What Is Faith?
What is faith? The dictionary defines faith as “Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, an idea, or a thing.” Faith is about believing in someone or something. People believe in all sorts of things. You got up believing that the sun would get up too. You ate some breakfast cereal, made from crops grown in unknown fields and packaged by unknown people and you believed it was good and safe for you to eat. You got into your car and drove on the road believing that the other people on the road would obey the traffic laws. You sat in a chair you knew nothing about, believing that it would support your weight.
Most people would say that those are reasonable beliefs, because you are dealing with visible things that you have past experience with. However, when it comes to believing in the invisible, the rules change for many people. They say that it doesn’t matter what you believe in as long as you’re sincere. Well that certainly isn’t true in the physical world is it? If that chair you sat down in this morning has a bad leg, it’s going to fall when you sit on it, regardless of what you believe about it. Same is true of the invisible world, the spiritual world.
What you believe in will have consequences for your life. In fact, what you believe in regarding the invisible world really will direct your life, because the invisible world is just as real as the visible. This visible creation we see around us in our world and universe was created by the unseen hand of the invisible God.
Faith is a journey to know God, the creator of the universe. You begin the journey by making a choice to search for God. God loves it when people make that choice
Jeremiah 29:13 (NIV) You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
Faith is not about a half-hearted search for God. Faith is about seeking for Him with all your heart. If you do that, God promises that He will let you find Him. For those who don’t seek, God keeps Himself hidden. Faith is in some ways like learning to ride a bicycle. We all enter the world depending on what we can see. It’s like riding a tricycle. There’s not much danger of tipping over, not much risk. At some point, you’ve got to get off the tricycle of only believing in what you can see. You must get on that two-wheeled bicycle of believing in the invisible. You will take a few falls at first, but eventually you’ll begin to really believe in that invisible world.
You’ll see that it is very real, that it can take you places and help you do things that you wouldn’t have imagined were possible. So today I want to talk about what faith is. I want to challenge you to believe with me, to say even though I don’t understand it all, I choose to believe.
Listen to my May 2, 2010 message “What is Faith?” (message-notes).
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Related posts:
- Faith That Wins
- Faith Drives Away Worry
- Grow Into A Woman Of Faith
- Looking Forward With Faith
- The Power Of A Mother’s Faith
And without faith it is impossible to please God. – Hebrews 11:6
Good reminders here, Dan. Appreciate it.
Brad