John 4:50 Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way; thy son liveth. And the man believed the words that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way
Like the other gospels, John is largely a book about faith in Jesus Christ, believing who He is and what He can do. It is about faith in God and in His Son, the Lord Jesus. Sometimes we can be kind of murky when we talk about faith. We try to define faith and something comes up a little bit short. We talk about the object of faith and the amount of faith. All those things are good things to consider, but at the end of the day faith is an abstract. You can’t taste, smell, or see faith as an object. Faith is largely a decision. When we talk about faith, we tend to focus on something that may miss the mark when we talk about faith in the Lord Jesus.
Let us consider three kinds or types of faith, all of which are important. First, you have the faith in Who Jesus is. That really is where you have to begin. There were people who rejected Christ, but believed His miracles because they had no choice. They had seen Him do them, but they attributed His miracles to the devil or other things. They did not acknowledge Jesus as God’s Son. Jesus had said about the disbelief of His own neighbors in Galilee that a prophet has no honor is his own country. It is easy to dismiss someone if you know them sufficiently well to take them for granted. The people who lived close to Jesus said, “Isn’t this Joseph the carpenter’s son? Don’t we know His mother and His brothers?” They totally missed Who Jesus is because they were just close enough to be misled by their familiarity with Jesus.
In contrast, it was the Samaritans, people that were outcasts in some ways, who came to the conclusion that He is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world. When Jesus met a Samaritan woman at a well, she began by saying, “I perceive that you are a prophet,” then she comes to the conclusion, “This is the Christ. He told me all things that I ever did.” The first object of faith is in Who Jesus is. It is not in what He can do or what He will do, but in Who He is. If I acknowledge Who Jesus is, what He can do is not a hard bridge to cross.
The second decision is what Jesus can do. That is where we get into the story in John 4:46. A nobleman had a son who was sick and about to die. He came to Jesus and said, “Come and heal my son.” Verse 48 says, “Then said Jesus unto him, Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.” “Ye” is plural. So, He is kind of addressing the father, but He was looking beyond the father to the crowd who had seen His miracles but rejected Who He is. He is saying, “You have seen my miracles, but unless you see miracles, you won’t believe.” Verse 49 says, “The nobleman saith unto him, Sir, come down ere my child die.” He is impatient. “Jesus, just come.” Why did the nobleman want Jesus to come to his house? It is because he wanted Jesus to heal his son.
That brings us to a third type of faith. Not faith in who Jesus is and not faith in what Jesus can do, but faith in how Jesus should do what He does. This man very understandably assumed that if Jesus was going to heal his son, Jesus had to be at his house near his son to perform the miracle. Verse 50 says, “Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way; thy son liveth. And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and went his way.” Later when the father returned home and found his son healed, he heard from his servants that the son had been healed the very hour that he had talked with Jesus. The Bible concludes the story by saying that the “father knew that it was the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth; and himself believed, and his whole house.”
Sometimes we know who Jesus is and that Jesus can do something, but we don’t trust God to do what He can do in the way we think He should do it. If you can trust God for an answer, you can trust God with the answer. So many times, we are not specific enough when we pray, and I think that is something for which we should strive. But, there is a ditch on the other side where we are so specific, know so precisely what we want, that we assume that the only way for God to answer the real need is for Him to answer the need exactly the way we think it needs to be done.
God can see farther, knows more, and has more power, so sometimes I am asking for God to do something in a certain way, when God knows He could perform the same answer to prayer in a better way. The great thing is that a God Who has the power to do something that needs to be done has the wisdom to do it in the right way. That is why I need to not just trust my life to God, but I also know He will do the right thing in the right way at the right time. If you can trust God for an answer, you can trust God with the answer.