Faith - what is that thing, anyway?

Faith. What is it? I’ve been walking with Jesus for 35 years now (sometimes not so well) and I am still struggling to find better language to speak of this thing called the Christian life.

Faith is certainly belief. It is trust. But it must be more. And it isn’t just “belief in” – read “intellectual assent to” – a set of theological statements written in a creed somewhere. That’s not personal, and one of the distinguishing characteristics of Christian life is the ability to have a relationship with a personal God.

So faith is about belief in, trust in, a Person that we have a relationship with. It’s like marriage. You make promises and vows to each other. But for promises to gain any traction in the couple’s life, both parties have to believe the promises made to them, and they have to trust that the person they marry will continue to be who they appear to be in the future. And, we should add, there needs to be an understanding that backing out, changing your mind, reneging on your promises is not an option. It's a lifelong promise, a pledge unto death. To fail in any of those areas will spell disaster for the relationship.

The book of Hebrews puts it this way: faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. It's almost a circular thing between faith and hope. Faith is assured of what it hopes for, and hope is akin to faith in future realities.

You look up faith in Christian dictionaries and such and you get what you might expect: belief, trust and obedience to God’s revelation in Christ. Or, as the Baptist hymn puts it, Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.

What’s with the obedience bit? Isn’t that just a keeping of the law, doing the right things and not doing the wrong things? Well, yes and no. First, it should be acknowledged that at a fundamental level no human being can perfectly keep the law of God without ever blowing it. And even if outwardly it appeared that a person was doing and not doing all the appropriate things, there is the matter of the heart that is always the heart of the matter. What are our motives for what we do? What are we driving at? How does our behavior relate to our belief about God?

I’d like to define the obedience part as living according to God’s promises, or living as if what God said were true and that things would happen just as He said. So obedience becomes the outworking or outward manifestation of the inner belief and trust and disposition of the heart.

Maybe we can make it even more simple. We live from what we believe. Regardless of whether a person believes in God or not, is a hedonist or not, is a decent person or not – we all live from what we believe. We can call what we believe to be true about anything and everything, taken together, “faith.” And how we live in light of our “faith” we can call “obedience.” By this definition, we all practice an obedience to our faith. The obedience will look different from person to person based on their “faith.”

Okay, maybe that wasn't really more simple..... Enough.