I found myself thinking the other day about faith. Most of what we know and think about faith comes from a passage in Hebrews:
“Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.” (Hebrews 11:1, NLT)
Confidence. Assurance. Those are good things. Right? Raise your hand if you’re “Sure”…remember that commercial? Always a good thing to be confident in one’s deodorant (different blog post, but I digress)…
Yet my mind went to a different place: When is faith simply us wanting to slack off and not do the hard work that needs to be done?
“Oh, I’m leaving that up to God.”
Really? What if leaving it up to God means God gives you the strength to deal with it yourself?
“My marriage is a mess. I’m turning it over to God.” What if God wants you to ask your spouse what’s wrong and actually entertain the fact that you may be the source of the problem?
Can faith, the belief and trust in God, become a cop-out we use to stay away from obedience?
Do we sometimes believe that in leaving it up to God and trusting Him that He’ll let everyone else know where they need to change to make our life easier?
How do we walk the fine line between trusting God and trusting God enough to walk the path He lays out for us?
I think, and not to start a theological argument (though I love them) that this is where James‘ line that “faith without works is dead” comes into play. It’s not about salvation. It’s not about doing good things to get to heaven, etc.
It’s about the fact that if we really trust God, true faith, means knowing that trusting God with the issue may lead to Him trusting us with the solution.
What do you think?
Christians often say “Let go, let God.” I think this is an important attitude, but it can also be misleading, for the same reason you mentioned.
I love the Serenity prayer. I have pasted it in front of my computer, kitchen sink, bathroom, everywhere around my house.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I “let go and let God” for the things I cannot change,
and ask for wisdom and strength to deal with the things I can change.
Casey,
I see where you are coming from. Faith taken in the sense of reliance without effort can be a mask for sloth. Paul reminds us to work out our salvation, James reminds us that faith without works is dead. We are not called to an inactive life as Christians.
Thinking of Paul and faith, my mind goes to 1 Corinthians 13 and what we now term the Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Love. Paul reminds us that the greatest of these is love and given his definition above, it is not an inactive or passive virtue. Perhaps, then we should either understand faith and hope also to be active virtues, or perhaps, even in the inacivity that might be inherent in them is no excuse for sloth because to be properly exercised they must be exercised in and through love.
What do you think?
@Sachi- great reminder. it’s hard to balance but a great thing to keep in front of us.
@David- exactly. you make a great connection that is illustrated by the thought that “love is tolerance.” Tolerance requires no knowledge of the other, no forgiveness of them or seeking forgiveness from them, no understanding of who they are or interaction beyond the surface level. Faith without obedience is like love that is simply tolerance – it is not engineered to stretch us and give concrete footings to our trust in God.
Thank you both for commenting – love the dialogue.
Keep in mind that this is coming from a closet synergist who is just biding his time until he can join the Orthodox Church, but I think what you are talking about here as far as faith becoming a cop out for action has a lot to do with how our 21st century Christianity is still reacting to Modernity.
It seems like the modern philosophies of the last 150 years made it sexy and cool to believe that nothing exists outside of the natural world, so as all the cool kids quit believing in God, and then most of the other kids who wanted to be cool followed suit, we Christians turned the idea of “faith” into the opposite of not believing in God. Then you couple that with the whole cliched “salvation by faith alone” bit and what you come up with is that being a Christian means believing that God exists.
This belief apparently makes God happy because now that all the cool kids no longer believe in Him, He’s just glad to know that someone out there is thinking of Him, so He invites those people to His great spiritual birthday party in the sky.
So what you wind up with is the flag waving pop-Christianity of the 21st century that has no impact on the real world and really doesn’t exist anywhere outside of the individual’s personal “beliefs.”
But if “faith” and “faithfulness” can be used interchangeably, then our faith should have feet on it. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, but we know he believed God because Abe threw all his stuff and his old lady on the donkey and set out for points unknown, putting one foot in front of the other until God said “stop.”
So we also live out our faith as we are faithful to the Way we have been shown and we keep putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, no matter how dark the situation is we may be walking through. What I’ve been learning is that as I strive to be faithful in tough situations (and sometimes I don’t strive very hard), after a while I have these “ah-ha!” moments where I see how God has used my faithfulness and blessed it and often times supplemented it to put a redemptive twist on a seemingly dark and unpleasant situation. When I think of “faith” then, I think faith is putting one foot in front of the other trusting that I will see that redemptive “ah-ha!”moment just a little farther on up the path.