Faith, hope, love. We hear these words, and we may sometimes wonder, what do they really mean and what do they have to do with me?

Well, in 1 Corinthians, Paul, a leader of the early church, is addressing the church in Corinth. And he’s saying, “hey guys, you were doing so good and now you’re being torn apart because you’ve lost sight of what matters most.” In other words, they took their eyes off Jesus. And Paul reminds them that when they were focusing on Jesus, they were experiencing the things of the kingdom and he continues telling them that what they were experiencing of the kingdom now is only a sliver of what we will one day experience.

That our relationship with God right now, is only a picture of what we will one day see for ourselves in the kingdom and that’s when Paul says “these three things remain: faith, hope and love”. In essence he is telling the church that of all the things to know, this is what we do know: faith, hope and love; This is what we can hold onto, what we can experience here and now as followers of Jesus.

And the first one of them is faith. Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see. (Heb 11:1 NLT). Faith tells us that we can move forward in life, not because of what we see, but because of what Jesus has said, not because of what we do, but because of what he’s already done. That even though we don’t physically see God with our eyes, we have confidence in who he is and what he has done. That is faith.

And all over the Bible God talks to us about faith, people ask Jesus to increase their faith, Jesus says to people “you of little faith”. Faith is a big deal in the kingdom. And we talk about it so often that we often attempt to grow our faith by looking at ourselves, by trying harder, figuring out how to manufacture it in our life. But that’s not how faith works.

In Heb 12:2 we are told to “fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith”. In other words, whenever we fix our mind, our eyes, our heart’s attention on who God is and what he has done, we take ourselves and our ability and our performance out of the equation….and THAT’s where our faith can grow.

He, JESUS, is the author of our faith. He is the one who perfected our faith and so whenever we need to be confident in things that don’t seem to be realities yet, like when I don’t see it, when I don’t feel it, we turn to Jesus.

So, how do we do that? How do we fix our eyes on Jesus? Well, take a look at this with me; these are the names of Jesus.

What I want you to do is pick the one your heart is drawn to and think about what that actually means.

For instance, if you choose that Jesus is _______, think about why? How is this true of him in your life?

Write it down, remind yourself of it and as you do, that’s fixing our eyes on Jesus, and as we do that our faith grows and we get to experience more of the realities of the Kingdom in our lives.