Old Testament that these characters,
especially in the Old Testament that we see,
are ones that live very much normal to their time lives.
I think if you haven’t read the Old Testament closely,
and maybe you’re someone who reads a lot of biographies,
you would come to the Old Testament and see a significant difference there.
In the biography of famous and very powerful people,
you often see how it’s impossible to retell their story
because they’re always interconnected with other powerful people
and they’re doing many things at the same time.
And they’re really rich and nuanced personalities.
Good biographers are able to sort of tease out all of these different parts of a person.
What’s different about the Old Testament is it doesn’t spend a lot of time telling us
about these in their connections and their power and their ability to do things.
It’s not interested in teasing out all of the different parts
of their motivation and their intention.
Really, what you see in the stories of these real people of faith is large sections of story
that’s just mostly common and normal stuff,
raising kids and going on,
and in some cases,
working for years to sort of secure your wife.
And there’s all of these different stories.
David’s an exception to that,
maybe, in some ways.
But what I think is interesting is that when you look at these people’s lives,
it’s these short and very time-constrained moments where everything changes,
where God comes and makes a covenant with Abraham.
This changes the history of Israel forever.
When Jacob has this encounter with the latter,
you have this sense that that’s going to be transformational,
this wrestling with God.
David, when Goliath is defeated,
you have this new chapter in his life.
But then Bathsheba,
you have this whole new chapter that happens from this mistake that he makes.
I think you see versions of this also in the New Testament with the disciples.
I think that moment where a fisherman goes to work and follows Jesus,
he actually leaves behind the stuff and goes and follows Jesus.
It’s these short moments that can change everything.
And we have this word in the faith that we call conversion.
I think we sometimes miss the mystery and nuance of that word.
Sometimes conversion is the thing that happens over a lifetime.
It’s this continuing conversion.
It’s the small discipleship decisions,
the transformations,
the worship,
the work of the Spirit within us.
All of this works on us over a long period of time and transforms us
that we’re more and more in the image of Christ.
But we shouldn’t miss.
There are some very impressive sort of pregnant moments in our experience and our walk as Christians
where things can change radically,
where our transformation can have a new meaning for us.
I think that happened to many of these biblical characters,
where suddenly they saw things in a whole new way.
They had an experience that transformed the way they saw the world.
And as they allowed God to do that in them,
it made for radically different life trajectories.
Yeah, it seems to me there’s a wonderful example of that in the New Testament disciples.
You have men who really prior to the resurrection
understand very little of the one that they’re with.
They travel with Jesus.
They serve Jesus.
They’re disciples of Jesus.
But they have a hard time hearing what He says.
They have a hard time believing what He says.
They challenge Him in a few instances.
More often, they misunderstand Him, and they simply aren’t able to
really discern what He’s trying to teach them.
And yet these same men,
after the resurrection,
become pillars.
They become leaders.
They become evangelists.
And yes, we certainly have to take into account the presence of the Holy Spirit
and the leadership of God in their spiritual lives.
But on another level,
what changes for them is not necessarily what they know
but what they understand.
In other words,
it’s not as though they’re suddenly made successful and worldly and knowledgeable,
but they understand that Jesus is alive.
And that’s really the message,
the good news of the gospel,
the message of resurrection,
becomes the driving force for them.
I think, Michael, the same thing could be said of Paul.
When Paul is convicted with that central message that Jesus Christ is alive,
that He is the Messiah,
that sets his life on a course that he will follow until it kills him, literally.
And I think it’s interesting that they get there not as the result of classes,
not as the result of church,
not as the result of reading Scripture,
but because they begin with that fundamental truth of understanding that Jesus is the Son of God.
They had said it before.
They had flirted with professing it.
But when they see it,
it changes everything for them.
And there’s very much a before and after in the New Testament picture of those men,
which, of course, we wouldn’t see in the Old Testament.
We maybe get glimpses of it in the characters who recommit themselves to God’s way,
say of Moses, perhaps, or the prophets,
for instance.
But it’s most clear,
I think, in the New Testament.
And as you look at the whole of Scripture and you look at these characters,
I think another theme that really comes out of that,
Clint, is that Scripture has a really soft spot and an obviously intentional emphasis upon the underdog.
The people that you wouldn’t have picked is the most prestigious or most powerful.
It should strike us that Moses rose to his place in Egypt because he was put in a river
to save his life by a slave.
It should jump out to us that Ruth and Naomi are central characters in the story of Jesus’ lineage.
It’s important that Esther becomes a person who we remember in the Scriptures.
If you were going to catalog the best and the brightest and the greatest and the most societally privileged,
it’s likely you don’t end up with the characters that we have.
Nobody picks Jonah, the guy who essentially doesn’t accomplish what he wanted to do.
God forces Jonah to proclaim the news that he didn’t want to say.
So Scripture has this beautiful way of reminding us it’s not the people who are on the front page
of the newspaper who are the most prominent in God’s story of the larger ark.
Really,
God is at work in the lives of those who don’t consider themselves important,
who don’t consider themselves well connected.
I think there’s a part of Scripture that does connect,
especially when you put it in connection with this idea of family relationships.
That’s something we can all relate to.
I think when you put that in connection with the reality that most
of us are simply living our lives,
trying to be faithful,
trying to learn, trying to grow, trying to be people of faith,
and yet confessing, it often doesn’t feel important.
It often doesn’t feel like it extends far beyond our circles,
and yet it is many of these people,
Clint, who Scripture tells their story.
And so in that sense,
I think it is a real connection that we
can make with these people.
Yeah, and I think the outflow of that,
perhaps, Michael, is the messages we see in the prophets who take the people to account for doing what?
For oppressing
the weak, the underdog.
And this return to the message over and over again where God says to
Israel, “You were slaves, and I rescued you.
I redeemed you.
You weren’t the best.
You weren’t the brightest.
You didn’t deserve it.
I reached down to the bottom of the ladder and lifted you
up.
Now how dare you push down others who are underneath you?” And when we get to the New
Testament, we see that probably ultimately again in Paul,
who is advocating for including the
Gentiles, who comes to see in a theological appraisal of what he understands to be Scripture
an invitation that God has given those who have previously been thought to be outside of God’s
work, outside of God’s interest,
outside of God’s mercy.
And Paul fundamentally changes the scope
and says, “No, I now understand that God wants to save the Samaritan,
the Greek,
the Roman.
God’s love is such that it encompasses all people,” and has to argue that case even with others
inside the circle, even with Peter and James and other Christians who aren’t able as quickly as
Paul to embrace that vision.
And we inherit from that a call,
interestingly in the language of our
study, to be real people for others,
to have a real connection,
a real impact on the lives of those
who are down the ladder from us.
And when we see that lived out in the lives of those we study in Scripture,
it is a call for us to live that out in our own life,
and I think a powerful one.
It’s interesting how Scripture can meet different needs differently at different times.
It can challenge us differently at different moments of our life.
And I think especially if
you’re coming to this conversation today with some sense of weariness,
maybe even you don’t
feel like you have much agency in your life,
that what you do at the end of the day doesn’t feel like it matters.
I think the whole of these people in the Bible remind us that even though we’re
human and even though we don’t see the future for what it’s going to be,
that we’re not all powerful,
we can’t make every decision.
There are decisions that we make and they make a difference.
I think we see that God does use the agency of humans,
even small humans like us,
to do amazingly powerful things, not to our glory.
It’s actually the fact that God chooses these people magnifies
the reality that was God who did it all along.
And we pick a person like Moses.
Moses is central to
the Old Testament, and so I think it’s natural to sort of put him on a pedestal.
But Moses hated public speaking.
He didn’t think he could do it.
He literally argued with the all-powerful God,
saying, “I can’t do that,
get somebody else.” And God chooses Moses so that God gets the glory.
And so if today there’s a challenge that is in front of you,
if there’s things that you feel that
you’re called to do,
that you’re seeking to try to do, but you struggle,
maybe you can take some
encouragement that God has always picked the people who need God to do it,
because that is the way in which God gets the glory and the praise.
And if we had the humility to sort of step back
and to recognize that,
I think it would bring lots of us courage,
but it also encouragement.
It
lessens the feeling that you have to be the end-all and the doer of all these things when you know that God,
by the power of the Spirit,
is able to uniquely equip you and send you to do those
good deeds, as opposed to you having to manufacture them.
Yeah, I think I can say this confidently,
Michael.
I’m not aware of a place in Scripture
where God calls someone to do something incredible,
but instead only moments where God
invites people to participate in the incredible thing He plans to do.
And there is a significant
difference.
When we wonder if we can move the needle on the world,
in some ways it’s the wrong question.
The real question is,
will we be faithful to whatever task God sets us?
And the outcome is in God’s hands.
The input is simply,
will we be faithful?
Will we try to do the things that God
has invited and called us to do?
And as we do that,
we give up the results.
We trust God with the results.
It was not Moses’ task to secure freedom for people.
It was Moses’ task to go to
the Pharaoh and tell the Pharaoh that God was going to set the people free.
And in an incredible
sense, God has chosen to partner with people,
which is a unique and incredible thing to try and
wrap our head around,
that the Creator of the universe,
when thinking about the ways to make
a difference in the world,
decides to partner with those who live in it.
And we see that in
various ways throughout the characters in our study. Yeah, and I think where you are pointing us,
Clint, is that central theme that’s come up over
and over and over and over again,
and that is that Scripture tells the story of many people
throughout time, but it’s never about their stories unto themselves.
It’s never about
finding a character interest in other people.
We find that because we see real connections with
these people, but the purpose of Scripture is always and consistently to show us how in the
arc of God’s will and desire in the world,
God calls up people at different points in time
to point to that very task.
God uses weakness to God’s strength.
God is able to speak.
The prophets are a great example.
This guy is able to speak through particular people
in particular moments so that God’s voice is heard.
There’s this beautiful tapestry
of lives and interests,
of regrets,
of fears,
of broken families,
of honest-to-goodness gifts and talents.
There’s all of these things in Scripture.
It is, by definition, an account of real life.
That’s one of the things that makes it so compelling,
Clint, is that Scripture
doesn’t paint this rosy picture of what it means to be human,
but it also doesn’t dogpile
being human.
It takes seriously that God made humans,
that humans live lives that are
wrapped up with sin and all of its effects,
and yet God still has committed,
God has promised, God has covenanted to be part of our lives.
To whatever extent we have the eyes of faith to see
that same God is alive network today.
And though we sometimes turn to Scriptures of people who
lived 2,000, 6,000, 8,000 years ago,
we’ve seen that a distance that separates us,
I think we may fail to recognize that these people are incredibly real representations of the very
same fears and desires and goals and promises that God has promised to work within in our own time.
And so reading these people,
encountering these real people of faith, I think,
gives us a kind
of family tree in which we can be oriented to see how God’s alive network in our own lives,
in our own stories.
Yeah, and I think the deep encouragement in that,
Michael, is how much of our stories overlaps with much of their stories.
Certainly not David in the palace.
I suspect none of us will have that experience.
But those moments of conviction where David
has to admit that he’s failed,
where he’s confronted with the reality that he left God’s will for his own,
and now the consequences of that and the pain of that,
those other moments where there are
disciples or characters who have the deep knowledge of what God wants.
They have clear discernment.
God shows up big and bold and says,
“This is my plan for you.
The promise given to Jacob,
the promise given to Abraham.” And then these other moments where God seems absent or at least
inaccessible, where there’s not a clear word and how often we live our lives between those two
realities.
The moments where we almost physically feel the presence of God with us and others where
we think, “I’m just slogging it out here and I haven’t heard a word in a long time and I could
use the help.” And I think the
comfort we take from learning the stories of our ancestors
is that none of that’s new.
The people of the Bible,
and we’ve said this a hundred different
ways, a hundred different times,
but the people of the Bible are not there because they were
spiritual giants who always understood what God wanted and were able to do it.
But because they were people who interacted with a living God and that takes them in unimaginable ways as it does
for all of us.
Sometimes we know what that means.
Many times we have no idea what that means.
Sometimes that’s very easy.
It’s comforting.
It’s remarkable and it’s satisfying.
Other times it’s hard.
It’s bitter.
It’s forgiving people we don’t want to forgive and turning over control that we
don’t want to relinquish.
And the struggle in all of that I think is informational.
It’s educational for us as we seek to be real people of faith in our own lives.
Yeah, I think attention that we
as Christians sometimes find ourselves in is we find ourselves in a position
where we either overemphasize our role in God’s story or we underemphasize it.
And neither is really true the scripture.
There’s this beautiful mystery in how God has chosen to work
in the lives of people.
And I can’t tell you,
Clint, the number of high school students I’ve
had conversations with who are just,
why doesn’t God tell me where to go to college?
And why is God telling me what my major should be?
And you may not be in that position,
but there are we
experience that all the time.
Why doesn’t God just tell me what the right thing to do for my aging
parent is?
Why doesn’t God just tell me if I should make a career change or not?
Why doesn’t God just
tell me the thing I need to say so I can reconcile with my spouse on this thing that we can’t seem
to get worked out?
Wherever that is,
I think you look at those stories where characters seem to
just get hand-like air mailed God’s plan.
And then you see other characters like Esther where
God’s not even named.
And yet Esther shows us what it looks like to be faithful in the midst of those moments.
There’s this beautiful mystery here and the point is your life doesn’t need to somehow
look ancient to be scriptural in the broadest sense of what I mean to be scriptural.
For your life to be wrapped up in this great story of God’s work in the world,
God is able to
work within your life right now.
And the beauty of that is God isn’t going to leave you unchanged.
And that’s the wonder of these character stories.
God chooses them irrespective of how well they’re
doing and yet God is still able to make stuff through them.
And characters like Jacob,
you can legitimately ask the question how far did he move in his life?
Yet even he is in God’s story.
So wherever you’re seated and whatever your vantage of your own life and this time is,
I think there’s encouragement to be had from the real people of faith.
God’s plan is big enough for you.
God will not leave you where you are and yet God also doesn’t expect that you become some
giant overnight of perfection.
That’s never been God’s plan.
Seek to be humble and to point
to Christ in everything that you do and say.
Try to be faithful and practice discipleship.
And if we can do that,
then we are connecting with the real people of faith we find in Scripture.
Yeah, and even in the characters we surveyed,
we see that every faith story does not end with happily
ever after.
There are struggles in those stories and yet if you look across the arc of the stories,
the arc of Scripture,
God is constantly
at work for wholeness,
for restoration,
for forgiveness,
for inclusion,
for justice,
for mercy,
for reconciliation.
These are the things that God
seeks to work out in the lives of those He calls and through those He calls in the world,
and that hasn’t changed.
God, as we present ourselves and as we follow the God who is sometimes
impossible to understand and frustrating to seek,
God leads us toward those good things
that has been His intention from the very outset, the very beginning.
Now, does that mean everything gets tied up with a nice bow at the end?
No, we all know it doesn’t,
but it does mean that in our real faith,
in our real lives
of faith,
the work of Christ is always toward our
benefit and always toward those good things that God has always been trying to do in the world.
And that’s a promise that I think we see in the lives of those who have gone before us
and we trust others may even see in our own lives when our stories will one day be told.
And maybe the easiest
way for us to access that in our own lives is to look to some of those people
around us who we see to be giants of the faith.
I think each one of us could probably name at
least one family or friend who has for us shown God’s love,
God’s grace, God’s mercy,
that we’ve seen some of these bigger things.
And of course our hope is that God will continue to
fashion within us these same good gifts that others might see them in us that God might receive the glory.
And what we have studied are the scriptural people of faith.
I think
you can look beyond the last page of Revelation and see that though we haven’t included these men
and women in our scriptures that we turn to as the the holy word of God,
I think that we see these
this legacy of faith and real people,
continuing people who take the the salvific work of grace
seriously and allow that to transform them.
And we can see throughout all of church history up until this day,
even those people in our circles,
that God continues to work,
God continues to transform and renew,
God continues to save,
and that’s good news.
Yeah, and I think ultimately
we aspire to that,
to be real people of faith.
And as we see it in them,
may it also be seen in us
as God continues the unfolding story of salvation far outside the pages of Scripture
and into the lives we lead and the world in which we lead them.
That’s what sends us out into that very world.
We are thrilled that you’ve joined us for this
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Blessings all.