Meet Your Faith

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. (Ephesians 2:8)

We tend to think of faith as a rather mysterious and illusive trait. A lot of atheists and agnostics consider themselves too intelligent to practice a faith – considering the idea, as Paul best described their conclusion, “utter foolishness”. But, we actually all practice considerable acts of faith throughout every day of our lives without ever giving it a thought. If you doubt this, consider the following: When you sat down to read this devotional, did think to yourself, “I sure hope this chair holds me.” The last time you inserted the key in the ignition, I doubt you thought, “I sure hope the car starts.” When you last finished eating, hopefully you didn’t think, “I sure hope I survive this.”

Actually, we live lives that are connected from moment to moment by an almost endless chain of faith filled acts. We are really quite practiced at it – finding it easy to have nearly complete faith in our own created things.

But, when asked to trust someone instead of something, a whole new and very different dynamic is added to the mix. Now, a different type and level of trust is required. And, because we know better than to even fully trust ourselves, we find trusting others a trial.

And finally comes the ultimate challenge – having faith in someone, who is alleged to be our creator whom we can’t see and we suspect we’ll most likely never actually hear from directly in our entire life. Faith in God requires a form of faith that simply cannot be justified through argument or rationale at all. Only the Holy Spirit can inspire us to step up to the edge of the proverbial cliff and fall forward into our first fledgling flight of faith in God.

Soon we realize that this exhilarating form of faith actually is a lot like flying. With conditions constantly changing, our faith develops and adapts to one situation after another. Through the urging of the Holy Spirit we slowly learn through faith to shed the awful weight of our sins and trust in the work of the Savior, causing us to rise ever higher. Isaiah was right to say, “They shall soar like eagles.”

This final level of faith truly is “utter foolishness” to the non-believer, but pure joy to the believer – love at its highest and best. How could we have ever in a million years simply willed ourselves to such a level of love and trust in something unseen without divine help?

“… this is not our doing; it is the gift of God.”