A common theme in the Old and New Testaments is that “the just shall live by faith.” Why is it that the just person must live by faith?
It is simply this: if we are not looking out for ourselves, then we have to trust that God is looking out for us. If—in following Christ’s call on us to give our lives away on behalf of the voiceless oppressed—we have to put ourselves in places and situations over which we have little or no control, then we have to lean into God’s sovereignty. If God’s direction takes us through unhealthy or dangerous paths, we can only move forward in full reliance upon Him.
It is a paradox—albeit one clearly stated by Jesus Himself and later by His disciple John and His apostle Paul—that the person who wants to find true life must first be willing to lay it down, to die to self. But the blessing in the paradox is this: as we give over control to God, He will look after us.
“The just will live by faith” simply states the obvious: that if I live outside of myself, if I live to give and serve, if I think of others as being as important as myself, if I live for justice—what ought to be—I have to trust that somehow I am going to be taken care of. I have to believe that it truly is better to give than receive, and that God really does watch over and sustain the just.
This is not to say that God’s will for our individual lives is of supreme importance, much less that obedience to His call will mean that He preserves us from sickness, suffering, or even death. But we can be assured that only as we take our rightful place in His master plan can we find the path to all the blessing He has in store for us.
Eleanor Roosevelt, who spent her later years immersed in the creation of a document that furthered the cause of justice all over the world, prayed the following prayer every night:
Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers
after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with
what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far off
goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee
for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying: make us sure of
the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our
eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men
hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from
ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.
Jesus is out to set our world right. Because our world is not right, we are faced with the tension of the way things are (truth) and the way they ought to be (justice). In Christian discipleship, therefore, joining Jesus’ justice project means stepping out in faith and relishing the paradox—finding our lives as we’re giving them away.
Partially excerpted from The Grand Paradox: The Messiness of Life, The Mystery of God, and the Necessity of Faith.
