“Even. If. He. Does. Not.” Remember this phrase? Three exiled Hebrews said them a long time ago. They spoke them to an angry potentate in the more dire of circumstances. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stood before the gigantic golden statue the king of the foreign land had erected in his own honor. The law had been passed; every citizen of the kingdom was required to bow low and pay homage to this statue, and the king the statue represented.

What do the words gram, liter, square foot, parsec, minute and pound have in common? They’re all units of measurement. They all are used to set a length or weight or distance or some other quantity with assigned values so that we can have a common point of relation when we want to discuss the amount of some solid, liquid, gas, time or anything else. There is really nothing we can’t assign values like these to; even the largest or smallest known things in our universe can be measured in some way.

But how do you measure something intangible? How do you quantify the amount of that which is not a physical entity? How, for example, do you measure something like faith?

It’s not just an intellectual question; the reason it’s not is because of how important faith is. Without faith, one cannot please God (Heb. 11:6). And what are the works God requires? At the center of all of what we might attempt to do for God and His glory, the Lord is looking for the act of faith – belief in the One He has sent (Jn. 6:29). This is a sobering thought – that the center piece of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is our faith. Surely, then, we would want to do the same thing we do with everything else in the world, which is to know how much we have of that which is so essential.

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