Walk by Faith, Not Sight - 2 Cor 5: 1-21

Jeremy Camp is a popular Christian singer and songwriter. In 2002 he released a song entitled Walk by Faith in which was this chorus: “I will walk by faith, even when I cannot see. Well because this broken road, prepares your will for me.”

While this song skyrocketed to number 1 when it was released, I wonder if we could truly say the same thing in our life here and now. Are we truly walking by faith?

Months ago in a Bible Study at Grace, we were discussing how many of the prophets were calling Israel to an attitude of repentance because they had stayed by worshipping other Gods or profaning the alters of Yahweh by making images. Why were folks doing that? Because if we are honest, sometimes we want to see. Sometimes its hard to walk by faith, so we create images to direct our worship of God at, all the while not realizing what we are doing.

In Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, the folks he is writing to are struggling with this question of what it looks like to walk by faith as well. Especially what it looks like to walk by faith when we are here on earth at home, but not yet in our heavenly home. Because of that we are only seeing glimpses of the hope we have in Christ, and that is what we need to cling to in order to keep going. 

Jeremy Camp knew what it meant to groan in this earthly body and how important was to cling to the hope of God even when we don’t understand and can’t see. In October of 2000, Camp married is wife Melissa. In February of 2001, she died from ovarian cancer. That song Walk by Faith, was written during their honeymoon, while neither of them fully knew what laid ahead. A movie based on his experience is coming out later this year entitled I Still Believe. 

For Paul, walking by faith is all about trusting God. The problem is that sometimes it seems like it is a lot easier to trust what we can see.

Growing up my brothers and I like do the Highlight Magazine picture searches. We would sit on a couch together at my babysitters until we found all of the pictures. How many of you remember those pictures in the magazine? Down at the bottom there would be a list of the pictures of the items you were to be looking for. Now what if I told you that you were to look at the picture but didn’t give you the key? Didn’t tell you what you were to find? 

That’s what it feels like to walk by faith and not by sight sometimes. It feels like we are trying to go through this world perceiving the movement of the Spirit, but also knowing that we many not recognize or understand everything. 

But even if we can’t fully see, it does not mean that we cannot trust. For Paul, the entire reason that we can trust God is because we have a relationship with him. Because we know God personally. God through that relationship has proven himself to be worthy of our trust again and again and again. So even in the moments when we feel like we are stumbling through the dark or are moving through this world and aren’t exactly sure what we should be seeing - God is still there.

That’s all we can do in these earthly bodies - walk by faith - walk in trust. 

Or maybe that isn’t all we can do. Because once we do catch those glimpses of the spirit - we want to share them. When we receive the gift of God, we want to share it. Even if this earth is not our final destination, we want folks to come to know the saving love of Jesus Christ. 

The prophet Jeremiah wrote at a time of captivity and he had the hard task of telling folks who were longing to get back to Jerusalem to hunker down, because it was going to be a while. In fact this what he wrote in the 29th chapter, But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. If the Israelites were to seek the welfare of the place were they were in captivity, should we not be seeking to share the Good News and bless folks here and now? 

Does that mean that everyone will accept what we have to say? No. But we keep going. Because it is the love of Christ that empowers us to share. It’s the love of Christ that holds us together. It’s the love of Christ that urges us on. 

Notice that I said that it is the love of Christ that empowers us to share. Christ does not compel us to walk by faith. Nor does Christ force us to share. Rather it is something that we want to do as we grow in our love for our Savior. 

So how do we get to this place of love and surrender? Well, it requires a death. A death to our own way and desires. Meister Eckhart, a spiritual writer, puts it this way: “The spiritual life is not a process of addition, but rather of subtraction”. We need to have subtracted from us those things that fill us and prevent us from trusting Christ fully - things like ambition, addiction and unforgiveness. We need to die to ourselves and ask instead that we be transformed by Christ. 

Part of the mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, but friends before we get to the transforming the world part, in order to be a disciple we ourselves need to be transformed. To have Christ enter into our hearts and start stripping away the parts of us that keep Christ from being the center of our lives. Is that the transformation we really want?

For Paul, he is trying to encourage the church in Corinth to also strip away their dependance on the law - to the point where they thought that salvation could come through the law. Instead, he wanted them to accept and trust in that gift of faith. 

But here is the thing about faith - that’s not about us. It’s not about what we’ve accomplished on our own. It’s not about our own goodness. It’s all about the one we trust. The one we follow. The one we proclaim. The one who transforms us. 

So where are you at this morning? Can you join the apostle Paul in saying that you walk by faith, not by sight. Can you join our brother in Christ, Jeremy Camp, in singing “I will walk by faith, even when I cannot see. Well because this broken road, prepares your will for me.”

If you aren’t quite there yet, what is one step you can take this week to walk by faith? What is one way you can lean into the arms of God and trust him?

Because that’s what faith is, dear Church. That is what it truly means to walk by faith - to go forward with God step, after step, after step - one step at a time. Amen.