In the last episode, we talked about the power of what God has guaranteed to His children. The hope for any Christian is that after Yahweh saves a person, He does not leave them alone. He stays with them and perseveres with them until the end. Some of the wonderful treasures the Lord has provided for our perseverance are the promises of God: they help us to grow, comfort us in times of sorrow and encourage us in seasons of opposition. The power of the promises is made manifest when a Christian trusts the Promise-Maker, God, who works in, on and around us to fulfill those promises. The crucial point to embrace is not to just know that the promises exist or to merely assent to the truth of the promises. The power of the promises is made evident when the Christian has faith and trusts God. “By faith” is the means by which all Christians live. Without faith, you are not Christian and will die by your unbelief. With faith, the Christian lives with the blessedness and fullness of life the Lord intended. As the prophet says:
But the righteous one will live by his faith. (Habakkuk 2:4)
So, the Christian is saved by faith and then lives by faith, which is distinguished from the life of sight. Of course, the life of “sight” is not limited to literal eyesight but refers to what is natural and earthly. Sight is a gift the Lord has provided to all human beings regardless of their election. Sight is not therefore to be rejected, but a man of faith understands that his decisive trust is not in an earthly gift. By contrast, natural men are content to live a life of sight without God. They live like practical atheists and ultimately trust what they think, experience, sense or feel. Indeed, they may have faith, but that faith is in something natural: their sight. In contrast, the Christian lives by his faith in Christ.
The apostle Paul made a distinction between the life of faith and the life of sight in the New Testament. In his second epistle to the Corinthians, Paul writes:
[F]or we walk by faith, not by sight. (II Corinthians 5:7)
The meaning of this text is simple: our ultimate trust is not in what we perceive with our natural eyes. Instead, our ultimate trust is in Yahweh. Our faith is what animates who we are, how we think and how we act. Yahweh is invisible to earthly sight, but He is the ultimate reality and is both eternal and unchanging. This stands in contrast to our earthly reality, which is predestined to end and changes all the time. Furthermore, let us also not forget that the realm in which we live is a secondary reality, subordinate to God. Thus, the believer’s perception of what is real is not confined to the material world of sight, for the present order will one day pass away and give way to the ultimate reality that we have not yet fully experienced. Sight is in fact subordinate to faith because: (i) Sight is not a means by which a man is saved and (ii) Sight is unable to perceive superior, heavenly realities. This is why faith is:
[T]he certainty of things hoped for, a proof of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:3)
Additionally, “For we walk by faith [and] not by sight” explains to us how we can have fellowship with and serve the invisible God in this life. Such faith is neither make-believe nor a fuzzy fantasy, but a strong confidence grounded in the truth of God’s Word. The Christian’s faith is concrete because it has solid content. Our faith is based on the God who made the world and sent His Son, who died on a real historical Cross and then rose from the dead three days later. Our faith is based on an inerrant and infallible Word breathed out by a God who is eternal and doesn’t make mistakes. Truly, His Word will not return to Him void. Hence, while we may not see many concrete spiritual realities, we trust in the God who reigns over and above all reality, both seen and unseen.
Certainly, walking by faith and not by sight does not mean denying reality. We don’t live in a “matrix” from which God will one day unplug us. Neither does walking by faith and not sight imply that we ought ever to reject or minimize reality: life really hurts, pain is very real, our hearts will be broken and we will shed many tears. Yet the Christian can literally look out and see all these things and then look up and trust in the good God who promises us that for all those who are His, the conclusion of the story will end in Paradise.
That was a brief explanation of what it means to live by faith and not by sight. Here now are three applications of how II Corinthians 5:7 applies to your everyday life.
Application One: We live by faith and not by sight. Therefore, we live by the promises of God: divine gifts that supply and nourish our faith.
Because of His love, the Lord has provided a Bible full of promises that fuel our faith. The Lord is infinitely kind, and because His intent is our good, He has assured us of what He will do for us now and in the future. Christians are in desperate need of preservation, and they find it in their God. For example, the Lord builds us up and comforts us with encouraging promises like Isaiah 41:10:
Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be afraid, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will also help you, I will also uphold you with My righteous right hand.
Consequently, a Christian can live by faith in God’s bare promises because he or she trusts God. The more a Christian can rely on God’s word alone, the stronger his faith. Weak faith will seek secondary assurances and want to see tangible evidences. As William Gurnall wrote in The Christian in Complete Armor:
He that walks without a staff is stronger than he that needs one to lean on. The promise is the ground that faith rests on. Sense and reason are crutches that a weak faith leans on. Can you bear up when the crutches of sense and present feeling are not at hand? Does your faith wane when the sensible demonstrations of God’s love are withdrawn? Do you then doubt the promise, not knowing whether you can venture to cast an anchor on it or not? Because you have lost the sense of His love, does the eye of faith fail you also in trusting His mercy and truth in the promise? If so, the eye of your faith is yet weak since it needs the spectacles of sense to support it.
Just as skillful swimmers are not afraid to venture into deep water, young learners must stay next to the shore. Accordingly, strong faith does not fear when God carries the believer beyond the depths of reason. Christians may find themselves in situations they could never have imagined, with no logical reason for why God allowed them to end up where they are, alone, afraid and confused. Yet, despite all these things, they will remember that God promised, “Do not be afraid … for I am with you and I will strengthen you.” What their faith feeds on isn’t what they see around them but the delicious morsels of God’s Word. As the wise king Jehoshaphat said in II Chronicles 20:12:
[We do not] know what to do, but our eyes are on You.
A person who lives by sight will endlessly struggle with how to reconcile God’s promise with their understanding. But a person with strong faith can trample upon the improbabilities and impossibilities of a promise, knowing that with God, nothing is impossible.
To repeat application one: we live by faith and not by sight. Therefore, we live by the promises of God: divine gifts that supply and nourish our faith.
Application Two: We live by faith and not by sight. Therefore, we live by the means of faith that God has supplied.
Christians need constant sustaining. Without spiritual keeping, our tanks run empty and we either falter or lose the strength to move forward. This is one reason why God must preserve us. As it says in Psalm 31:23 (ESV):
The Lord preserves the faithful.
By grace, God causes us to have faith and then crowns that faith with preservation so that we may live. We’ve already talked about one means of preservation: the promises of God. The other means of preservation are very plain and ordinary. They are prayer (both private and corporate), Bible study, sitting under the ministry of the Word and being an active member of a local church. Notably, the church is the natural channel through which all of these means of preservation flow. Anyone who reads the Bible will never doubt the crucial importance of the local church. And, practically speaking, let us also not forget the power of being around other godly people: for their wisdom, their encouragement and their love. Fellowship with others in the church is important because Christians are like infants: unable to help themselves and needing the continual help of others. The Lord preserves the faithful by allowing them to be around other members of the faithful.
So, prayer, Bible study, sitting under the Word and fellowship are the simple, everyday things Christians engage in to keep the fire of their faith warm. Neglect of these means of preservation is spiritual suicide because even the most mature saints will cool if not kept warm by these powerful ministries. How many will tell themselves it is reasonable to skip the Bible, skip prayer and skip church, only to find themselves neck-deep in sin later on? Sin makes the life of sight reasonable and practical, the life of faith impractical and burdensome. Yet we live by faith and not by sight. Therefore, we live by the means of faith that God has supplied.
Furthermore, God tends to sanctify people by incremental steps, and sometimes those steps are so small as to be undetectable. Yet these are the means God has ordained for the preservation of our faith. Can God work without means? Of course He can. But that is not His usual method. God’s usual, reliable methods are the plain and ordinary means of faith already discussed. The Bible teaches us that God does not usually work by the miraculous or the extraordinary. Thus, we should not neglect duty upon a presumptuous expectation of something miraculous. Living by the means of faith means doing what is plain and ordinary, each and every day.
To neglect the means God has ordained suggests a distrust of God significant enough that we don’t use what He provided. As a result, we reap the consequences of our own unbelief: we are quick to lose hatred of sin, the tenderness of conscience, fervency in prayer and the delights of heavenly meditations. In contrast, as we grow spiritually, our use of the Lord’s means increases, as do our spiritual appetites. This means the mature Christian is mature because they are more dependent on grace as opposed to independent of it.
To repeat application two: we live by faith and not by sight. Therefore, we live by the means of faith that God has supplied. The third application follows closely to the second.
Application Three: We live by faith and not by sight. Therefore, we must safeguard our faith if we seek to live happy, holy lives.
Faith is the chief grace from which all other graces flow. Hence, because it is the root, if you nurture, cultivate and keep your faith, a blessed and fruitful life will follow. Conversely, if you do not safeguard your faith, what results is a miserable existence that perpetually feels empty because of a fractured relationship with Yahweh.
Safeguarding your faith simply means being diligent and perpetually employing the means of faith discussed in the last application. As it says in Romans 8:5:
For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh (e.g., sight), but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit (e.g., faith).
Setting one’s mind means being intent on the things of the Lord. What one sets his or her mind on, action follows. For most, the reason for neglecting diligence is either sloth or distraction. Sloth equals negligence in duty, making faint endeavors and failing to continue. The slothful Christian is in one place and remains there the next day, is there one year and then again the next. All of his efforts are cold and vanishing. The distracted person allows sin to draw his mind away by surprise or frequent solicitation, and the sin eventually conquers. Yet this cannot happen without an open neglect of the soul. The failure to stir yourself up and give an effectual rebuke in the strength and by the grace of Christ against sin is what results in sin’s prevalence.
As J.C. Ryle wrote in his famous book Holiness, “Christianity is a good fight.” Accordingly, mature saints are not those who have conquered and now have no conflicts. Instead, they are the ones who are fighting the most while engaging the means of grace the most. The foundation of this fight involves safeguarding their faith so that they remain happy, healthy and full of joy in the heat of battle.
The “fight” that Christians engage in may involve many different types of suffering. Of course, suffering is a fight against unbelief, despair and giving up—on God, people and situations. Suffering is a fiery arrow that the enemy sends, but often God does not deliver us from said assaults, at least not instantaneously. Part of the warfare is to endure and keep the faith in the suffering, recognizing that, for the Christian, suffering is part of our vocation. A cruel teaching that exists today is that a Christian suffers from a host of trials—whether it be a persistent temptation, a bodily disease, despair or sorrow—yet if they just had more faith, all of it would disappear. That is simply not true. In fact, in many cases, the greatest faith is not manifested in how quick something goes away but rather in how long a saint waits for the great deliverance that God promises in Christ. The sign of faithfulness is endurance in the suffering. Safeguarding one’s faith thus equates to employing the means of faith so the saint may remain diligent under the trial.
The final point I will make on this application speaks to those who have been growing in grace for some time. It is important not to forget that often, it is the most mature saints who are afflicted with despair because it equates to a Satanic attack on their faith. The devil is the most intelligent creature ever made, and he won’t waste his time on peripherals: he strikes at the chief grace, faith, knowing that if a believer’s faith crumbles, so will they. Distrust leads to hopelessness and spiritual arrest. That is exactly what the devil did when, in Genesis 3, he attacked who Adam and Eve trusted in. He followed the same strategy in Luke 4 when he attempted to get Christ to distrust God’s promises and instead believe his lies. Yet let us never be dismayed, because, as it has been said, the devil is God’s devil. God alone is sovereign, and as long as Christians keep their focus on Christ, they will persevere. A mind full of God’s truth will not fall for the devil’s lies. Safeguard your faith if you seek to live happy, holy lives.
The promise God has made to all His children is that the righteous one will live by his faith, and by that faith Yahweh will also strengthen, help and uphold with His hand (Isaiah 41:10). If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31). Beloved, walk by faith and not by sight.
Dr. C. H. E. Sadaphal