Recently, I had to make a decision. Not life-changing but significant enough to require some thought. It also involved money. Not that much, but still, it was money. Under normal circumstances, it would have taken me a few minutes. What gave me pause was that this decision had to do with a goal that I have been working toward for several years and have not quite achieved. I wondered whether it was time to throw in the towel.
Actually, what I really wondered was what God thought about it. Was He saying, “John, keep it up. You’ll achieve your goal eventually.” Or was He shaking His head because I hadn’t figured out that it is a dead-end? How many disappointments does it take to realize that God wants us to move on? To put it another way, what’s the difference between faith and stupid? How does one tell the difference between persistence in faith and stubborn refusal to acknowledge that God is not behind your agenda?
After meditating on this question for several days, I did what any theologically reflective person would do. I posted the question on social media. What struck me was how certain many of those who responded seemed to be. They made it sound easy. The difference was a matter of humility, someone said. It was merely a question of discerning whether you were seeking to glorify God or yourself another proposed. Or it was a simple question of guidance. All you have to do is follow the leading of the Holy Spirit. Some seemed to point to circumstances as the deciding factor. You move forward until you have to stop. Others sounded as if the solution was more a matter of paying closer attention to an inner feeling of some kind.
Who Are You Calling Stupid?
Perhaps they are all right to some degree. But one thing is clear to me. The difference between faith and stupid is not as apparent as one might think. To the unbeliever, faith looks like stupid, and to the believer, stupid sometimes looks like faith. For this reason, the best place to begin is with a definition. Faith, on its most fundamental level, is simply taking God at His word. Faith is an exercise in trust, and the effectiveness of faith depends entirely on its object. Place your faith in an unreliable person or an undependable object, and it makes little difference how firmly you believe. You will still be disappointed in the end.
According to this definition, the primary difference between faith and stupid is a matter of presumption. Stupid is a conviction that goes beyond God. Likewise, stubbornness is what stupid looks like when we apply it to action. Stubbornness is perseverance that is misdirected. We keep moving but in the wrong direction. Yet, like Peter, when he attempted to dissuade Jesus from taking the path that would lead to the cross, we are convinced that we are acting in God’s interest (Matt. 16:21–23).
The difference between faith and stupid is a matter of presumption.
If stupid sounds harsh to modern ears, perhaps we would prefer the Bible’s term for this, which is “folly.” It sounds more elegant, but it’s really no better. Among other things, folly’s most fundamental characteristic is its lack of common sense. “Even as fools walk along the road, they lack sense and show everyone how stupid they are,” Ecclesiastes 10:3 complains. The fool ignores the obvious. The signposts are there, but the fool doesn’t bother to consider them. He prefers to go his own way. It can be hard to discern the difference between persistent faith and stubborn refusal because we are prone to folly. Like Peter, our natural bent is to be of the wrong mind. We often replace God’s concerns with our own.
The Cure for Folly
The good news is that there is an antidote for stupid. The cure for folly is wisdom, and the Bible tells us that wisdom is offered freely to any who will take it. James 1:5 promises, “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.” James goes on to qualify this wildly generous promise by warning that: “. . . when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do” (James 1:6–8).
I used to think that his point was that, to receive this wisdom, we must believe that God will give it to us before we ask. There are similar promises in Scripture (Matt. 21:22; Mark 11:24). But I suspect that there is more in view here. We have trouble accepting God’s wisdom not because we think that He will refuse to grant it to us. It is because we are not convinced that it is wisdom. The cure for folly is not only to take God at His word but to trust that He has a better idea of what is going on than we do. Where God’s directive is clear, we do not need to question. Nor do we necessarily need to understand why He has commanded it to be so. It is enough to know that it is God who has told us what to do.
But where there is no explicit directive, God calls for a different kind of faith. We might call this cooperative or even collaborative faith. The journey of the Christian life is more than a simple matter of command and response. As those who have been created in His image, God grants us the dignity of making plans and choosing options. We set goals and strive to reach them. We may move in one direction, then decide it is not the right one and change course. As Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.”
What is more, neither our success nor our failure in what we attempt is necessarily a reliable measure of either God’s will or His approval. Solomon’s career was at its peak when his heart “turned away from the Lord” (1 Kings 11:9). Jesus’ moment of victory came at the point when His life and ministry appeared to be an abject failure (John 19:30).
Pillar & Cloud
We tend to envy ancient Israel because of the way God guided them during their wilderness journey. Exodus 13:21 says, “By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night.” We would like a pillar and cloud of our own. Yet, the certainty that God was guiding Israel did not keep them from questioning their direction (Num. 21:5). Nor did it protect them from disobedience or rebellion. Knowing what God wants us to do doesn’t always mean that we want to do it.
Even when God guides us, He does not always spell out the fine details in advance. According to Hebrews 11:8, “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.” Likewise, the apostle Paul declared, “And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there” (Acts 20:22). Actually, Paul knew a little of what awaited him. After saying this, he went on to add: “I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me. However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace” (Acts 20:23–24). Divine guidance does not come with a detailed map, but it does provide a trajectory.
Divine guidance does not come with a detailed map.
Those in Christ do not need a pillar of fire or a cloud of glory because the Holy Spirit indwells them. Yet even His indwelling presence is no guarantee that there will not be times when we feel uncertain about the direction we should take. Acts 16 describes how Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia because the Holy Spirit kept them from preaching the word in the province of Asia. It would be interesting to know exactly how the Holy Spirit closed the door, but Scripture doesn’t tell us. Luke says that when they tried to enter Bithynia, the Holy Spirit wouldn’t allow them to go there either. One almost gets the impression of Paul and his team bumbling around Asia, trying one direction and then another, until God finally sends him a vision in the night of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him to “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” In Acts 16:10, Luke writes, “After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.”
If even Paul sometimes felt muddled about which direction to go in the age of miracles, we should not feel too badly if we also have moments when we lack clarity about whether or not to continue on a certain path. When it comes to what God has written, faith is a matter of taking God at His word. And when it comes to those things that God has not spelled out for us, faith is a matter of trusting that He will still guide us, using ordinary and sometimes even extraordinary means to take us where He wants us to go. Desire, circumstances, and the mysterious prompting of the Holy Spirit all work together to move us along the path that God has laid before us. And even if we happen to make a few missteps along the way, the destination is still sure because we are not traveling alone. “I am with you always,” Jesus says, “to the very end of the age” (Matt. 28:20).