Having grown up in the Word-Faith camp, I felt like I knew pretty much everything there was to know about faith, and living by faith.
Then my faith was tested, and I found out how little I knew.
Over an extended period of time, I worked all the faith formulas I knew to resolve a situation in my life. I made positive confessions, declared and prophesied, praised…everything I knew. Nothing budged. And then I did something I never, ever thought I would do.
I gave up.
I don’t mean that I gave up in an I-don’t-believe-in-God-anymore kind of way. I gave up in an I-don’t-have-the-strength-to-keep-this-up-so-I-have-to-leave-it-in-God’s-hands kind of way. All my confident confessions and declarations were reduced to, “Lord, I lean upon You to get me through this day.” I felt like a failure, like I really didn’t have enough faith.
And that’s when things began to change. And that’s when I realized my picture of faith had been incomplete.
I thought about the verse in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And I realized that active faith actually requires an apparent contradiction. When everything around me looks exactly like God promised it would, I no longer need any faith. It is when everything looks the opposite of what it should look like that I need faith.
The other thing I learned is that faith is a lot more than believing something is true, or believing hard enough for something to happen. Faith means trust. I can believe a plane will fly, but not have the faith to get on board. To have faith, I have to entrust myself. It wasn’t until I leaned myself fully on the Lord that I saw His intervention on my behalf. So when I thought my faith had failed…that was actually the point when I had the most faith.
Here’s the interesting thing about faith. We need it to believe the Bible. I don’t mean we need to believe the Bible; I mean we have to have faith to trust in what it says. Why? Because there are many apparent contradictions in it!
Consider the following:
- How is it that the same God who commands, “Thou shalt not kill” commanded the nation of Israel to commit ethnic cleansing, including killing women and children?
- How is it that a God of mercy is also a God of justice?
- How is it that God is sovereign, yet responds to the prayers of people?
- How is it that God is both Three and One at the same time?
There are those who would take these apparent contradictions as evidence that the Bible is unsound, using them to logically pick apart our belief in God. But my faith actually begins when I can no longer explain these things. I have to trust God with the aspects of Him, and the aspects of Scripture, that I cannot understand or explain. I have to choose to trust Him when it does not make sense.
When I have faith in God and His Word, I am saying I realize there is a bigger picture that I’m not seeing, which if I could see it, would resolve the apparent contradictions. But I don’t have to see the big picture to trust and believe the God is good, that He always has mankind’s best interests at heart–that He always has my best interests at heart. I know it because I have faith.
At its very core…faith is a trust based on relationship. When we stop trying to work it as a formula and live it as part of a love relationship with God, I believe that’s when we are tapping into what faith really is.
Wayward Son
Musician. Composer. Recovering perfectionist. Minister-in-transition. Lover of puns. Hijacker of rock song references. Questioner of the status quo.
I'm not really a rebel. Just a sincere Christ-follower with a thirst for significance that gets me into trouble. My quest has taken me over the fence of institutional Christianity. Here are some of my random thoughts along the way. Read along, join in the conversation. Just be nice.
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Glad you aren’t one of those Old Testament Christians then.
Good post. Thanks for writing it.
My personal thoughts on faith were shaped by a cancer diagnosis. In a moment of terror, I was forced to ask, “what do I believe because I want (maybe need) to believe it? what is really true?”
In that search, I settled on two conclusions:
1. Faith is the gift of hearing God speak. Because faith is a gift
and because it comes by hearing.
2. Hope is the confident expectation that I will see the goodness of God regardless of the outcome to my circumstance.
From there, I learned to cultivate hope (through many of the habits you discussed) and receive faith.
The cultivation of hope required a forfeit of my desires regarding the outcome. Yet the ability to stand in a place of praise at the darkest hour actually created the conditions necessary to hear. Trust was easy in that place.
All that to say, I’m glad you gave up. My experience says that’s a wonderful and liberating and death-defying choice.