Faith That Amazes

Did you have an opportunity to watch any of the events of the 2024 Olympics Games in Paris? If so, which ones? If you watched women’s gymnastics, you likely heard the name of American athlete, Simone Biles. With 30 world championship medals and 11 Olympic medals, Simone is the most decorated gymnast in history and people are calling her the G.O.A.T. – the Greatest Of All Time. One indication of her greatness is that, since 2017, she has introduced 5 elements in gymnastics – 2 on the vault, 2 on the floor, and 1 on the balance beam – that are named after her because they are among the most difficult elements in women’s gymnastics, and for some of them, she is the only person who has been able to do them. She is indeed a very gifted and talented gymnast.

But you may not know that Simone has also faced many challenges in life. Her mother struggled with substance abuse and Simone and her three siblings spent time in foster care. When Simone’s grandparents found out that their grandchildren were in foster care, they took them in. Eventually, Simone’s grandparents adopted her and her younger sister and her great aunt adopted the two older children. Simone first tried gymnastics when she was 6 years old and she was encouraged by her instructors to continue. She began training and competing at an elite level when she was 14. While under the mentorship of USA Gymnastics, she was sexually assaulted by Larry Nassar, as were with many other female gymnasts, and USA Gymnastics tried to cover up Nassar’s crimes. In 2016, her medicals records were released publicly, and she was accused of doping. She then revealed that she had been diagnosed for ADHD and that she had an official exemption for the medication she took for that condition. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, she withdrew from several events due to mental health issues. All these things are part of Simone’s journey to the triumph she is now experiencing. 

 So how did Simone overcome all these challenges to become the greatest gymnast of all time? Simone was introduced to Christianity by her grandparents and faith became, and still is, very important in her life, and she credits God for her success. In an interview she did in 2021, Simone said, “I don’t physically understand how I do it. It (is) a God-given talent.”[i]

We see Simone’s physical abilities and they amaze us, and her faith plays a big role in how she amazes us. But let’s look at this situation from another perspective and ask ourselves the question: What can we human beings do that amazes God? This is an important question because God is the source of ultimate reality, and he sees things as they really are. If we could discover what amazes God, then we would know what is important to him. If we knew what was important to God, we could then make those things important to us. We want to be people who live according to what is good, beautiful, and true in an ultimate sense, and not be distracted or deceived by the fickle and fleeing priorities that we see in the world around us. So let’s think about the question of how we can amaze God, and let’s do it by reflecting a time when a human being did amaze God. That event is recorded for us lo in Luke 7:1-10 and, if you have a Bible or a Bible app handy, I invite you to turn there now.

A Centurion Asks Jesus to Heal His Servant

This event happened in the early part of Jesus’ ministry, shortly after he called his twelve disciples and preached the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus was in the northern region of the Holy Land, on the north side of the Sea of Galilee, in his adopted hometown of Capernaum, where he moved from Nazareth when he began his ministry.

In that town there was a centurion who had a servant who was dear to his heart, and that servant was very ill and near death. The centurion was likely a soldier in King Herod’s army and he would have had about one hundred soldiers under his command. He was likely a Gentile, or non-Jewish person, and so he would not have been allowed to worship with Jews in their synagogue. But it seems like he was one of several Gentiles in the Bible who perhaps stood outside the synagogue and listened by the door as God’s Word was read and explained, and, as a result, came to faith in the one true God. In Acts 10, we encounter another Gentile believer when Peter meets Cornelius, who is also a centurion.

Because of the social and religious barriers between Gentiles and Jews, the centurion does not approach Jesus personally. Instead, he asks the Jewish elders in Capernaum to go on his behalf and ask Jesus to heal his servant. The Jewish elders pleaded earnestly for Jesus to do this because the centurion had shown great love and support for God’s people in Capernaum, and he had built the local synagogue. So Jesus went with them.

The Centurion’s Special Message

As Jesus drew close to the centurion’s house, he encountered a group of the centurion’s friends who had been sent by him to give Jesus this very special message:

“Lord, don’t trouble yourself, for I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. ⁷ That is why I did not even consider myself worthy to come to you. But say the word, and my servant will be healed. ⁸ For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

⁹ When Jesus heard this, he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd following him, he said, “I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel.” (Luke 7:6-9)

Then the centurion’s friends went back to his house and there they found that the servant had been healed.

Key Takeaways to Apply to Our Lives

So what can we draw from this Bible story and apply to our lives today? First, the faith that amazed Jesus was complete trust in his divine authority. The centurion knew how authority worked because he was under authority, and he had authority. When someone with authority gives a command, it happens, because the power to make it happen comes with the authority. Power and authority are connected. The Oxford English Dictionary defines authority as the “power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience”. When we acknowledge someone’s authority, we are recognizing their power to do what they are doing in their realm.

What was amazing about the centurion’s faith was that he recognized Jesus’ power and acknowledged his authority even though he was not part of God’s chosen people, the Jews. They knew God’s promise of a Messiah and had centuries of spiritual formation and nourishment through God’s Word, but this Gentile centurion understood in a way that no one else did, not even among the Jews, who Jesus was and the authority that he had. The centurion knew that Jesus had power and authority from God to heal and restore broken and dying people.

How did the centurion develop such amazing faith? Through the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures, what we Christians call the Old Testament, the centurion would have heard of God’s power to create all things into being with just his words. He would have heard the promise of a Messiah who would crush the evil one’s head even as the evil one bruised his heel (see Gen. 3:15). He would have heard of God’s compassion as he intervened in miraculous ways many times to provide for, protect, and preserve his people. The most significant of God’s miraculous interventions was when he brought his people out of slavery in Egypt and into the land which he has promised to give to them. The presence of God’s people in that very same land centuries later was proof to the centurion of God’s ultimate authority, supernatural power, and unconditional love. Because of his immersion in God’s Word, the centurion believed in God’s authority and power to miraculously do good things for his people.

It seems likely that the centurion had heard that Jesus had quoted Isaiah and said that he had come to preach good news for the poor and freedom for the captives, and then backed up his words by casting out demons, healing those who were sick, blind, and lame, and forgiving people’s sins, something only God could do. That was how the centurion realized that God’s power and authority were in Jesus. So the centurion reached out to Jesus, asked him for help, and then trusted in his authority and power to heal his beloved servant. Other healers of that time had to be in the same room as the person needing healing, and they would use special rituals or prayers to call on God for help in healing. But not Jesus. He had all of God’s authority within himself because he is God.

The centurion not only knew who Jesus was and what he could do, he also had a very clear-eyed awareness of who he was and what he could do. As a Gentile, he didn’t even deserve to ask Jesus for help, so he sent the Jewish elders to ask Jesus for him. He also didn’t deserve to have Jesus come to his house. Doing so would make Jesus, a Jew, ritually unclean. So he sent his friends to stop Jesus before he arrived at his home. And the centurion also knew that he was helpless. His servant, whom he loved, was about to die and there was nothing that he could do.

So the second point we can take from this story and apply to our lives is that faith which amazes is rooted in an awareness of the immense gap between humanity and God. When human beings start overestimating what they can do, they tend to underestimate what God can do.

So how can we develop amazing faith like this centurion? As I see what is going on in my own heart and in the world, I think that what often happens is we approach God with compartmentalized and conditional faith. We divide our life up into boxes and we trust God with some of those boxes, like forgiveness for our sins and life after death, which, if you think about it, are realms where we are powerless anyway. But the boxes where we have some authority and power, we tend to keep for ourselves. And when we do trust in God, we tend to include an “if” somewhere in our faith. For example, if we said out loud what we actually believe, it might sound like, “I will trust in you God, if you help to make my business be a success, or if you bring someone who loves me into my life, or if you help me pass this course, or if you make a certain person well again.” So we hold back on our trust in Jesus, and the realms in which we trust him, until Jesus proves to us that he can do what we want him to do. When we do this, how much trust are we displaying in Jesus’ authority? Zero. We are just like many Jews in Jesus’ time who demanded that he perform miracles for them before they would believe that he was who he said he was.

Developing amazing faith starts when we simultaneously hold on to two unshakeable truths: First, the absolute depth of our sin and brokenness, which makes us completely unworthy, just like the centurion, for God to have anything to do with us.  And second, the infinite height of God’s love, grace and forgiveness for us, which moved him to cross the impassable barrier of our guilt and shame, become one of us, and pay the full cost of our forgiveness for all our sins by suffering and dying on a cross for us. So the third point that we can draw from the account of Jesus and the centurion is that faith that amazes is unshakeable trust in God’s grace for us.

Jesus has already shown us that he is worthy of our trust in his power, authority, and grace when he rose from the dead on the third day after he died. In him we have new life, and there is nothing in this world, not even death that can take our life in Jesus from us. In our life with Jesus, we have all the love, forgiveness, grace and healing we need and we are forever safe with him.

The Amazing Faith of Eric Liddel

One hundred years ago this year, the Olympics were also in Paris. One of the athletes who attended those games was Scottish sprinter, Eric Liddel. He was born in China to Scottish missionary parents. He attended boarding school in London, and then went to the University of Edinburgh for his post-secondary education. Because of his Christian faith, Eric refused to run the 100-metre race at the 1924 Olympic Games, because those races were being held on a Sunday. Instead, he ran the 400-metre race on a weekday and won. The year after the Games, Liddel returned to China as a missionary teacher. There he died, twenty years later, at the age of 43, in a Japanese internment camp.[ii]

Eric Liddell had faith that amazes us. But when do you think Eric Liddell displayed faith that amazed God? Was it when he refused to race on Sunday at the 1924 Olympics? Was it when he went back to China as a missionary? Or was it when he lay dying in a Japanese internment camp? Only God knows the answers to those questions. But what we do know, based on the account of Jesus and the centurion, is that we don’t need to be an Olympic athlete. We can amaze God with our faith without even leaving our home.

Dear friends, our faith does not depend at all on us. Our faith depends totally on Jesus. He is the One who makes our faith amazing. For faith which amazes God is simply trust that God will do amazing things in our life. So, we trust unconditionally in Jesus and his authority in all realms of our life, even when things do not turn out the way we hoped, because we know that he is at work in our lives making all things, even the hard times, work out for our good in the end. Amen.

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[i] Sydney Jezik, “The Faith of Simone Biles, the most decorated American gymnast ever,” Deseret News (Internet; available at: https://www.deseret.com/faith/2024/07/31/simone-biles-religion/#:~:text=Biles%2C%20who%20is%20Catholic%2C%20has,a%20God%2Dgiven%20talent.%E2%80%9D; accessed August 7, 2024), and “Simone Biles,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia (Internet; available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Biles; accessed August 7, 2024).

[ii] ”Eric Liddel,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia (Internet; available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Liddell; accessed August 7, 2024).