Our whole life is an act of faith.
“I wish I had your faith….” ………….. “I make decisions based on evidence and not on faith”. “Faith means making choices with a lack of or even in spite of the evidence.”
Have you ever heard these words, or perhaps even spoken them? I have heard them before, I have even spoken a version of them before. I vividly remember telling a friend of mine that I thought she was stupid for basing her life on something she could not prove to be true.
I had totally misunderstood what Faith is. More than that, I had totally misunderstood how life and all people work every single day.
To be persuaded….
To be persuaded. That is what the word ‘faith’ means. To be honest, I am not interested in common usage or common understandings. I am more interested in truth. How people understand what words mean, does evolve over time and becomes a caricature of the truth it was intended to communicate. ‘Faith’ has fallen victim to this.
The Bible talks a lot about ‘faith’ – as you would expect. But, faith is a translation of a word in an ancient language – Greek. The Greek word in the Bible that we translate as Faith is a verb that literally means ‘to be persuaded.’ It makes no reference to exactly how or what it is that persuaded you.
Richard Dawkins would say that faith is all about believing something without or inspite of evidence. That is simply not true. Faith is all about being persuaded that something is true. It does not matter how you are persuaded.
So, you might be persuaded that gravity exists or that the earth is spherical. You have faith that gravity is real and the earth is round. Biblically speaking.
Faith in the every day…
Faith is therefore, not about what we believe, it is about what we do.
I am sitting on a chair. I sat down without thinking about it or without hesitation. I operated on the basis that this chair would hold my weight. I didn’t even consider that it might not.
I bought this chair in Asda, Boldon, right before watching the Tin Tin movie at the Cineworld cinema. I have sat on this chair every day, pretty much, for about 15 years. It has never failed. This chair, was specifically designed for a human to sit on it. It has never failed to achieve that. The instructions for the chair, specifically stated a weight limit that far exceeds anything I will likely achieve in my life. It has always kept that promise.
So I sit and do not hesitate.
Every time we sit in a chair, we are exercising faith in the Biblical sense.
I do not exercise faith by believing in my head that a chair will take my weight. I exercise faith when I actually sit down. This is why definitions are important.
Suppose we go for dinner and order soup. We both have the same and it is one of those places where they wheel a big pot over to our table and serve us both the same soup from the same pot.
I pick up my spoon and eat. You however take a different approach.
First you take a thermometer and check the temperature of the soup, making sure it will not scald you. Then, you take syringe and draw some of the soup inside. You follow this by subjecting to the soup to serious of tests and examinations to verify the ingredients and ascertain that there is no substance inside that could be poisonous to you. Then, you eat.
Some would argue that I exercised faith and you did not. But, from the perspective of what the Bible means when it talks about ‘faith’, we both exercised the same faith as we both ate the soup. Faith is exercised by taking action upon a conviction held. It is irrelevant how that conviction is arrived at.
If you are in a building and voice announces over the speaker that there is a bomb under the building and every needs to get out…..being persuaded of this fact demands action. If you do not act, you do not believe and are not persuaded.
This is the flip side is it not?
If someone tells you that they believe something, but it has no impact on the choices that they make or the actions that they take, then they do not believe it. They are not persuaded it is true or that it really matters all that much.
Certainty???
Which brings us to the questions of certainty. And here, we have to face up to a shocking reality….nothing in our lives is ever certain.
I sit without 100% certainty that the chair will hold my weight.
I am reminded of Tim Leake and that fateful day that he did the same thing. He and I lacked a crucial piece of information. I believed that the screw I removed from the chair was non-essential. He had no knowledge that a screw had been removed. He sat and the chair failed.
Nothing is certain.
And this brings to the other element of faith. Every single one of us exercises faith for every single second of every single day.
This is quite easy to explain the logic.
Take the example of the soup. In eating the soup, both of us exercised ‘faith’. We exercised faith in the kitchen staff, the waiters, the cleaning regime, the ingredient suppliers. All of it. You exercised faith that the tests you applied would actually give an accurate result.
Have you heard the phrase ‘seeing is believing’? We say that we will not believe something unless we see it for ourselves. That is a strange way to behave as it is based on the assumption that our eyes are capable of detecting everything that is real, which we know they are not.
It is also, frankly, not true……
Life is an act of faith
It’s not true as life is an act of faith for all of us.
In every decision we make and in every action we take to carry it out, we exercise faith. No-one knows that getting married or having children will work out well, yet people still get married and have babies. In doing so, they exercise faith. In big decisions and mundane actions, we exercise faith constantly and consistently throughout our lives.
This is true because every time we take any action, we are acting in line with a conviction we have formed. And we place our faith in objects, situations or people. We place our faith in chairs, or food, or cooks, or our eyes or a set of empirical tests. Every act is, at its core, an act of faith. We cannot avoid this.
How this relates to being effective
I wanted to conclude here briefly. At the core of being effective is faith and not certainty.
When we make decisions about what to do or what not to do, this is an act of faith.
We often allow a lack of certainty to paralyse us into inaction. I am slowly learning that this is unwise.
NOT taking action, is also a form of action.
We trust that if we do nothing, nothing will go wrong. That is an act of faith therefore that everything will be preserved as long as we change nothing. My recent experiences make it abundantly clear to me that this is just not true. I placed my ‘faith’ in a lie. I was persuaded of a conviction that has proved false.
Therefore, I am not advocating that we take action without thought or consideration. But I am advocating that since any and all action or inaction is, at its core, an exercise of faith, then taking action and making decisions is a wiser approach than doing nothing and hoping everything turns out ok. Most of the time.
Never allow a lack of certainty of the outcome to be the reason you do not do something or decide something. You will never be certain. Life is an act of faith. And do not make the mistake of ‘trusting’ that doing nothing, will simply preserve the status quo.
Conclusion
Life is an act of faith. That is the conclusion. Every action we take, every decision we make is an exercise of faith. The question therefore is not about whether or not you or someone else ‘has faith’. The question is – what are you putting your faith in. Is it going to prove ‘faithful’.
Many of us in the West place our faith in financial security for example or our jobs/careers etc. This is a little strange. We all know of examples of nations where hyper inflation or economic collapse has rendered even the most sizeable fortune, totally worthless.
But that was over there, we say. Not here. But nothing is certain. Perhaps the belief that we are different, that it will never happen to us, is an exercise of faith, being persuaded of a conviction, without any rational reason for being so persuaded?
For me, as a Christian, I have been persuaded that Jesus Christ is exactly who he claimed to be. I have been persuaded that he did exactly what he said he would and that this achieved exactly what he promised us it would. I have therefore been persuaded that eternal security can be found in him and him alone. And so, each and every day, my goal is to live my life and to make my choices, based on the conviction that this is true. I am persuaded that this is good, right and wise.
Not perfectly so. But, life is an act of faith.
