What Does The Bible Say About Belief, Hope, Faith and Trust
Stefan Van der Merwe
What is faith? What do you hope for? What is it that you believe in? In what do you trust?
These four words, believe, hope, trust and faith are our topic today and although we do not have a central passage of scripture to work from I still will use verses from the bible to explain what these words mean and how they relate to each other.
One of the usual steps in hermeneutics (interpreting text and specifically the bible) pastors often use in preparing sermons a semantic analysis of the words in the passage.
In our situation, like I said, we don’t have a given passage but what we do have a couple of words that are used interchangeably often with the same meaning and that is why semantics here is important because it’s not only concerned with the meaning of a word but also with relationship between words. In our case Faith, Hope, Believe and Trust.
In ancient Greek (the language the NT were written in) we also have four distinctive words.
Faith — Pistis
Hope — Elpis: Can be Trust (red)
Believe — Pisteuó: Can be Trust (yellow & blue), Can be Faith (green & blue)
Trust — Peithó
Now that we are all totally confused, I’m going to try and separate these four for you and then try and show you how they relate to each other.
Faith — Something you HAVE (or don’t — differs in amounts) (a noun)
Only looking at a few verses in the book of Matthew we see that faith:
Can come in all sizes
Mt 8:10 — When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.
(More than usual — it’s great!)
In the book of John 17:5 the disciples famously asked Jesus to increase their faith — and ironically it was linked here to forgiveness — When a brother that sins against you seven times seeks your forgiveness every time after he has sinned — you must still forgive him.
Can be seen — usually by our actions
Mt 9:2 — Some men brought to him a paralyzed man, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.”
We often say, action speak louder than words and in this case it is definitely the truth — when we truly believe in forgiveness, and in a God that forgives us our sins every — we will not shy away from asking Him for forgiveness.
Faith often has a visible outcome
Mt 9:22 — Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment.
(Faith often leads somewhere — in this case it led to healing)
It’s a prerequisite to action — God acts when he sees faith.
Mt 9:29 — Then he touched their eyes and said, “According to your faith let it be done to you”
Reminds me of a friend of mine’s son. We would visit them from time to time and when his son was still small he often told us that his dad can fix everything. Even if something that I had broke, he would look up to his dad and say, “My dad can fix everything, can’t you dad?” This is the kind of child-like faith that God reacts on. Not only CAN he fix everything, but He waits for us to ask Him to fix whatever is broken or give us whatever we ask for in prayer.
It can impact other people
Mt 15:28 — Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
(It pleased Jesus and prompted him to act someone else’s behalf)
Intercessory prayer is beautiful Christian concept and as Christians we truly believe that God does not only act upon our own needs but also on behalf of other people’s needs if we ask him in faith to invervine.
It is limitless
Mt 17:20 — …”Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
(No limits to what is can accomplish)
When it comes to faith — the sky’s the limit we say, but in this case there are no limits to what faith can accomplish.
Hope — Something you NEED — Your foundation in life :)
People have foundations of many kinds -
In Act 16:19 we read for instance how people set their hope on financial gain.
“When her owners realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities.”
Hope is a forward projection of good! A desire for all good or “goodness” to prevail and as Christians we know that God is good, amen? He is the ultimate good and that is why as Christians we can easily say as Psalm 42:5c teaches us “Put your hope in God”.
But hope is more than just a desire (which is based on feelings). For us as believers, hope is based on the character of God himself. The never changing stable foundation on which we can build our lives.
Let’s look at Romans 5:18 as an example:
“Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
We see here how hope became the foundation from which Abraham, you could say “launched his faith” and believed in the promises of God.
Romans 15:13 teaches us that God himself is the Hope and that the presence of God in the form of His spirit is a source of overflowing Hope to us.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 15:13)
Believe — it is focused on someone or something — “unwavering confidence/dedication” in someone or to something. Something you DO as well.
If you believe in something or someone it shows your confidence or dedication to that thing/person and this usually leads us to act in a way that corresponds with what you believe in. If you tell me that you believe that tomatoes are the best fruit/vegetable that man can eat, but you never eat tomatoes yourself, it sure does beg the question if you truly believe this to be true.
Or if you say you believe that “John Smit” (as an example) it the best candidate to be our next president but on election day you put your cross next to someone else’s name then either your belief in “John Smit” has changed or you never believed in him as the best candidate at all.
In the world we live in people believe in many things, but as you remember from a previous sermon of mine, the belief in self is very popular today and in many cases even replaces traditional belief in a deity or deities. Let look at a few passages in the Bible and see what we actually should be believing in:
In answered prayer
Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours (Mark 11:24)
In the power and fulfilment of the Scripture
He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! (Luke 24:25)
After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. (John 2:22)
In Jesus for our Salvation
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. (John 3:16&18)
In the promises of God
Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” (Rom 4:18)
In the judgement day and the resurrection of the dead
For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.(1 Thess 4:14)
In Eternal life (as a promise)
And this is what he promised us — eternal life. (1 John 2:25)
These are the things we should believe in and which should occupy our minds and thoughts on a daily basis. Believing in things of this world only leads to disappointment, but believing in the things we have just mentioned is of eternal value.
Trust — Like believe, trust is focused on someone or something — “an unwavering confidence/dedication” in that someone or something.
The Greek word here is the same as the word for “believe’’ and often is used interchangeably but can also mean persuade or confidence.
Things I hear often are:
- Do you trust the system / the government / this particular newspaper / the markets / the facts — and in doing this we are not talking about people in particular but more in a general sense of the word. We are basically asking ourselves if something is the real deal?
- We also use it to speak about people. You either trust someone or you don’t. Why?
Because trust is very much based on experience. By your experience with someone or something you are persuaded to trust or have confidence in that person/thing.
Luke 16:11 “So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?”
We see the picture that Luke paints for us here — The way worldly wealth here is handled becomes the foundation for either trusting or not trusting a person onwards with true triches.
We do that with each other as well. We trust people as far as they are trustworthy and the only way to know if a person is trustworthy is through experience with that person.
It’s interesting that John 3:16 does not say that whoever TRUSTS in Jesus will not perish but have eternal life, but whoever BELIEVES. Here we see a key difference between trust and believe. We often say that seeing is believing and yet people often read the word of God without believing in what it says. It’s like reading about a miracle in a book. You read it with your own eyes, but because you have not experienced it yourself, doubt remains in your heart. In Christianity, faith in Jesus as God born man, who died, rose from the dead — and all because he loves us and had to become the lamb that dies in our place on the cross for our sins, is therefore a prerequisite to obtain eternal life and no amount of experience will bring you to the point of believing these fital Christian truths.
After believing in Christ as Lord, you start to experience Him in a new way. Suddenly the Word of God opens up to you and you start to see things from a new perspective. Your old God-less worldview makes place for a biblical worldview and the more you read and believe this, the more you start to TRUST in God’s Word, in his promises, in God himself, and this is what leads to more Hope, because we said earlier on that Hope is based on God’s character and on what He can do and not on my circumstances or what I can do.
That is why so many people in the world really do not have any hope, because they never look up to God as their source of Hope, never believe in Him as the source of all hope and never get to experience God and put their trust in Him fully.
CONCLUSION
To add these four words together I would say it all starts with FAITH — that comes from God and He gives it to all mankind — in different capacities but always enough faith for us to BELIEVE in him as Lord and Savior of mankind. Those who put their FAITH in Christ and BELIEVES in Him as the source of all HOPE, will start to experience a change in the way they see themselves, other people and the world around them and God himself and in this process of Spiritual growth, you come to TRUST Him more and more.
This is not a very long sermon today, but I never intended to go into these four topics extensively, but rather wanted you to see the difference between the four of them and how they related to each other. Amen?
