Michael Todd - Crazy Faith Workbook: Its Only Crazy Until It Happens

The beautiful thing about faith is that its never too late to build it.

MICHAEL TODD

I gnaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian doctor who started practicing around 1846 in the maternity ward at General Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland. Soon Dr. Semmelweis noticed something strange happening: many mothers were dying of a mysterious disease called childbed fever.

After digging into the problem, Ignaz discovered that women giving birth in one specific ward were dying at a rate five times higher than women in a second ward. At first, he could not figure out the cause. The wards used nearly the same techniques, the climate was the same, and overcrowding was not the issue, as the second ward was always more crowded than the first ward. The only discrepancy that Ignaz could find was that the first ward was staffed by male doctors and medical students while the second ward was staffed only by female midwives.

Eventually, Ignaz had a breakthrough when one of his fellow doctors became ill and died after performing an autopsy. It was a tragedy, but Ignaz noticed the pathologist had died from the same illness as the patient he was examining. (Ironically, that illness was childbed fever.) Ignaz also realized the male doctors and students on the first ward regularly handled corpses and then went to deliver babies without washing their hands or anything in betweenwhile the midwives on the second ward never performed autopsies or touched cadavers.

Ignaz suddenly had a revelation. Maybe the sickness was somehow transferred from the patient to the doctor. Maybe the pathologist caught something while he was examining the body of the women who had died. Could that really be the cause?

Of course, this is an obvious connection for you and me. We know today this is how disease is transmitted. But a couple hundred years ago, even doctors still believed that illnesses were caused by bad air or bad blood. Without realizing it, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis had discovered germs. He started having all the male doctors and students on the first ward wash their hands and instruments with a chlorine solution before delivering babies.

Mothers stopped dying. Lives were saved. It should have been good news.

However, as it turns out, the doctors of Ignazs day didnt like being told that they needed to wash their hands before practicing medicine. They felt that Ignaz was accusing themthe doctorsof giving diseases to their patients. So, out of pride, the medical establishment rejected Dr. Ignaz Summerweis. They refused to hear him or adopt any of his recommendations. They cancelled him before cancelling was a thing.

A few decades later, Louis Pasteur would publish his work on germ theory, which revolutionized the medical practice and proved Summerweis correct. By then, Ignaz had suffered a nervous breakdown and been consigned to an asylum. He died at the age of forty-seven from sepsisthe same bacterial infection that he had spent his life trying to fight.

Its a depressing story, but it illustrates an important principle: crazy is often a matter of perspective. What people consider crazy right now can be customary tomorrow. And much of what we consider normal in this moment was crazy in the past. The same idea applies to your lifeincluding your spiritual life. Those goals or dreams or plans that seem impossible to you right now may feel different once you grasp the power of this thing we call faith. Why? Because things are only crazy until they happen.

Faith is a word that is common in both our culture and the church. Its a word youve used many times yourself. But what does it mean? When we talk about having faith or living by faith or those other phrases that come so naturally to us, what are we actually saying?

The Bible gives us an answer to that question in Hebrews 11a chapter that many people call The Hall of Faith. As you will see, this passage of Scripture not only provides a concise definition for faith but also reveals what faith looks like through the lives and examples of several heroes from the Old Testament. Lets examine the first half of that chapter:

1Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2This is what the ancients were commended for.

3By faith we understand that the universe was formed at Gods command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

4By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.

5By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: He could not be found, because God had taken him away. For before he wastaken, he was commended as one who pleased God. 6And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.