What the heck is faith?

Could Faith Be A Bigger Word Than We Think

 

Faith is a loaded word. Only five letters long, yet it has impacted the world in every single generation. It’s a word that has been rejoiced over and cried over. A word that has drawn people together and driven people apart. It has been divisive and inclusive. It has been researched and taken for granted. Some would say they have a lot of it, while others would say they have very little. There are those who believe it to be a gift from God, and others who believe it must be earned.

 

But what is it? What does it mean to have faith? Is there a certain amount we need to access the heavens? Does having too little disqualify us from an audience with God?

 

Ask someone who loves the Bible, and they’ll likely quote Hebrews 11 and say something like, “It is the ability to believe what you can’t see.” But can a word so profound and ancient be reduced to a verse in the Bible? Can we get curious about it? Can we look at what faith does before we define what faith is?

 

So, here’s my take on faith. Before I begin, I want to be clear that this is not a definitive statement. In fact, what you’re about to read is simply my initial thoughts put into words that are entirely inadequate to express what my heart is processing.

 

Faith is not simply an expression of belief or a capacity to believe in what I cannot see. It is the manifestation of a relationship that flows from love. When I am loved, I develop faith in the source of that love, whether it comes from God, Jesus, a friend, a pet, or even myself.

 

Which means that faith, like love, is always fluid and rarely static. It grows as love grows. Like trust and belief, it is designed to flourish in relationships.

The challenge to this way of thinking is that faith is so often connected to religious thought and practice. If a person has faith, they are usually identified by what they believe and what they do on particular days of the week.

 

And that was me!

 

As a pastor, we never admitted it, but everything was often geared towards Sunday or the church. It was where faith could be seen and expressed without shame. Declarations and prayers were made. Sermons were preached, worship was sung, and service was visible. Spiritual maturity was often measured by church attendance or how long someone spent reading the Bible. The more a person was known for these practices, the more faith people assumed they had.

 

Which kind of worked, and still kind of works for many people… until it doesn’t.

 

Health issues, financial crises, relationship breakdowns, and unanswered prayers would test a faith that was only really visible on a Sunday. We came together to hear about a good God, but our own personal lives were unravelling faster than a loose thread being pulled.

 

These crises of faith then affected our connections at church. People wondered if we had backslidden or whether the world had become too much of a temptation. Our declining church attendance raised red flags among the faithful. Whispers became gossip, and before long, those moments when our faith seemed to falter became bigger questions about whether we had faith at all.

 

But what if a faith crisis isn’t actually a faith crisis? What if it’s a theology crisis? What if our faith has grown to a point where it needs to grow through something new? What if the things we believed have taken us as far as they can, and we now find ourselves wondering what faith looks like when God’s goodness seems beyond our reach?

 

This is where faith and love can combine powerfully, or not at all.

 

I grew up being taught that God loved me, but it took many years for me to discover that I could actually feel that love rather than simply affirm it intellectually. That changed during one of those theological crises that I initially thought was a crisis of faith.

 

In the lowest moments of my life, I learned more about love than anything I had ever been taught. I experienced it through the lives of those who loved me. Biblical concepts of forgiveness, grace, mercy, and kindness were being expressed personally towards me. And there was something about that love that drew me closer to God rather than driving me away from Him.

 

Love became a passion, and that passion fuelled a curiosity that led me to discover God beyond my Sundays and religious practices. It wasn’t that those practices were bad or wrong. I had simply reached a point in my life where I longed for this love to be present in every day and every moment. And for that to become a reality, I had to become more comfortable with love than I was with my theologies.

 

My theologies kept leading me back to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I had spent my whole life trying to do good and rejecting what was bad. All I seemed to accomplish was attempting to do good while often choosing what was bad. I was sitting beneath the wrong tree, eating fruit I was never designed to eat.

 

I had to find life. I had to find the Tree of Life, the tree that represented Jesus. The One who called Himself life. The One who didn’t remind people of their sin but invited them into His love, where they could be known by that love.

 

I learned love by experiencing love. I could not simply be taught something that needed to be experienced. I discovered that I first had to learn to love myself before I could fully experience the fullness of this divine love. And that was a challenge…

 

All my life, I had learned through experience the effects and power of shame. It drove me towards performance and external behaviours that distracted people from seeing my shame. At the time, I didn’t realise how much it prevented me from feeling the very love I preached and taught about.

It was only when I began taking the first stumbling steps towards loving myself that love awakened something eternal within me.

 

I was made by the One who is love, to be loved and to love. It was through that revelation that I discovered what faith felt like.

 

It is easy to have faith in someone you love. It’s as natural as breathing and as awe-inspiring as the tallest mountains. I no longer measured myself by faith, but by presence. And I’m not even sure that can be measured.

Yet, through every challenge that has come my way this year, my faith has not been shaken, nor has my trust in God’s love wavered.

 

Twelve months ago, I still had an appendix, and I didn’t know I had prostate cancer. I’ve also been living with a skin condition that has robbed me of sleep for the best part of two years. But none of this has caused me to wonder where God has gone in the midst of it all. None of it has challenged a faith that is now founded in love rather than theology.

 

I can say that “God is good,” but I no longer feel the need to defend that goodness or convince anyone that my health challenges are anything more than opportunities to experience more of His love.

 

So, faith looks a little different than it once did. But that little difference manifests in ways that go beyond anything I experienced before.

 

Faith is now seen in the everyday. It is discovered on walks through a national park or during swims in the ocean. It is found at the tables where I sit and in the quiet moments I spend alone. It is still there in the gatherings I attend and when I read my Bible, but now it looks a little different.

 

When I began to understand that God is love, I began to discover that love is an even bigger word than faith.

 

 

Matt