Faith is a concept that is essential to Christianity and is a key theme of the New Testament. Paul encourages Timothy to “fight the good fight of the faith” and there are several instances in the gospels where Jesus commends individuals for their faith. When the Roman centurion tells Jesus that He doesn’t need to come to his house in order to heal his servant, Jesus marvels over the man’s faith, “Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Mt 8:10). As Christians, we understand that it is our faith that defines us as Christians. We are to be people of faith. Because it is such a central theme in the Bible, it is also a common topic for Christian sermons, books and songs. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding in the Christian church about what it means to live as people of faith. Simply put, Biblical faith is a continual response of trust to the gracious initiative of God towards us that enables us to receive the life that He is giving us through Jesus and in the Spirit.
There are a variety of misunderstandings of faith within Christianity that are often fueled by secular concepts of faith. In our culture today, we frequently hear that all kinds of things are possible if we “just have faith.” The main characters in many of the Disney movies, for instance, are told that wonderful things can happen if only they will believe. This view of faith regards it as a sort of an autonomous power we possess that can change things.
We see this understanding when people talk about how “faith changes lives” or “faith heals.” But this view of faith is abstract. It presents faith is some sort of generic subjective or psychological quality that we impose on our circumstances or our lives. It is mental or attitudinal, a state of mind such as being optimistic, or idealistic, or positive. This “faith” isn’t attached to anything in particular—it has no object apart from itself. What it really amounts to is faith in the power of my faith. The source of this kind of faith then is myself. Faith becomes nothing more than a power we use to get what we want and the value of faith is in the amount we are able to muster. I have often heard Christians talk about faith as if it is something we need to work up in ourselves—something that starts with us. This plays into a contractual idea of a “vending machine” God—if we can put in the right amount of faith, God will give us what we want.
But is this the Biblical notion of faith? In Mark 5:34, when Jesus tells the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years that her faith made her well, does He mean that she was healed because she had enough faith? What exactly was Jesus commending in the centurion? Was it simply that he had morefaith than others did? Does Jesus work with us according to the amount of faith that we have?
Trying to “have faith” according to these misunderstandings can have an enormous impact on our lives. When we think of our Christian faith in this way, we are thrown back on ourselves and our own resources. We are tempted to try to generate adequate faith by our own willpower. If our prayers seem to go unanswered or if we encounter difficulties in our lives, we may wonder if we are to blame because we didn’t have enough faith. Many years ago I was in danger of miscarrying my first pregnancy. Some well-meaning Christian friends encouraged me to “just have faith” and that God would heal me. After a few weeks of struggling to adequately believe I would be healed, I miscarried. I was not only devastated, but left to conclude that I lost the baby because of my inadequate faith.
However, the reality is that faith is not a commodity I posses in a contractual relationship with God. Jesus was not conditioned into healing the centurion’s servant because the centurion possessed a certain quality or amount of something called faith. When Jesus tells the woman that it was her faith that made her well, He is not saying that she was healed because she had enough faith. Unfortunately, even if we know that this is not Biblical faith, we are often still tempted to behave as if it is when we are struggling in our lives. We try to come to God “in faith” in hopes of conditioning Him into doing what we ask.
Rather than being something that originates with us, Biblical faith is understood to be a response made to the initiative of God. God reveals Himself, His character and purposes to His creation, and we respond to Him in faith—trusting in Who He’s revealed Himself to be. When Jesus commends the centurion for his faith, He is commending his response of faith in Jesus. The centurion understood more about the heart and authority of Jesus than many others and responded accordingly with trust in Jesus. When Jesus says to the woman after she was healed of bleeding that her faith had made her well, He is confirming that placing her trust in Him for healing and wholeness was the right and fitting response to Him. She came to the right person and her trust was not misplaced.
Because faith in God is a response to His initiative towards me, my faith is defined and shaped not by how much faith I possess, but by the One in whom I have placed my trust. My response of trust fits the revelation and work of the triune God. I am trusting God to be the God that He has revealed and is revealing Himself to be. This aspect of faith can be illustrated in our relationships with one another. My trust in my husband, Gary, is a response to and so is shaped by who he actually is. For instance, I have faith that he is faithful, insightful, and good at repairing things around the house. However, I don’t trust him to perform heart surgery on me! And I don’t believe that he could operate if I just had “enough faith.” My faith in Gary is grounded in the character of Gary as I have come to know him.
My faith, therefore, is not in my faith, but in the heart, character, and purposes of the triune God, most fully revealed to us in Jesus. So, we can have faith in God only as we come to see Who He is. In Hebrews 11:11, Sarah’s faith is described in this way: “she considered him faithful who had promised.” She knew something about the character of the One who had promised her a son—that He is faithful—and she trusted He would be true to His own nature.
Notice that Sarah is not trusting in the promise that God made, but in the God who made the promise. The object of our faith is nothing less than God Himself, the One we meet in Jesus Christ and who reveals Himself to us in and through His Spirit. We are ultimately trusting not in our faith but the God of our faith, not the promises of God but the God of the promises. We are not trusting in the rightness of our doctrinal statements, but in the living triune God to whom our statements hopefully bear clear witness.
Because the object of my faith is God Himself, then Christian faith is more of a dynamic relationship than a once-for-all decision or assent to a particular set of statements about God. As I see who God really is—His self-giving love, His grace, the wonder of His triune life that He has come to give me a share in—trust in this God is drawn out of me. And as I turn my eyes again and again to Him, my faith in Him grows. This is why we need to be reminded again and again of the true nature of faith and the character of the One in whom our faith is grounded. This is why the New Testament writers spend so much time expounding on the nature and purposes of God—to feed the faith of their readers.
Fundamentally, Christian faith is trusting that God will be true to Himself, that He will be the One He has revealed Himself to be. What does this mean? Well, we are trusting that God will be faithful to continue His good work in our lives, whatever circumstances we are in (Phil 1:6). We are not trusting that God will give us all that we think we want or that He will keep us from suffering, but that He is at work to make us more and more fully His children and He is not thwarted by our circumstances (Ro. 8:38-39). We trust that Jesus has united Himself to us and the He Himself is our life, our righteousness, our joy and our peace (1 Cor. 1:30; John 11:25; 14:6, 27; 15:11; 17). We have faith that He is truly present in our lives—that He meets us fully in this moment (Mt. 28:20). We can know Him, rest in Him, enjoy Him anew every day, no matter what trials we face. We trust that His presence and grace is the true and last word on who we are—not our past, our finances, our relationships, etc.
Responding to God in trust frees us to receive from Him what He is graciously giving to us, which is ultimately Himself. To trust God is to draw near to Him with empty hands, not hands full of expectations or our own agendas. When we hold onto our expectations, then we, at that moment, are robbing ourselves of seeing, knowing and living in the faithfulness of God. To hold onto my agenda means I am really trusting in my agenda. I am not trusting that God’s work in my life is better than any agenda I am tempted to cling to. Looking to where God is at work in my life and trusting Him to be faithful frees me to receive what He is actually giving at this moment instead of refusing it because it isn’t what I expected.
Living by faith is an ongoing, dynamic process that never becomes automatic. I find that in my life this means that over and over, I need to look away from myself and my circumstances to the triune God and be reminded again of who He is. I am continually surprised at how easy it is for me to forget how good, faithful, present and active God is and become tempted to let fear or anxiety fill in the gap. Our faith is renewed not by trying hard to work up faith, but by placing ourselves again before God, seeing Him again in Jesus, and having Him draw out the response of trust. Fortunately, God desires to grow our trust and confidence in Him and is at work in us to do just that. He never throws us back on ourselves, calling from heaven to “just try harder.” God loves to show His heart and purposes to us to feed our ability to live more and more out of trust in Him.