Faith Thoughts

Sometimes my mind gets locked into word-association games. Driving home from work, I listened to a song about faith, and began thinking of words related to its concept. I came up with belief, trust and confidence, and tried to relate them to faith, to discern their differences in meaning. First, they all flow from faith. The dictionary tells us belief is an idea or concept held to be true. It can be based on evidence, or not. Trust and confidence are closely related as the belief that something won't let us down. That's why we assume a rope won't break, when we're dangling by it a thousand feet above jagged rocks. After checking any number of dictionaries, the Biblical definition of faith is--wonder of wonders--far and away the best. “Now faith is the essence of things being hoped, the evidence of things not having been seen.” (Heb 11:1) Faith is an abstract idea, rather like love. They both require actions to demonstrate their existence, and a source other than the person exercising them. Really, that's not such a strange idea. When we breathe, we expend energy from our food's metabolism. But that metabolism won't happen without the oxygen we breathe in. It's a “chicken or egg” conundrum, answerable only by attributing them to God. Jesus provided a prize example of faith's purpose in Luke 17:5, when he and his students discussed forgiveness. They couldn't see how it was possible to forgive someone 490 times for the same offense, so they asked Jesus to increase their faith. They understood that Jesus was the source of faith, and they didn't even have diplomas from seminaries. But there's another conundrum: To ask for faith, one must exercise faith. So where does one get that faith? Jesus inferred the answer in vs. 6: “If you had faith like a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and be planted in the sea'; and it would obey you.” That “mustard seed” faith is like the drops of water needed to prime an old-fashioned pump. Okay, where do we get that mustard seed of faith? Its existence is assumed, like God's existence. Faith is part of our nature, given to us when God blew his Spirit into Adam's nostrils. Like the human spirit and the capacity for love he gave us, our faith was perverted when we sinned. Since we have warped spiritual vision, we search for tangible things in which to invest our faith, and find plenty of perversions to fill the bill. Only when God's spirit takes the scales from our eyes can we see the only worthy Object for our faith. At that point we have a choice to make: We can either close our eyes to God's beauty, to continue searching for some perverted substitute, or we can gaze at His beauty in wonderment, and place that mustard seed of faith in Him. That's only the beginning of a new-lifetime of choices between growing that faith, or killing it. Thanks to His Holy Spirit, Jesus' disciples know which way to go ... we just have to do it!