Ask someone to define faith and you'll probably get as many definitions as the number of people you ask. There's many reasons for it actually. The first and most simple reason is that a person can't explain what they don't understand. Beyond that however, faith is a confusing issue. If you don't think so, just ask several ministers to define the first verse of Hebrews chapter eleven and you'll probably get that many diverse interpretations.

When writing a devotional, I choose to use the New International version of the Bible when referring to Scripture, even though I grew up using another version called the King James version. It uses different terms to render 11:1: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." The KJV is similar to NIV, but both are the result of different people looking at the same original Greek text and attempting to put it in terms everyone's likely to understand.

I like to define faith in terms most of us can understand. Using a common chair as the object of our lesson, think about sitting down in one. Unless you've experienced one collapsing by virtue of your weight, you probably trust a chair to hold you because it's proved its faithfulness. But how do you know someone hasn't rigged the chair to fail before you walked in the room? Do you look under a chair before sitting in it? I doubt it. You trust chairs because you have no reason to do otherwise. After a failure however, our trust must be re-earned or we'll always fear sitting in one, even though only one out of thousands failed.

Faith is not necessarily what we do, but instead who or what we trust. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is called the faith chapter because the names mentioned therein are like a hall of fame for faith. The Bible tells us how certain men and women had faith and what it then led them to do. It's the same with us. When we determine who we're going to trust and why, it's then we can take action with hope and confidence.

Have faith? In the advertisement for milk, someone has it on their lips when the question is asked. If we were to make a commercial for faith, we'd need to ask the question while someone is acting on something they can't prove but decide to trust anyway.

It's the same way for us as Christians. Without action, we're demonstrating our lack of trust. Without trust we'll never act in confidence. And the only way we can have confidence is to trust God. And the way we can do that is to absorb ourselves in God's word and remember His faithfulness to us in the past. Then we refuse to act on emotion, but instead on what God's word says, trusting God to keep his word. That, my friend IS faith!

By the way. In my illustration of the chair... I don't have faith in chairs. I have faith in the One who, even if I fall will help me get up. Have faith?

1 Developed from Read the Bible Thru ( Ez. 24:1-26:21 Hb. 11:1-16 Ps. 110:1-7 Pr. 27:14 )
2. Scripture comes from the Holy Bible, New International Version; (c)1978 by New York International Bible Society

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