What is faith? Defining it isn’t
all that difficult. Merriam-Webster offers this: “allegiance to duty or a
person; fidelity to one’s promises; sincerity of intentions.” Oxford provides a
more streamlined take: “complete trust or confidence in someone or something.”
In the Bible, faith is famously defined in Hebrews 11:1 in this way: “Now faith
is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.”
Why does faith matter? The Bible
teaches that “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6), “we
have been declared righteous by faith” (Romans 5:1), and “for by grace you have
been saved through faith” (Ephesians 2:8). From this sampling of scripture we
find that faith is central to our standing before God and it is the pathway to
salvation itself.
But how do we faith? The Bible
provides a lot of examples, but I can’t point to an explicit “this is how to
faith” declaration, so I find that faith remains something of an abstract
concept. But if it’s so essential, it’s important to know what it looks (and
feels) like. The goal of this essay is to suggest a practical, simple-to-employ
understanding of biblical faith.
We find two main kinds of faith in
the Bible: saving faith and living (or walking) by faith.
Saving Faith
Moses tells us in Genesis 15:6 that
“Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.” This is the
first explicit reference to faith or belief in the Bible. What stands out, even
at this early point in history and under the Old Testament framework, is that
it wasn’t Abraham’s obedience or moral superiority that made him righteous, it
was that he believed God. In contrast, if we look back at Genesis 3, the
way the serpent convinced Adam and Eve to disobey the command regarding the
fruit was to encourage them to disbelieve God (“Did God really say…?”). So from
the very beginning we begin to see this pattern of believing God or
disbelieving God, believing God or believing not-God.
Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about
belief in John 3:14-21. Here another facet of saving faith emerges. Biblical
faith means not only believing God, but also means believing his Son. This is
what sets Christian faith apart from Islam and Judaism. All profess belief in
the God of Abraham, but only Christians believe in the Son. Also note in Jesus’
words that while believing in God saves, it is the lack of belief in God that
condemns. Jesus also defines that which we are saved into: eternal life. Later
in the same gospel he defines eternal life for us as knowing God and knowing
Jesus Christ (John 17:3). Salvation isn’t just to deliver us from perishing
under judgment, or even so that we can go to heaven some far off day. Rather,
it is that we are delivered into a state of intimately knowing God—immediately,
constantly, and eternally.
Paul parses faith and salvation
throughout his writings. In his letter to the Romans, (Romans 3:22-26) he
teaches that believing God means believing what he says about us, in particular
regarding our sin. We all have sinned. It matters less what our particular
flavor of sins are but that we all fundamentally have failed to live up to
God’s standard of holiness, and there is nothing we can do about that. One
aspect of saving faith is that we must agree with God about this. Another
aspect of saving faith is that we must agree with God that we can’t do anything
about this on our own, but are wholly dependent on him to rectify the
situation. Saving faith is believing that God rectified the situation on our
behalf by sending Jesus Christ to take away the punishment that we had earned
by our sinfulness. Saving faith, as Paul says here, is “receiving through faith
Christ’s atoning sacrifice in his blood” (verse 25).
Back in John, Jesus gave us an
image for believing “in our hearts.” In John 3:14-15, he references Moses
lifting up the snake in the wilderness. This is a reference to an event which
occurred while the Israelites were in the wilderness, recorded in Numbers
21:4-9. Snakes had been sent by God as a punishment, but he also provided
deliverance from the punishment. He instructed Moses to create a bronze snake
and lift it up on a post. When a snake-bitten person looked at the bronze
snake, they recovered (verse 15). With this allusion, Jesus is giving us a
mental image for saving faith. Just as looking to the bronze snake delivered
the ancient Israelites, so looking to the sinless Christ lifted up on the
cross, taking the punishment that we deserved for our own sins. The way we
practically, right now “look to” Christ lifted up on the cross means to
remember, reflect, and meditate on it, believing (“in our hearts” as Paul
taught) that Christ’s act on our behalf saves. Believing in our hearts includes
the cognitive or intellectual act of accepting it as true, but it also moves us
deeply, emotionally.
Consider what Paul teaches in Romans
5:1-2. We have been declared righteous by faith, which ends the war we started
with God through our sin (makes peace with God). The result? Joy. The joy of
salvation is that our sins do not count against us. This sounds very “New Testament,”
but take a moment to read Psalm 32:1-5.
There are many more scriptures we
could unpack, but the passages we’ve reviewed so far have laid out the
fundamentals. Faith as it relates to salvation is believing God’s version of
history: that we all have failed to live up to the standard of holiness for
which he created us, that by doing so we have brought eternal punishment on
ourselves, and that no action on our part can rectify this situation, but God
has rectified it on our behalf through the sacrifice Christ made in our place. Our
response to this is what Paul teaches us in Romans 10: 6a,8-10: “The
righteousness that comes from faith speaks like this…The message is near you,
in your mouth and in your heart. This is the message of faith that we proclaim:
If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that
God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. One believes with the heart,
resulting righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in
salvation.” Saving faith is the message of salvation in our mouths and in our
hearts.
Living by Faith
Saving faith is not just a
one-time, set-it-and-forget-it thing. Faith continues to save us not only from
the eternal punishment of sin, but also it delivers us from sin itself as we
walk by faith. Read Romans 8:1-17. Here Paul again spells out saving faith, but
also declares to us that if we are saved, we will live differently. Note that
we can still choose to live according to the flesh, living in sinfulness, so
being saved doesn’t automagically override our decision-making and turn us into
hyper-moral automatons. But saving faith means that we now have God’s Spirit
living inside of us, and we can access the power of that Spirit to continually
put sin to death in our lives. How do we do this? The same way we came to
saving faith—it starts in our minds.
To receive saving faith, we renewed
our minds. That is, we removed our old thoughts about God, ourselves, sin, and
righteousness, and replaced them with God’s truth about those things, as
revealed in Scripture. But continuing in the faith works the same way, as we
continually remove those old thoughts and replace them with God’s truth, and
the external evidence of this is changed living, changed desires.
Read Ephesians 4:20-24. Notice the
imagery here of removing or taking off the old, worldly way of life and having
our minds renewed, which allows us to clothe ourselves in the new self. This is
how faith not only saves us from the punishment of our sins, but actually
recreates us into the likeness of God which we originally lost in our sin.
Faith is being taught by Jesus through the Holy Spirit to take off our old
sinful way of life and to be clothed in God’s righteousness . And the battle
for this happens in our minds.
This imagery points to a pretty
useful mental-imagery discipline. The articles of clothing of my old self and
those of my new self both are available to me in my wardrobe for as long as I
am in this mortal body. As I grow in my saving faith, I recognize more and more
of the old-self clothing that needs to be removed, and more and more new-self
clothing—which “looks like” Christ and his righteousness—to be put on. But the
old-self clothing is still there, and sometimes I’ll find myself wearing it
again, and will need to take it back off and replace it again with new-self
clothing.
Paul takes the imagery a step
further in his letter to the Galatians (2:20): “I have been crucified with
Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in
the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for
me.” Here we’re not only taking off the old self like clothes; the old self is
dead and the only life we live now is one of faith in the Son of God. This
provides an even more powerful imagery and mental discipline. My old self is a
rotting corpse. Why would I keep dragging it out? We read earlier from Romans
8, in which Paul talks about putting to death the deeds and desires of the
flesh. Living by faith involves mentally—and emotionally—killing those
behaviors and desires and replacing them with desire for fellowship and
intimacy with God and with a desire for his righteousness.
But is this our daily experience?
Why not? Paul helps us out again in Romans 7:14-25. Pay particular attention to
verse 21, “When I want to do what is good, evil is present in me.” So, the
capacity for sin and evil are still present while we are in these bodies. But
because we are new creations, the capacity for intimacy with and obedience to
God also is there. Where our minds are focused at any given moment will
determine which master we are serving.
Paul illustrates this for us in his
letter to the Galatians (Galatians 5:16-25), in particular 24-25: “Now those
who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.” Here we
see it is not only where our minds are focused, but also where our desires are
focused. If we are seeking to satisfy God’s desires, we’ll bear the fruit of
the Spirit. If we’re seeking to satisfy the desires of the flesh, of what the
world tells us is worth pursuing, we’ll not be bearing spiritual fruit. Both
desires are always available for “feeding,” but we control the food supply with
our thoughts and our behavior.
So we find in these passages that
there is a moment-by-moment, pushing-and-pulling dynamic to walking by faith.
Faith is not a set it and forget it thing. It’s something that in any given
moment we are either doing, or we simply are not doing. In the moments we do
not live like or feel like new creations, we simply are not living by faith.
More accurately, we are living by a kind of faith, but we are replacing faith
in God with faith in something else. Ultimately, that’s what every single
individual sin boils down to: replacing belief or reliance on God with reliance
on something not-God.
Now we understand that faith is not
simply believing that once upon a time Christ died for our sins so everything
is hunky dory. Faith must be a living, breathing presence that characterizes
every moment of our lives. In a follow-on essay, we’ll dig a little deeper into
what this looks like and practical steps for how to do it.
