Faith

I preached on Hebrews 11 this past Sunday. Hebrews 11 is the great chapter on the heroes of faith, and it’s one of those passages where you really just need to get out of the way and let the text preach itself. Verse 1 opens with “Now faith is the confidence of things hoped for and assurance about what we do not see.” (NIV) If you look around at different translations, you discover that the word for confidence here is sometimes translated “substance.” That is, “faith is the substance of things hoped for….” As if faith is the act of our hopes becoming manifest. Almost like our hopes lived out in our day to day lives.

What is really interesting here is that the Greek word for confidence is “hypostasis.” It’s the same word that's used in Hebrews 1:3 to talk about Jesus. The preacher says Jesus is the “hypostasis” of God’s being and in the NIV it’s translated as “exact representation.” That is, Jesus is the exact representation of God’s being. In other words, we see God the Father in and through Jesus. It is through Jesus that God the Father is made known.

I wonder if a bit of this same idea is at work with our faith? Faith is not meant to be something that is only in our head, but something that is lived out. Something that others can see by the way we live. Perhaps faith is a way of living that teaches others about God—that reveals our hopes. What if faith were the exact representation of our hopes? What if faith were the substance of our hope? What if faith were something that people could see in us and through us, to help them make sense of the hope we have in Jesus?