What is faith?

How do you define faith? Have you ever taken a step of faith? Faith isn’t just about believing in God or the supernatural. Faith is exercised by every person, every day.

Taking a step of faith is simply making a choice when the outcome is uncertain. It can be something as important as deciding what career path to take or as trivial as whether you should pack an umbrella for the day.

Many people misunderstand faith. Author and Philosopher Peter Boghossian defines faith as “belief without evidence” and “pretending to know things you don’t know”¹. However, this is more akin to ‘blind faith’, not real faith.

So what is real faith?

Let’s answer that with a helpful illustration. Skydiving is an act of faith. Here’s why. When you skydive you don’t know for certain that you will make it to the ground safely, yet you place your entire life in the hands of your parachute. But this isn’t done blindly without reason. Parachutes have proven to be trustworthy and you know for a fact that parachute accidents are extremely rare. Faith in your parachute is based on evidence and experience.

In the same way, faith in God is based on evidence and experience. In the Bible, God always proved His trustworthiness before He asked anyone to have faith. Biblical faith is trusting in God because of the evidence, not in the absence of it.

The people in the Bible who had faith in God based it on experiences of His presence, and the evidence of His hand at work in their lives. They trusted God in the unknown because God had proven Himself to be trustworthy.

Do you believe God is trustworthy? Here are 2 ways that you can start to explore that answer.

1. Get to know who God is.

God has displayed His trustworthiness in the pages of the Bible. These are recorded ancient documents that detail God’s character and love as He interacted with them. It shows how God is understanding, powerful, shows mercy, and is on your side. They aren’t fairytales; they are accounts of events in history that have withstood the test of time.

2. Seek Him out for yourself.

Why can you trust your best friend? Because you’ve spent time with them and you know them. God is exactly the same. You can speak to God directly, start a friendship with Him, and even ask Him to help you to trust Him.

Every act of faith begins with a small step. Try praying to God and reading about Him in the Bible. You’ll be amazed by what you discover.

References
¹ Peter Boghossian “A Manual For Creating Atheists”, Chapter 2.