A WORTHY PERSPECTIVE-SHIFTING ADJUSTMENT

Decisions we make—from where we live and who we marry, to what we do for a living and what social circle we invite into our lives—all branch from one thing: whom or what we place our faith in. Where this becomes a conundrum is misunderstanding how faith is used, and its nature, but perhaps most importantly—knowing how it differs from belief may adjust the perspective we hold about some of the biggest issues in our lives. Let’s take a look.

TITANS: BELIEF AND FAITH

Faith isn’t synonymous with belief. Belief is simply something someone accepts to be true. The foundation of belief is acceptance. To receive a particular truth by accepting it is to believe something. That isn’t what faith is.

Faith is complete trust or confidence in something or someone. We don’t place complete trust or confidence in something we don’t believe. And in order to trust something, we must accept it first, since that’s what belief is.

PROCESS OF BELIEF LEADING TO FAITH

In order to make a decision, we have to have faith in its eventual actuality; faith in its becoming a part of our reality. We won’t have that faith if we don’t accept the parameters of what it looks like to arrive at that actuality. First comes belief: we accept something is possible based on what we’ve experienced or known before, then place our faith (trust) in something based on that belief.

A ‘FAITHFUL’ DELINEATION

When it comes to decisions, we are placing our faith—our trust—in something outside of space and time, to assist with the thing we’ve decided we want to become manifest in reality.

For instance, let’s say we decide we want a new car. We believe (accept) we can buy a new car by faith (trust) in the process. We place trust in the process of saving up enough money, which we have the faith should create the possibility of eventually buying a car. We accepted the belief that we can get a car, and trusted the process of putting money aside in savings… we made a decision in faith.

TRUSTING THE PROCESS… FAITH IN ACTION

In the above example, we can acknowledge what we placed trust in was, in fact, something outside space and time. The way we know this is in the way we made the decision to go through with the process before we knew with certainty that we were going to be able to buy the car. We hoped, but we didn’t know. We trusted. We trusted in something that wasn’t tangible. It was a practical plan, but the choice to implement the plan without certainty was an act of placing trust in something outside of time, because we haven’t arrived at that time yet.

That’s faith.

NOT JUST FOR THE RELIGIOUS FOLKS

A lot of people who are anti-religious-anything tend to believe they don’t have faith in anything. Don’t be fooled by the world telling you “faith is for religious folks.” We all place our faith in something. We just aren’t always aware of what faith looks like in our lives and the lives of others, likely because of our prejudice towards what we’ve experienced to be “faith” ‘without good works.’ After all, faith isn’t always Christ-centered—there are those whose faith is in the devil, and their works are evil. But the most common understanding about this subject is that faith in Jesus, without works, is dead (James 2:26).

Problematically, a great many of us, Christians and secularists alike, haphazardly place too much emphasis on works without understanding the foundational faith-based incentive.

What’s perhaps worse, sadly, is that a lot of us make serious decisions in life without realizing where our faith lies. 

ONLY TIME TO DO

Faith is powerful. Faith is placing trust in something. Trust is always earned, even if not at first. Sometimes we find ourselves in a position where we must trust quickly, due to timing. When someone says jump during a fire, we trust that jumping will save our lives from the danger of the fire. We don’t have time to think, we just have time to do. So we do what we must, and we trust.

In a nutshell, that is the nature of faith of Christianity. We don’t really have much time to think, we just have time to do.

FALLACY OF ‘ENOUGH TIME’

We think we have time… we believe we have time and we trust in the relativity of just how much time we may have left in our lives… but by placing our faith in an aspect of reality we have no control over (time), we end up in a very dangerous position, spiritually: We end up trusting ourselves with living our lives in the manner we choose, not knowing that we’re jumping into the fire; we place our faith in the ways and beliefs of the world, rather than in Jesus.

WHAT JESUS IS TELLING US TO TRUST

Jesus is saying, “Jump!“—by placing faith in Him. He is telling us to trust in Him and not the world; to trust Him and not ourselves. More than anything, He’s telling us to trust wholeheartedly in His sacrifice on the cross that saved us from having to pay for the consequences of our sins in eternity, for the purpose of freeing us from being deceived by the devil’s lies to live our broken way, instead of Jesus’s redemptive way.

PUTTING AWAY THE REPETITIVE LIFE

We’re free from feeling as though we have no other reasonable choice but to follow the world. This freedom, this process of trusting in salvation from Jesus, is received by believing we have a new start in Christ by being born again through the Holy Spirit. We do this by putting away the repetitive life of sin we’d previously chosen, where we felt compelled to try over and over again to find answers that the world couldn’t give.

DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES OF LEARNED TRUST

For the many of us who struggle with mishandled belief systems learned from abusive relationships and traumas, faith can also be placing our decision of trust into the hands of someone or something that may not be worthy of it. Sometimes, we have to have our trust broken to understand where it doesn’t belong. Even as it goes against the grain, sometimes we experience the same trauma many times before we come to realize that the reason we seem to keep revisiting the same lesson is because we’ve had it engrained into our psyche to more naturally trust something or someone dangerous, unhealthy—ungodly.

TRUST WITHHELD IS A MISSED BLESSING

Some of us have learned to trust blindly, while still others learned to trust something evil because the good we witnessed was threatened, or undermined. Some of us learned through broken innocence the idea that trust is fluid and therefore faith isn’t reliable, and we’ve surrendered to accepting faith isn’t as powerful as some people make it sound. That’s their belief. Their faith is then manifest in the way they trust that trust, itself, is dangerous to give away; so they trust in themselves, the very person who learned, misguidedly, that trust shouldn’t be given. That type of faith backfires because trust is then kept as though it wasn’t meant to be given to the very thing worthy of it.

WHAT OUR LACK OF FAITH REALLY IS

Some of us have not learned efficiently or properly—and now we misunderstand—how belief and faith operate. We abuse faith, ignore it or neglect it; we set it aside and believe that our lack of faith is safer than any notion of faith, when our lack of foundational faith has become our powerless faith.

A DANGEROUS GAME OF DENIAL PLAYED ALONE IN THE DARK

The faith of someone who denies faith is dangerous because they stand for nothing and don’t know how to properly utilize their beliefs to invest faith in anything worthwhile, or eternal. Their fundamental belief is comprised of the foundation of trusting that the unknown is unknowable, and that searching for answers will only lead them from one area of a dark room to another area in the same dark room. They have not learned to trust that the light under the door means life outside the darkness.

The only way to learn about belief and faith, about acceptance and trust, is to use them. It’s scary, but only when we’re untrained. To learn to use them wisely is to begin the process of understanding what is available to place our trust in, and doing our research.

VALIDATION FOR SIN VS THE SEARCH FOR OBJECTIVE TRUTH

Many people today share a common New Age theology of “believe in whatever works for you,” as though any belief works just as well as another. That is a twisted ideology, as well as unfruitful theology, and here’s why, just from one example: the belief in murder being societally or culturally acceptable is only relativistically shared by those who distrust objective morality/truth.

The problem with this is that the people who live by it don’t want to place their trust in something foundational. Sound and foundational truth doesn’t appeal to them because their search in itself isn’t for objective truth, but for validation for their sinful behavior.

PRESUPPOSITION OF SIN

We must understand, if we are to come to grasp the realities that belief and faith hold in such a relativistically unsound society, that our decisions are birthed under our understanding of sin. If we misunderstand sin, or if we categorize sin just as relativistically as morality, then we fail to capture and to respond to properly, that which causes our beliefs, or worse, our faith—to be the impetus of that which becomes dangerously corrupt, rather than that which becomes a blessing.

FALLIBLE BELIEFS LEAD TO PLACING TRUST IN UNHEALTHY PLACES

Placing faith in ourselves as though we were God tends to arise from the faulty presumption that there is no God. Whether this preconceived idea is arrived at by choice, or if it’s derived from positing there is no other belief to invest faith in, this dead-end belief results in trusting the self, which we talked about above. But, without God, there is no basis for objective morality, and belief in the self as an answer to “whatever works for you” only begs us to ask ourselves how we ever deduced we could be our own best god when we have such poor wisdom as to not even question whether we’re entitled to take on such a mantel in the first place.

In other words, how can someone who has noteworthy problems placing trust in healthy people or beliefs know with mature understanding that trusting themselves over an omniscient, all-loving, righteous and holy God—is a wiser choice? Think about that for a moment.

FAULTY FRUIT AND WEAK FOUNDATIONS

We all believe what we believe for different reasons, but the real issue is that not every reason is sound. If our unsound reasoning lends us towards a belief that results in faith, then our faith is already compromised, and ultimately the fruit of that person’s consequent lifestyle will be, too (Matthew 7:15-20).

We all accept ideas, some of which have a weak foundation. We then place our faith into whatever fits into that box of accepted ideas, whether or not the foundation is strong. Then someone comes along with the name of Jesus and we’ve memorized a list of unreliable reasons why our weak faith in ourselves should be strong enough to keep us safe in an eternity we don’t believe in, because we never took the time to understand why faith in Christ makes more sense than denial-based spiritual presuppositions.

CHALLENGED BY JESUS’S DEITY

We’d rather assume there’s nothing to learn about what we don’t understand, and that presumption leads us to assume Jesus’s deity is as much myth as our favored skeptics insist they are, even if our only reason is that we would rather not have our list of objections challenged by someone with more credible, substantial knowledge, or a more mature perspective about the intricate complexities of Jesus’s deity.

UNDERSTANDING WHAT WE ACCEPT, & OUR FAITH

Since time is short, make the most of it by investing what time we do have in understanding what we believe by poring through Scripture on a daily basis. Alongside this point is the importance of understanding the faith we’ve invested our lives into, based upon our understanding of our beliefs. When we do this, we have not only more sound reasoning for our beliefs when people ask, but our whole lives transform based upon the viability of the foundation of our faith in Christ.

INVESTING IN OUR RESPONSE TO WHAT GOD DID FOR US

We should be accepting not merely what makes sense to our rationale, but what sits well with our spirit (Romans 15:13). To ignore this is to ignore what makes us human and not just mammals. We were made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), and to accept that in our hearts means investing in our response to what God did for us in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 4:22-24). To accept that we were made in God’s image is to accept that God sent Jesus to die for us so we could blamelessly bear that image to give Him glory for His grace and mercy.

FREE FROM BONDAGE

Being saved through faith by God’s grace means we are free from bondage; free from blind eyes, deaf ears, and repetitive sin. We have the freedom to live shamelessly, humbly, and boldly with clear spiritual vision—as well as to hear and witness the Holy Spirit move in our lives, guiding us to glorify God’s name in Jesus. Let this truth be the foundation of our faith as we lean into what God has for each of us as His undivided followers of the risen Lord.

I pray this in Jesus’s holy name. Amen!

Image by Danny See Chuan Seng from Pixabay