Musicals aren’t my favorite movie genre, but I enjoy most of them. One that I especially enjoy is Paint Your Wagon. Not my favorite, but I do enjoy it. Hard to be a favorite if two of the lead actors and, therefore, singers are Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood! But, I do enjoy it.

If you’re familiar with the musical, the basic story is about the California gold rush and the rising up of such gold rush towns as "No Name City," the fictional gold mining town in Paint Your Wagon. It is, shall we say, a rough lifestyle without many rules.

One of the storylines involves a traveling preacher who arrives on the scene. He is the musical’s moral conscience and periodically pronounces God’s coming judgment against No Name City. In the song, "Here It Is," the preacher sings his sermon to the citizens of No Name City:

At one point in the song, the preacher asks the citizens:

Will you go to heaven, will you go to hell?

And such is the state of the citizenry they sing out in chorus:

Go to hell!

Then:

I thought about singing a segment of the song and having you take the part of the citizens, but it didn’t seem appropriate to have the congregation singing, "Go to hell!"

As the musical progresses, Ben Rumson, the Lee Marvin character, "Partner," the Clint Eastwood character, and some of their cronies are starting to see the gold on their claim running out. As they wonder what they’re going to do next, Rumson has a moment of inspiration. Observing someone bringing their gold dust into the saloon in exchange for cash, Rumson notices the amount of gold that falls through the floorboards. Suddenly, the idea comes to him: build tunnels underneath all the saloons—and there are plenty of saloons in No Name City—and collect the gold that falls.

And so they do. Which, of course, leads to the end of No Name City…just as the preacher predicted. Well, whether or not the Lord was involved in "gobbling up the town and swallowing it down" is a matter for debate. But one thing is clear, the complex system of tunnels dug by Rumson and the others erodes away the city’s foundation and causes it to collapse. The musical ends with No Name City a collapsed heap of lumber and mud, and Rumson, the "wandering star" moving on to the next stop.

The writer of Hebrews might describe a life without faith as looking something like that. In his account of Abraham and his journey of faith, the writer describes Abraham as a stranger in a foreign country, a man who was "looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God." Nothing unsure or shaky with faith, but rather a "city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God." Isn’t that an interesting description of faith? Yes, there’s the classic, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." But I am intrigued also by the author’s description of Abraham’s faith journey, "he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God." There is a definition of faith for today!

Life brings events that will shake the very foundations of our lives—the death of a loved one, serious illness and disease, the loss of a job, the breaking up of a relationship. If we have no foundation in our lives, such events threaten to gobble us up and swallow us down…just like No Name City. Not events of a "reckoning day" from the Lord, but events that are part of life in a broken and fallen world.

Do you ever find yourself asking the question—when you’re aware of someone with no faith foundation at all and they’ve experienced a horrific tragedy in their lives—do you ever find yourself asking the question, how do they endure it? How do they make it through that tragedy without a foundation of faith? I find myself asking that question a lot. And it breaks my heart. How do they stand up in the midst of a great tragedy with no foundation of faith? I would not want to be in that position. Faith is the foundation that holds us up, that helps us to persevere through whatever tragic events occur in our lives. I wouldn’t want to live without it.

Let me suggest some things to you that faith is not, before concluding with some thoughts on what faith is.

First of all, faith is not something that guarantees us a life without events that will threaten our foundation, as we learned in Jesus’ concluding remarks on the Sermon on the Mount regarding the two types of houses that were built. Both houses, the house built on the rock of Jesus Christ and the house built on sand, suffer storms battering against them. The same storms come—the storms of illness and disease, the breakup of a relationship, the death of a loved one—the same storms come. Life in a broken, fallen world is like that. But, it is the house built on the foundation of rock that stands. Faith is not a guarantee that no earthquakes of tragic events will threaten our foundation. It is, however, a way to persevere through those events. Faith is a city with foundations whose architect and builder is God.

Something else that faith is not; faith is not intellectual suicide. There are those in the world who scoff at positions of faith, who see faith as a crutch for the emotionally weak, who see faith as an irrational choice for a rational mind, a medieval position of superstition in an enlightened world of logic and reason.

The past three days our staff and some other leaders in our church attended a Leadership Summit. Yesterday, on our way to the closing session of the Summit, a car passed us on the highway. On the car was a bumper sticker that read, "Dare to Think for Yourself." It was right below one of those "Darwin" emblems. You know the one I’m talking about? The fish symbol, which is a symbol for Christianity, with the word "Darwin" inside the symbol. Plus, the fish has little tiny legs. You’ve seen that symbol? Well anyway, there below that symbol was this bumper sticker that read, "Dare to Think for Yourself." Now, to be sure, I don’t know any more about the driver of that car than that—those two items on the car. For all I know, it could’ve been someone driving to the same Leadership Summit! I doubt it, but I guess it could’ve been. What I do know is the combination of those two items is often a cynical comment about faith. There are those who "think for themselves" and then there are those who numbly and dumbly have "faith." For some, to have faith is to commit intellectual suicide.

I beg to differ however. There are many rational and convincing proofs for Christian faith. I find those proofs in nature; I find those proofs in the testimony of Scripture; the witness of believers from the "ancients" written about by the author of Hebrews, to the eyewitnesses of the ministry of Jesus, to brothers and sisters today; I find those proofs in my own experience with God in my life.

This question of whether faith is "rational" or not led me to return to this book, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Faith. In the book, Strobel seeks answers to some of the major objections to Christian faith—the "big eight," as he calls them. As a former reporter, Strobel’s style is to seek out and interview some of the leading thinkers in Christendom, asking questions about these major objections. He interviews highly-educated, intelligent, deep thinkers; people such as Dr. Peter Kreeft who has a doctorate from Fordham University, post-graduate studies at Yale and has been a philosophy professor at Boston College for 38 years; William Lane Craig who has doctorates in philosophy from the University of Birmingham, England and in theology from the University of Munich. The book, as you might imagine, can be a bit heady. But it is very helpful in the area of Christian apologetics. Reading the book, one can feel very confident that holding to Christian faith is not a matter of intellectual suicide. Standing with other great thinkers like C.S. Lewis, Walter Martin and Ravi Zacharias gives me confidence to say that holding to Christian faith is not irrational, a setting aside of intellect and reason.

Having said all of that, however, it must also be said that faith is, well, faith. Gathering all of the evidence, reflecting on it and coming to an informed, rational conclusion about the existence of God is one thing. But it is, ultimately, faith in something that is unseen. It is a belief that God is active and involved in our lives when God remains unseen. It is a belief that God is faithful to His promises even when we do not hold a signed contract to that effect in our hands. It is a belief that God is building a city with foundations right now, today, in our lives even though that foundation cannot be produced by engineers. It is a belief that God is building a city with foundations that will be ours in the future, a place where the sorrows and pain of this life, where the "present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us," (cf. Romans 8:18). Faith is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." We can gather all the evidence. We can make a decision based on sound and rational reasoning. But there is always an element of faith to it. A leap of faith. Not a blind leap, but a leap nonetheless. The denouncers of faith in God, those that cynically challenge us to "think for yourself," have their own leaps of faith. They won’t admit it, but they do. Faith in the superiority of the human mind, humanity as the ultimate development in the evolutionary chain. They have their own leaps of faith. I choose to place my faith in Almighty God.

I mentioned that several of us recently attended the Leadership Summit. Yesterday, the Summit ended with a talk from Bill Hybels about inspiration. As an example of inspiration, they showed a brief video about a young man named Patrick Henry Hughes. Patrick was born without eyes. He also was born with a tightening of his joints that prevents his limbs from ever straightening. Blind, confined to a wheelchair, you can imagine the despair of this family. However, at an early age, Patrick showed an affection and ability for music—as early as the age of two being propped up at a piano, finding the keys and pounding out simple melodies. Now, Patrick is a student at the University of Louisville and, with the help of his father, plays with the marching band. Someday I hope to show you the video of Patrick and his father that was shown at the Leadership Summit. You might have seen him on the Oprah Winfrey show a while back and we do have some video of that appearance, a video that is very similar to the one we saw at the Summit. Let’s take a look at that right now. (Show video)

After watching the video about Patrick, we returned to the Summit broadcast live from Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago. There, on the stage, was Patrick at the piano. He began to play and sing a song he’s written. As I sat there listening to his song, I realized the words were about today’s topic—faith and the assurance of things hoped for, the certainty of things not seen, a city with foundations whose architect and builder is God. I wrote in my notebook for the Summit the words of the chorus:

(a reference, I assume, to the words of Jesus in the Bible)

That, my friends, is faith. In the midst of such adversity, the triumph of the human spirit built on a city with foundations whose architect and builder is God.

And God can do the same for you. Whatever adversity. Whatever tragedy. Whatever difficulty you face in life, God is a "sure and present help," building a city with foundations, established and available to you right now…and for eternity.