When I was in grade school I wasn’t a great speller. Actually, I’m still not a great speller, but computers have this nice feature called spell check that helps me out a lot. But anyway, when I was in grade school I got tested on my spelling and never really did that good. But I remember one time where it was my pastor who caused me to do bad on my test. You see, one of the words I had to spell for a spelling test was believe. B-E-L-I-E-V-E. And I remember having the pastor give a children’s sermon or something where he talked about how we would find the word live in the word believe. He talked about how it was important that we believe if we really wanted to live and this could be seen in the way that believe was spelled. Amazingly, that very next week, we were tested in spelling and the word “believe” came up. I remembered what had been said on Sunday morning (amazingly) and spelled out “be-live” B-E-L-I-V-E. I got it wrong—obviously, my pastor’s fault. Now I just need to come up with an excuse for all the other words I spelled wrong.
Though my pastor’s grammar left something to be desired, his theology was sound. It is worth noting that there is a powerful connection between living and believing. If we truly want to live life to its fullest, if we truly want to let our lives fill with God’s blessing, then we need to learn the importance of belief.
I want to begin by having you think about a question. How do you describe what it means to be a Christian? Is it being sure that you go to church every Sunday? Is it being sure that you do your best to obey the commandments? Is it trying to live as good as the person next to you, trying to be a decent person? Is it living a life of belief?
These all are parts of the Christian life, sort of, but none of them are the center of what it means to be a Christian. We hear again and again that we are to have a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, but what does that mean to you? How is that lived out? How is that seen in our lives?
In this advent season I want to look at one part of that answer. I want to focus on how we live out our Christian faith in a personal relationship with Jesus. And to do this I want to focus on what it means to believe.
So often when we hear about belief, we think it is about assent to a certain group of beliefs or ideas about something. Do you believe that something happened? Do you believe that someone exists? But to truly believe in Christ is much greater than this.
So often when we hear about belief, we think it is about whether we believe that what the Bible says is true. Was Jonah swallowed by a giant fish? Did Moses lead the Israelites through the Red Sea? But to truly believe in Christ is much greater than this.
So often when we hear about belief, we think it is about being gullible. Are we going to take things on faith? Are we going to trust things that we cannot prove? But to truly believe in Christ is much greater than this.
So what is belief, then? What is it that we are called to do when we are told that we are to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and we will be saved? I think the best way to look at this belief is to see a radical example of it. And some of the best examples of people living lives of faith and belief can be found in the Bible. And so today I want to look at someone who is a huge part of the Christmas story but whom we tend to look over. And yet this is someone who lived a life of faith and belief that many of us could never attain.
Joseph, the man who raised Jesus as his own son even though he wasn’t. Joseph, Mary’s husband. Joseph, a real man of belief.
Joseph is a man of faith and belief because of what he doesn’t do and because of what he does do. He is a man of faith and belief because when the impossible presents itself to him, he accepts it at face value and lives faithfully.
Joseph has the world turn against him very quickly when he is about to get married, but then he finds out that his fiancée is pregnant. Joseph is presented with the unthinkable. He has the impossible put in front of him and he could easily decide to ignore it, to assume the worst. But he doesn’t. He accepts that God is able to do the impossible. He accepts the word of his wife. He believes, and because of this the world is changed.
As we read this morning, Joseph and Mary were engaged to be married. But Mary had gotten pregnant. We see right away Joseph’s character because he could have, by law, taken her out and have her stoned. He could have had her killed for sleeping with someone before she was married, for cheating on him when they were engaged. But he automatically decided that he wouldn’t do that. Instead he thought it would be best to divorce her quietly and move on with life. So, he wasn’t willing keep the marriage going, for obviously, she had cheated on him… but at the same time, he didn’t want to make an ordeal out of her situation, so a quiet divorce was the option that presented itself. Not the best option, but perhaps the best for a difficult set of circumstances.
Mary may have even told him about what had happened to her, about the angel that had appeared to her to tell her that she would be carrying God’s son. But is that truly something that someone would believe? If someone told you that, you wouldn’t accept it.
But then Joseph had an angel appear to him in a dream and tell him the same thing. An angel told him to go ahead and marry Mary because she did not cheat on him. Instead, the baby in her womb had been conceived by the Holy Spirit. And the angel told him to name the baby Jesus. We all know the story, but have we really thought about it. Imagine you were in Joseph’s shoes. Imagine you found out that the person you loved had cheated on you, and then you have a dream, a dream that tells you that they didn’t really do so. Would you believe that dream? Would you accept it as reality, even though what the dream was telling you was impossible? Or would you think that you may have imagined it, made it up in your head, tried to make an excuse for yourself subconsciously?
Why would you accept that the impossible happened when it sounds so much like an excuse? And if you did accept it, would you do what the dream asked of you? You see, even if the dream was real, even if the angel was telling the truth, Joseph would still be looked upon poorly by those around him. They would look at the situation and know there was more to it than it seemed. They would do the math and look at him as weak. And Joseph would be raising a son who was not his own, and all those around him would know it. Is it worth living this way? Is it something that you would be able to do? Would you be able to live with this situation?
Well Joseph was and he did. He not only accepted the truth of the dream that he had, he followed the instructions given to him by this angel, and Jesus was raised with a good, strong father throughout his childhood. We see later that Joseph continued to listen to his dreams, for after the Magi visit he is warned in a dream to drop everything he is doing and go to Egypt to protect his son from Herod. And again, he follows the wisdom of the dream. And when Herod dies, another dream tells him that it is safe to return to Israel, and Joseph again does as the dream commands, and so Jesus grows up in Nazareth.
So, using Joseph as an example, does that mean to believe is to follow your dreams, to take them seriously and follow where they lead? Not really. If that were the case, I’d have really tried some stupid things, for some of my favorite dreams are flying dreams or jumping dreams, and I don’t do either of these in real life. Though in Joseph’s case, this is what living the life of faith entailed. We don’t need to pay attention to our dreams and worry about what they mean and how they speak to us, at least not usually. Instead, we can learn from Joseph’s believing in God’s power to do the impossible and Joseph’s faithfulness to following God’s commands.
When we say that we believe in God, in Jesus, are we saying that we truly believe in the power of God to do the impossible? Are we willing to allow God to work miraculously in our lives and the lives of those around us? Or do we just say that we believe that he exists, but we don’t really expect him to work miracles? If we don’t expect God to work in this world, what good is believing in him? This is something that I’ve never understood. There are those who see God as some great being who created the world, set it up, set up all the laws that this world has to abide to and then went off and paid attention to other things that seem more important to him. Basically, he is a great clock-maker who put together a beautiful clock, wound it up and then let it do its thing. This is called deism. You believe in God. You believe that he created the world… but he isn’t really active in it now. He’s done his thing and now it is all up to us. What’s the point of this? If you truly believe this, what’s the point of coming together to worship? It doesn’t affect him. What’s the point of praying? It isn’t going to make a difference. What’s the point of believing? He’s not going to care one way or another.
And yet, so many of us, when we look at what we believe and how we live, this is where we fall, if not in the way we think than in the way we act. Do we really believe that God can work in this world? Do we really believe that God can do a miracle in this day and age? Do we believe that God is intimately involved in the workings of this world? When we pray do we think that God just may answer us?
Joseph’s belief allowed him to accept that his fiancée could be pregnant and also be a virgin. He believed that God could work in his world. He accepted that God is greater than what we expect and how we live. He knew that the gifts that God give are greater than our understanding.
Joseph believed these things but he also allowed them to affect how he lived. He also allowed them to affect what he did. He believed that God was able to work in his world and do the impossible. He believed that God gives great gifts to his people. And he therefore changed his life to respond to the work that God was doing.
How do we let our belief in God affect the way we live? Are we going to change what we do because of our faith in Christ? Are we going to allow him to direct our lives, to allow him to take us down paths that may take us places that will be uncomfortable for us? Or are we going to allow ourselves to play it safe, to take the easy way out. Do we just want to continue with the lives we have, or do we want to enter into that special relationship where we allow God to guide us; where we let God change us; where we are affected by him and his will on our lives?
What does it mean to believe? It means that we are willing to let God do the impossible in our lives. It means that we are ready to be moved and changed and directed by God. It means that God can work in this world and in our lives and through our lives to do great and impossible things.
Do you believe?
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