(Read Hebrews 11)
I knew and deeply loved someone who had walked through the lowest and darkest valleys imaginable. She looked at me and said, quietly, “I don’t know how I can endure this.” What made it stop me cold was who she was. This wasn’t someone on the edges of faith, testing the waters. She was a woman of deep, consistent, sustainable faith — someone who had walked with God long enough that her roots should have been unshakeable. And in one sense, they were. She hadn’t stopped believing. She hadn’t walked away. But the shadows of uncertainty and loneliness had moved in anyway, and they were her constant companions now as she faced what was ahead. She had been instrumental in my own walk with Christ. She knew Scripture far more deeply than I did — I couldn’t surprise her with a verse. All I could do was encourage her, and just be there. Many years after her death, I opened my Bible to Hebrews 11 and couldn’t stop reading. Images of her were emblazoned in my mind. What got me wasn’t the miracles. They were cool, but a phrase kept appearing — “without having received the things promised.” Abraham, Moses, the prophets — all lived and died holding onto something they never fully saw in their lifetimes. And somehow, that had been enough for them. I closed the Bible, knowing that despite the fear and the shadows, that was enough for her, too.
R.C. Sproul once wrote that “only faith can see the future, as it receives the promises of God.” That’s a sentence worth noodling on. Because faith isn’t optimism. It isn’t wishful hoping or positive thinking dressed up in religious language. It’s a particular kind of seeing — a vision that bypasses the eyes entirely and lays hold of something more solid than what we can observe. The writer of Hebrews said it plainly:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
— Hebrews 11:1
Think about that word: substance. Not shadow. Not impression. Substance is something real, something you can put weight on. Faith isn’t the absence of proof. It’s the presence of a different kind of proof. It’s the soul’s grip on what God has already declared to be true, even when our circumstances are telling a completely different story.
God created life. All of it. Every atom, every system, every spinning galaxy, and every stubborn dandelion pushing through a crack in concrete. He made all of it out of nothing by the sheer force of His word. That’s not a small detail — it’s the foundation. If God can speak a universe into existence, His promises aren’t just good intentions. They’re declarations from Someone who has never once been unable to do what He said. Every promise He’s ever made carries the full weight of that creative power.
For no matter how many promises God has made, they are Yes in Christ.
— 2 Corinthians 1:20
Not some of them. All of them. Every promise finds its answer in Jesus. When we hold onto a promise of God, we’re not grasping at abstractions. We’re grabbing hold of Christ himself — the living fulfillment of everything God has ever spoken. And through faith in Him, something remarkable happens to us:
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
— Romans 5:1
Made right with God. Think about what that means for someone who knows exactly how not-right they’ve been. We carry our failures, our secrets, and the full weight of our worst moments into every quiet room. And faith, simple, trusting, persistent faith, closes the gap between what we are and what God has declared us to be in His Son. Not because faith is some kind of spiritual achievement we earn. But because faith reaches out and takes hold of what God has already provided.
The hard part is that this kind of faith doesn’t always feel like much when you’re in the middle of a dark season. People going through life’s traumas would tell you that. You open your Bible and read the promises, and part of your brain sits there running the numbers, stacking up evidence from your circumstances against what the page is saying, and the skeptic in us concludes that the math doesn’t always seem to work. That’s when Paul’s instruction becomes less of a suggestion and more of a lifeline:
We live by faith, not by sight.
— 2 Corinthians 5:7
Not by what the symptoms say. Not by what the bank account says, or what the silence after a desperate prayer seems to say. Faith asks us to let God’s word weigh more than our experience. That takes effort. Real effort. It means showing up to pray when prayer feels empty, reading the Word when it doesn’t immediately comfort, and trusting the character of God when His timing makes absolutely no sense to us.
But here’s what’s also true: faith grows. Paul tells us that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. The more we immerse ourselves in what God has said, the more our faith develops substance and muscle. A faith that is fed becomes a faith that can carry weight. It starts to magnify what God is doing even in the places we’d rather not be. It enriches the ordinary moments with the awareness that a faithful God is present in all of them. And over time, it lets God’s glory shine through circumstances we once thought could only produce despair.
Some problems don’t disappear overnight. Sometimes, they never disappear. But the strongest believers will sit across from you and tell you that their faith came out of that season with a different kind of weight to it. Not necessarily triumphant or at peace every minute, but anchored — because they’ve learned what it means to hold onto something they can’t see, and find that it kept them going, gave them hope, and let them endure.
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.
— Romans 15:13
Let your faith grow. Feed it. Stretch it. Take it into the hard places and watch what God does with it there. His promises don’t need your circumstances to cooperate in order to be true. They already are.
Faith just opens your eyes to what He’s already done.