The Sun Will Come Out

I sit at the local coffee shop (if you want to call starbucks a local coffee shop), staring out the window at the sunlight. It kind of feels like California to me. Every time someone opens up the door the cool breeze blows against my back. It feels wonderful.

It is hard to believe that just this morning it was so foggy that I couldn’t see more than 30 feet in front of me. Now, the fogginess of the morning is a distant memory.

I wonder if this is what it will feel like in the next life. Compared to the end of the story, we get a foggy glimpse of God. We have a tiny representation of His grace. We have the down payment, the Holy Spirit, which is a guarantee of what is to come.

Even having this down payment, we see horrors. We see the fog. We see death, destruction, and terror. We have doubt and insecurity. We struggle to believe. We struggle to see God through the dense fog.

One day, though, the sun comes. The fog never returns. We will stand in the presence of the Almighty. Today, we are in fog. Tomorrow, the sun comes out. Come, Lord Jesus.

What is Faith?

Salvation by grace through faith is something that Christians have believed since the conception of the church. However, I think there may be a problem with our understanding of the word ‘faith.’ What does it mean to put faith in God? What were the New Testament writers getting at when they used the term? How did the readers understand the concept? How is that different from the way the term is understood today?

I was talking with my friend Matt about this idea. He was pointing out to me that the way that ‘faith’ (Greek: pistis) is used in the New Testament seems to be vastly different than the way we understand faith today.

We tend to define ‘faith’ as an intellectual assent to facts. If someone is asked if they have faith, they may say, “Yes. I believe in God.” What they mean by this is that they believe that the world was created by God. They may believe that Jesus is God. They may even believe that Jesus died and rose again for their sins.

This is not an incorrect understanding of ‘faith.’ However, it is helplessly incomplete. Faith includes believing certain truths. However, faith is most often used to describe loyal devotion or commitment to a person or cause. This is how the word was most often understood in Greek literature.

We have overemphasized the intellectual aspect of faith to the point that we have ignored the idea of loyalty and commitment to God. In my opinion, this has led to two fatal errors.

First, there are many people who profess faith in God because they intellectually assent to the things that are written in the bible. They say, “I believe in God,” and yet they show no loyal devotion to his purposes on this earth. To the readers and writers of the New Testament, this was not faith at all. To profess faith without complete, unswerving devotion would be like professing to be a square circle. This is why James tells us “faith without works is dead.”

Second, there are many others who are continually wondering where the line between doubt and unbelief should be drawn. An overemphasis on the intellectual aspect of faith has led people (like myself) to continually question if they ‘believe strongly enough.’ The truth is, faith will always involve doubt. By definition, faith includes uncertainty. Any faithful person who is honest with herself will say that there are times when she wonders if she is wrong. Continual battles of trying to make herself believe stronger are unhelpful. Instead, she needs to focus on being completely committed with an unswerving devotion. This involves belief, but does not stop there.

We must learn to define faith in a more complete way. While the intellectual aspect of faith is important, it is not all that Christian faith entails. Christian Faith entails unswerving commitment to the purposes of God in the world.