We’re spending this summer thinking about faith for ordinary days. Two weeks ago, we talked about what faith actually is: not something you manufacture, but heart that trusts and receives what God has already offered in Jesus Christ. Last week we talked about God as the initiator. If he already sent his Son to die for us, how much more does he walk with us in love as his children? God loved you first. He continues to hold you.

Hold onto that, because this week’s readings take us somewhere harder. We’re going to look honestly at what it feels like to live inside that faith and love when life doesn’t seem to be going all that well.

There is a saying of Jesus that people use as a comfort: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” (Matthew 10:29, ESV) It is nice to know that even the sparrow has the Father’s attention. But, here’s the thing: Jesus never said the sparrow wouldn’t fall. Jesus didn’t say that your Father stops the sparrow from falling or that a sparrow’s life is not fraught with uncertainty and danger. Jesus only said that your Father is there when it happens. God doesn’t rescue the sparrow. But the sparrow is never apart from the Father.

We like to say God has a wonderful plan for our lives, and I believe that’s true. But God’s idea of wonderful and ours might be very different things. Jeremiah found this out the hard way.

Jeremiah doesn’t sound like a man at peace with his calling. “Oh Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed” (Jeremiah 20:7, ESV). That word “deceived” is worth a closer look. The Hebrew underneath it isn’t primarily about lying. It’s the word you’d use for wooing, enticing, seducing. Think of early courtship when you’re putting your best foot forward, not lying exactly, just presenting the attractive version of yourself. That’s the idea Jeremiah is reaching for. 

Jeremiah feels like God’s call had shown him the good parts without showing him how hard it would get. Jeremiah said yes, the way you say yes to someone you love, not yet knowing what that love would cost. 

Now he knows. And he’s furious.

Yet Jeremiah can’t quit, either. “There is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” (Jeremiah 20:9, ESV). Faith, for Jeremiah, isn’t a comfortable conviction. It’s closer to a compulsion. He can’t walk away from what he believes, even when he wants to. And by the end of the passage, nothing is resolved. He’s praising God in one breath and asking why he was ever born in the next. (see Jeremiah 7:13-14)

Here’s the thing I want you to hear if you’ve ever prayed and felt like there was nothing but silence in return. That is a real tension and faith doesn’t need to resolve it. 

There is a genuine hiddenness to God, and the scriptures fully acknowledge it. Luther called it the Deus absconditus, the hidden God. Scripture is full of faithful people who cried out from inside that silence. Jeremiah wishes he was never born. Even Jesus, praying in Gethsemane: “Father, if there is some other way, please let’s find it.” And God said there was no other way.

Paul writes near the end of his life, “I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day” (2 Timothy 1:12, NIV). He isn’t claiming to understand his circumstances. He’s saying he doesn’t need to, because he already knows who’s holding him. There’s a difference between faith that waits for an explanation and faith that doesn’t need one.

Knowing whom you’ve trusted doesn’t leave you passive. Paul spends most of Romans 6 explaining what that trust actually looks like in a life, and he’s blunt about it. Don’t let sin reign in your mortal body. Do not present your members to sin. Those are active words. God hasn’t reached inside you and removed all the temptation so you can float through life like you’re in a field of daisies. Faith is not a sudden infusion of infinite willpower. It puts Jesus at the center and builds your life around that.

Faith isn’t content to keep on sinning. Not because we’re earning anything. The gift is already given, free and clear. But how do you receive a gift that cost someone everything and stay comfortable living in the very thing that put him on a cross?

Often your willpower will not be enough to overcome sin. You may need to analyze your life and your surroundings and look for structural changes you can make so you don’t present the temptation in the first place. That is one way of avoiding temptation and it doesn’t involve willpower (which often collapses under pressure).

I’ll tell you something small and a little embarrassing. My wife Kelly bakes cookies, and I have learned the hard way that I cannot simply decide to have only one. Willpower has never once solved this. What works is a towel over the plate so I don’t see them every time I walk through the kitchen. I could pray about that plate of cookies all afternoon and I would still have eaten half of them by dinner. Removing them from my sight does what prayer alone could not.

That’s a small example. The principle isn’t small. Maybe your version isn’t cookies. Maybe it’s the phone you reach for the second you’re bored, the drink that’s quietly become two and then more, the temper that flares when you’re running on empty. Faith doesn’t give you a sudden reserve of willpower you didn’t have before. It asks you to be honest about where you’re weak, and to change the structure of your life, not just your intentions.

If you’ve thought about your spiritual growth and wondered if you are growing or even if you have been going backwards, I want to point out something to you about spiritual growth. If you find yourself more bothered by your own sin than you used to be, that’s not necessarily a sign you’re losing ground. You might be three times more patient than you were five years ago and feel half as patient, because your eye for your own failures has sharpened faster than the failures themselves have shrunk. Discontent, in that case, is a gift, not a grade.

None of this erases the cost of living as a follower of Jesus, and Matthew’s gospel won’t let us pretend otherwise. Jesus tells the disciples plainly that following him will set family against family, that they’ll be hated for his name’s sake. He doesn’t tell them not to be afraid. He tells them to fear the right thing. Not the people who can only touch the body, but the one who holds your eternal destiny. And, to be clear, that fear isn’t terror. It’s the kind of fear you have for someone who has real power over you and whom you respect deeply. 

Then Jesus brings in the sparrow from the beginning of our time together in this blog. Two of them, sold for next to nothing, and not one forgotten by your Father. Even the hairs of your head are numbered. Not protection from the fall. Presence inside it. We’ll hear Jesus say something almost unbearably gentle about this in a couple of weeks, that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. Hold onto that. It’s coming.

Faith can feel like a compulsion you didn’t ask for, even while it gives a peace you didn’t earn. Faith isn’t content to keep on sinning. But that drive to change is driven by gratitude, not guilt. And faith does not spare you. Nobody ever promised to spare you earthly trials. But faith is the trust that God is holding you through life’s pain, present with you in it.