Faith is believing and trusting, having a conviction and being assured. Many times, Christians say "Have Faith". However, we often miss the point, and think of faith as a quality we must have or something we must try to build. We mistake faith as a kind of "spiritual fitness test", as if by effort and exercise we can "build up" our levels of faith the same way we go from 4-pound to 6-pound dumbbells.
Jesus told the woman with the issue of blood, "Your faith has made you whole".
What is faith? Faith is simply knowing God, knowing He is our Father and trusting Him. The more we know Him, the more we trust Him. Faith is not an inner quality that we build up like "endurance" or "strength". It's not about us pushing ourselves to the limits and setting new challenges.
When we take God out of the equation, faith becomes pointless. It becomes a meaningless idea, even a self-deception.
"You must have faith and do this," someone might say. It's not about whether others think you have faith. Forget about everyone else, forget about all the judgment and snobbery and pride that gets mixed in like poison. Just go back to the bare bones of it, which is you trusting in someone who loves you, who will never hurt you, who knows you better than you know yourself and knows everything.
Faith is realising that I'm small, that I'm weak, that I can't know everything. But, I know that God knows.
Faith is born of this trusting relationship, this dependent relationship. When God asks you to do something or to trust Him over something, it will be based on this relationship. You will know what God has asked of you if you listen to Him. Faith is holding to Him and trusting Him above what we feel and what the world around us seems to say. Faith is clinging to God.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for - if God has promised us something, even though we don't see the results yet, we can continue to trust God. That's how David trusted God while fleeing for his life. That's how Abraham trusted God and followed Him, believing Him from a son and heir.
Mankind likes to turn everything into a formula and system, because that is what we understand. But God is bigger than our ideas and our man-made wisdom and proves us wrong. We often tell people what to believe and what to trust God for, rather than let them be rooted and built up in Him. We often dictate to people what faith looks like and how it should be worked out, when actually God asks different things of different people, and doesn't fit into our neat little boxes of prescriptions and ideals. We need to also let people dive into God's Word and hear from the Holy Spirit.
Faith is not based on self-delusion. Often, we start believing in the healing and in the miracles and in monetary prosperity, and not actually in God. Let's just cut all that out and focus on having a living, real relationship with God. Faith is simply living out that relationship.
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