I Had Fainted Unless I Had Believed

Faith 5

          Why do people quit? God’s people. Why do they quit on their marriage, on a diligent approach to parenting, on soul winning and tithing and praying and teaching Sunday School? Why do they give up their bus route? Why do they, in the worse cases, quit on church and on God completely? I do not mean what excuse do they sell/tell us as their rationale. I mean why does it happen?

I want to know the answer to that question because I do not want to be a quitter. My college president, Dr. Wendall Evans, said, “Christianity is not measured in years; it is measured in decades.” I want to serve Him for numerous decades. So what causes people to quit on God and on God’s work, and how can I avoid it?

The psalmist gives us a thought provoking answer to that question in Psalm 27. I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait on the Lord: Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: Wait, I say, on the Lord. Somehow or other, amongst all the other excuses and/or reasons, we will always find this at the core of a quitter’s quitting – he failed to believe. The devil tempted him, trolling any number of false truths across his path like a fly fisherman does in the late summer sunshine, and the quitter bit. He stopped believing God and instead began to believe the deceitful lies of the devil. So he quit.

When you take a moment and examine this psalm you will find it is actually filled with quite a few specific examples of this. Take, for instance, the discussion of fear in the first three verses. The psalmist tells us his enemies are after him, and discusses fear specifically at least three times. But in spite of those enemies and in spite of that fear his confidence is in the Lord.

Fear, while not precisely the opposite of faith, is here set in contradistinction to it. Fear attacks my faith. In my life, fear has done that through finances – losing a job, losing health insurance, taking a pay cut, etc. In the sixteen years I lived in the inner city, fear attacked me via crime and the threat of crime more times than I can count – fear for myself, fear for my wife, fear for my children, fear for my church. Fear has attacked me via my health. Meniere’s Disease, my long affliction, is incurable and regressive. Will tinnitus eventually drive me mad? Is deafness in my future? Will drop attacks come and rob me of my ability to preach and to minister? See? Fear. Flies flashing in the late summer sun above the river.

What kept/keeps me going through those fears? Faith in God. I had fainted unless I had believed.

Yet another example the psalmist furnishes us with is the pain of loneliness, the emotional scarring of abandonment. In verses nine and ten he talks about his father and mother forsaking him and says to God, leave me not neither forsake me. Yet often, it seems He has. David penning a psalm in the flickering light of a candle deep in the bowels of a damp cave. Paul, shivering without his cloak in the Mamertine prison. Jeremiah, up to his armpits in mud in a dry well used as a temporary dungeon. John the Baptist, languishing in Herod’s prison. “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” And on and on it goes. Friendless. Orphaned. Childless. Imprisoned. Desperately single. Alone. Bereft. Forsaken. Flies flashing in the late summer sun above the river.

You will faint unless you believe.

What should have been one of the happiest days of my life, my college graduation, was one of the most miserable. I had a long-term serious relationship in high school that came to nothing, and did so painfully. In college, I had another long-term serious relationship that came to nothing, and did so painfully. Here I was, about to walk down the aisle, accept my hard-earned diploma, and head out into the ministry. Only I could not, of course, because I was single. Who hires a single youth pastor? What church is desperate enough to vote in a single pastor? I was frustrated, lonely, sad, and increasingly bitter. I do not exaggerate when I state that my senior year of college was a blur of pain. Nor did it end there. Month after month, nothing changed. I lost jobs. I fell into debt. I gained weight. I clung with fierce determination to the only thing in my life that mattered – my bus route – while my dreams of ministry success and family life crunched underfoot.

Years passed this way. And each time I thought the exile of loneliness was about to end I would find the oasis I ran toward was just another hollow mirage, mocking my sorrow. Needless to say, along the way, the master fly fisherman known as the devil cast a few lines my way. He very nearly snagged me. At one point, beyond weary of it all, I quit my job, closed my bank account, packed up my car, and was on the brink of heading out of town, heading nowhere, just leaving it all behind. It is perhaps the closest I have ever come in my life to quitting on God. Indeed, I practically had. Till God, in the nick of time, sent a dear friend across my path that night  to tell me that God still loved me, that He was still good, and that I should trust Him in spite of it all. And I believed.

I had fainted unless I had believed.

So will you.