What is Faith?

Some words are hard to define and faith is one of them.  Ask anyone and you may receive a whole host of different interpretations.   ‘Have faith!’ someone may say to you when you share a troublesome situation that you don’t feel you can handle. Or perhaps it’s about having faith in the pilot that they can navigate the plane to the place of your destination and without crashing it!

For Christians it goes even deeper. Our understanding of faith is in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – an all-encompassing, divine and loving God who loves us in a way that we really cannot fathom; and so our faith is one that defies all rationality because we have never seen God and yet we trust in Him. We have faith in God and that faith enables us to be confident in understanding that God is part of our lives, living in and alongside us each minute of each day. Through the ups and the downs, the sorrows and the joys. We are never alone and that is a wonderfully comforting feeling! And in a way, faith now becomes totally rational!

The word ‘faith’ appears over 450 times in the Bible and possibly one of the best is this one from the New Testament book of Hebrews­ (11.1)  ‘Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.’  This is such a precise definition.

Our learning and our faith stems from the Word of God, the Bible. We believe that Jesus came to earth as a man and lived and breathed on this earth; he experienced pain and suffering to happiness and joy just as all of us have done, and yet he was crucified so that he could take away our sins once and for all.

The 16th century theologian and writer, Martin Luther, wrote this: ‘Faith is from God, not from man. Man can do nothing to earn or receive it. We are right with God by faith alone.’

If you would like to know more about faith, then do please get in touch.