We see four essential components of saving faith in this passage, reflected in the experience of this Roman centurion. What Jesus Christ does here is he holds this centurion up as a perfect example of faith.
What enabled this centurion who had a servant who was a very dear friend of his as well as a servant? What was it that enabled him to put such implicit trust in Christ the Saviour? The first thing is that this man developed a tremendous need. That's the first ingredient of faith always. Faith is built on realism. It's possible for a man, a woman, young person to just be drifting through life and everything is going fairly well for you. Things are slotting into place and you have no idea that you're spiritually dead. ‘How do I come to be here? Is there a God? Can he be known?’ You never ask these questions and you never feel any need of his forgiveness or his power or his help. How are you ever going to get faith? Something has got to happen which shakes you out of your complacency. For some it may be a great tragedy, something that changes the whole life. It may be a bitter disappointment. All the ambitions you have hoped for and relied on suddenly smashed and broken down. For others it may be nothing out externally catastrophic; it may just be that suddenly within yourself life goes sour. However it happens, before you can have faith there has to be a great sense of need arise in you, and then you begin to open your mind to the bigger issues.
Perhaps you are confident that you can be happy without God. What God will do before he can help you is send into your soul a great thirst, a great need. Conversion starts here. You begin to think, you begin to see through this world and all its enthusiasm for merely material things, and it's confining itself only to the here and now, the things you can touch, feel, possess. You see through it, and you begin to see all the sinfulness, the wretchedness and selfishness, and the exploitation and the unfairness in the world. Many good things you see, but you see wherever human beings tread there's always a seam of rottenness and corruption, trouble and disorder, operating at the same time. Have you come to this point? What if it isn't true? What if I have been brainwashed to believe that everything has come about by a sheer accident? Even beautiful things, ordered things, so much perfection in creation – is all this really sheer accident? As a result of accident after accident, and the process of natural selection, we are told that you get wonderful music and wonderful artistry. You have begun to wonder about these things. Is this credible, this view that is pushed upon us from all directions these days in our modern atheistic society? You become dissatisfied with the idea that your life is nothing, that one day it will be gone and you will be forgotten, and there is no life beyond. The universe will either experience the ‘Big Freeze’ or collapse into a massive conflagration, and the whole of humanity will be destroyed and all the particles will fly apart and everything that's ever happened in history will have been utterly, utterly pointless. You don't want to believe that anymore. You think it doesn't add up. ‘I need an explanation, I need a purpose, I need a meaning, I begin to feel there's a Creator, there's a great Designer. I begin to feel that this great testimony of people who believe in God has substance.’ So many things have got you thinking and wondering. But you are against the tide, so many friends will say, ‘What are you thinking about? What are you talking about, that's nonsense, forget it.’ But it's getting hold of you. That must have been how it was with this man, for him to commit himself to taking such an interest in the Jews over whom he served.
What is faith? Faith is not what most people think it is. If you were to ask most people what is faith they would give you an answer which really amounted to this: it’s a sort of tenacity or willpower; faith is the power to believe in something which is not intellectually credible. We hear the stories from bygone years of how the poor sorrowing widow, at the close of the war, would not believe that her loved one was really killed in action, and would always expect that somehow there had been a terrible muddle and he would come home. People would say that woman has great faith. Well, she may have had great something – we don't wish to take away from what the effects that love can have in people clinging on to impossible hopes. But that is an absolute misuse of the term faith. Faith is not willpower. It is not hoping against hope that something is true which is improbable. But if you are a cynical kind of person, and you take a lot of convincing, and you think that's faith, then you will say to yourself, there's no hope in me being a Christian, because I'm a realist. I cannot screw up my reason and my intellect and my mind and into a ball and throw it in the waste paper basket and just cling on to something in blind hope. I can't do that. Well no one expects you to do that because that does not happen to be what faith is.