Faith That Moves Feet

This Sunday’s second reading from Hebrews [11:1-3, 8-16] offers us one of the most stirring passages in all of Scripture. You’ve likely heard it quoted at funerals or seen it referenced in discussions about faith:

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” [11:1].

The passage goes on to tell the stories of biblical heroes — Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Noah — but not in the way we might expect.

These aren’t tales of people who had everything figured out, who possessed unshakeable certainty about God’s plans. Instead, they’re stories of men and women who acted on promises they knew they would never live to see fulfilled. Abraham left everything familiar to journey toward a city “whose architect and builder is God” [11:10], but he never saw that city completed. Sarah laughed at the impossible promise of a child in her old age, yet somehow found herself participating in the very miracle she had doubted. Moses glimpsed the Promised Land from Mount Pisgah but died before setting foot in it.

These stories challenge our common understanding of faith. Many of us grew up thinking faith meant passive belief — intellectual assent to certain truths about God. But the Hebrews passage suggests something far more dynamic and demanding. As a covenant friend once put it, these are people whose faith moved their feet, not just their minds.

Noah didn’t just believe a flood was coming — he spent years building an ark when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Abraham didn’t simply assent to God’s promise of descendants—he packed up his entire household and started walking toward an unnamed destination. Even Sarah’s skeptical laughter somehow didn’t disqualify her from participating in the very promise that seemed so impossible.

This is the distance between passive belief and active trust. These biblical heroes lived a faith so real that it reorganized their entire lives around promises they couldn’t yet see fulfilled. The author of Hebrews describes them as people who “acknowledged that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth” [Hebrews 11:13]—not because they felt spiritually displaced, but because their actual behavior made them look odd to their contemporaries. Who builds a boat when there’s no water? Who leaves a comfortable life to wander toward a destination they can’t name on any map?

This active trust also meant living with a particular kind of uncertainty. These weren’t people who acted because they could guarantee successful outcomes. Abraham and Sarah invested everything in a promise they knew wouldn’t be completely fulfilled in their lifetimes. They would see Isaac born, but they would die long before their descendants became “as numerous as the stars.” Yet they lived as if God’s future was more real than their present circumstances.

This brings us to one of the most challenging aspects of biblical faith: it often requires us to act without seeing the full picture. The Hebrews passage tells us these heroes “died in faith without having received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar” [Hebrews 11:13]. They lived in what we might call the “between times” —with one foot in their present reality and another in God’s promised future.

I’m reminded of Moses, who after forty years of leading the Israelites through the wilderness, was taken by God to Mount Pisgah and shown the Promised Land he would never enter. From that mountaintop, Moses could see the fulfillment of promises made to Abraham centuries earlier, but he would die before setting foot in Canaan. The ancient rabbis suggested that Moses died with “the kiss of God” on his lips [Deuteronomy 34:5]— not as punishment, but as the intimate calling home of one who had served faithfully without seeing the complete fulfillment of what he’d worked toward.

This kind of “Pisgah faith” appears throughout history. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used this passage from Deuteronomy in his final sermon, acknowledging that he might not live to see racial reconciliation, but he had been to the mountaintop and glimpsed the promise. How many parents invest everything in raising children whose full potential they’ll never see realized? How many teachers pour themselves into students whose greatest contributions will come decades later?

The question becomes: What can we glimpse from our own Pisgah? What promises are we called to see and greet, even if we don’t live to see their complete fulfillment?

This perspective fundamentally changes how we understand faithful living. Most of us are comfortable acting from our strengths, giving from our resources, serving when we can see how our efforts might succeed. We prefer the manageable, the calculable, the realm of human possibility.

But the faith described in Hebrews 11 operates differently. It’s not about what we possess or can accomplish through our own abilities. Instead, it’s about God’s capacity to work through our limitations, our uncertainties, even our doubts. Sarah’s skeptical laughter didn’t disqualify her from the miracle she questioned. Abraham’s lack of a clear destination didn’t prevent him from becoming the father of nations. Noah’s apparent foolishness in building an ark became the preservation of life itself.

This divine way of working doesn’t mean God will fulfill all our wants or make our personal dreams come true. Rather, it invites us to live as if God’s promises are more real than our current limitations. What would it mean to match our creeds with our deeds, to forgive as we would like to be forgiven, to nurture others as we hope to be nurtured? What would it look like to show less concern about the divisions that consume so much of our energy and more concern about the souls who struggle in silence around us?

The heroes of Hebrews 11 weren’t guaranteed success. They were sustained by something deeper: trust in the promise-maker rather than confidence in their own calculations. They planted trees whose shade they would never enjoy, built foundations for cities they would never inhabit, invested in futures they would never fully see.

This is what Duke University theologians Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon called living as “resident aliens” —a phrase they used as the title of their 1989 book by the same name. Resident aliens are people whose primary citizenship lies elsewhere, which frees them from the impossible burden of trying to make this world work perfectly according to their expectations. They live with a different kind of vision. They hold the present lightly and the future hopefully. They labor in the now while trusting in the not-yet. They believe that God’s promises are not confined to individual lifespans or human schedules.

I think of a close friend who spent almost four decades leading his family’s business through radical changes, knowing that the “old ways” that had worked for his grandfather and father would no longer suffice. He jokes that he and his wife “wandered in the wilderness” for thirty-five years — five years shorter than the Israelites. A few years ago, as he prepared to pass leadership to the next generation, he had what he describes as his own “mountaintop moment” — not as dramatic as Moses on Pisgah, but a clear sense that his time was complete and that others must now lead the company forward.

Like Moses, my friend had to exhibit faith that whatever challenges lay ahead, God’s presence would be sufficient. He had to trust that the changes he’d initiated, the values he’d instilled, the relationships he’d built would bear fruit in ways he might never see. His feet had moved in faith for decades; now he had to trust others to continue the journey.

This kind of faith requires what we might call “holy imagination.” It’s the ability to see beyond our present circumstances to glimpse what God might be doing in and through our limitations.

In the early years of the 20th century, my great-grandfather, Edward Leslie Crawford, farmed modest land near his church, Pisgah Associate Reformed Presbyterian, in what was then a very rural Gaston County, NC. By worldly standards, he wasn’t very successful — no sons to help with the work, no financial windfalls, no expansion of the family holdings. He knew that he would be the last Crawford to work those harsh fields of red clay and stubborn rocks.

But from his own Pisgah perspective near the end of his life, he could see that God’s promises were being fulfilled in ways he never could have imagined. The abundance he had hoped for was growing and thriving in the extended families of his four daughters, including our grandmother Lib. And so, what looked like the end of a farming legacy was actually the beginning of something far richer and more lasting.

This is the faith that moves feet without guaranteeing destinations, that acts on promises without demanding proof, that plants seeds without insisting on seeing the full harvest. It’s faith that can laugh with Sarah at the impossible and then participate in the miracle. It’s faith that can build with Noah when the skies are clear and wander with Abraham toward an unnamed city.

As we live in our own “between times” —with one foot in our present reality and another in God’s promised future—we’re invited to consider: What can we glimpse from our own Mount Pisgah? What promises are we called to see and greet, even if we don’t live to witness their complete fulfillment? And how might that glimpse change the way our feet move in faith today?