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Many times I have known of people embarking on a course of action, saying that they were doing it “by faith.” The implication was that it was a very spiritual thing to do, and anyone who questioned the course of action was therefore unspiritual. Strangely enough, those courses of action have sometimes ended in various degrees of disaster.
The problem with this often begins with a failure to understand what faith really is. Last week we discussed the fact that faith must have an object, and that the nature of the object will determine the validity of the faith. For example, in order to obtain salvation a person must have a faith whose object is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The people who embark on mistaken courses of action “by faith” ususally have erred either in mistaking a feeling for faith or in having faith in the wrong thing. A pastor “by faith” leads his people into a building program which they cannot afford. They get a loan, cannot make the payments, and lose even what they did have. What went wrong? Was it God’s fault? No, God does not fail to keep his promises. Therefore, the faith was not in a promise of God, but in some other object. Perhaps it was in a figment of the pastor’s imagination. Perhaps he wanted a new building so badly that he convinced himself that God
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