For many of us, the faith we have been taught is much more religious than it is relational, but we've got it upside down. Often, suffering is what it takes to sift religious faith from relational faith. It took shaking and humbling for me to realize this in my own life.
This January I joined a small Bible study titled "Faith Foundations." I was excited to come to the table, anticipating that I would have something substantial to contribute, considering the amount of time I have served the Lord and His children. But the Lord had a different plan in mind.
At nearly the same time that I began this study, the Lord led me into painful new territories. In this foreign terrain, convincing fears lurked around every corner. Each moment presented a difficult opportunity to believe what God had said, or believe my lived experience and close friends. The Lord brought me low to show me that the Foundation of my Faith was not constructed in the way He intended it to be.
If you look up the definition of faith, google will tell you either "complete trust and confidence in someone or something" or "a system of religious belief." Through this season of examining my own faith and faith as it is exemplified in the Word, I have found that often we tend to focus on the latter definition. Subconscious questions motivate the anxieties of our hearts, and influence our actions. We strive to muster up faith so that we can show it by the way we live, and in doing so, please God. This approach is inherently backwards and ineffective.
So, what would it look like to walk this out God's way? If no good can come from man (Romans 3:10, Ecclesiastes 7:20), then faith can by no means come from within us either. We must look outside ourselves to the source and the Father of all good things. If we can lift our attention to look at the character of God, then with consistent meditation, our actions will begin to align themselves to the knowledge of Him.
Faith is interacting with God on the basis of who He is, and nothing else. Faith recognizes that no personal flaw, obstacle, circumstance, or enemy — nothing holds weight in the equation where God is who He says He is. Can there be a real friendship where one does not trust the character of the other, and does not believe anything the other says?
James 2:14–26 talks to us about how faith without works is dead. This has nothing to do with striving or performance. When we act accordingly to God's character, that is faith that pleases God. If God says He is faithful, and we live our lives in a way that relies on that characteristic, it makes space for Him to show His nature in our circumstance. On the other hand, God will not bulldoze our relational status with Him to try and prove something about Himself. He gives us opportunities to trust Him, and when we choose faith over fear, He answers to that choice. Just as we see that fears fulfil themselves, faith also fulfils itself for this reason.
In the gospels we repeatedly see stories where the heart of Jesus was deeply moved by the faith of the people He healed. We have all read, it was their faith that made them well. These people often had no theology or knowledge of God, no system to their belief, but they fixed their eyes on what was revealed to them in the man Jesus.
James 2 also references Abraham, who had enough faith to sacrifice his only son, the passageway to the fulfillment of God's promise to him. The kind of emotion Abraham must have experienced on the way up Mount Moriah is unimaginable. But yet, he chose obedience. This story resounds of a striking relational dynamic between Abraham and God. The Lord was so moved by this ultimately trusting obedience that He considered Abraham His friend! Abraham's faith led him and his entire bloodline into a Covenant with God.
This story poignantly foreshadows the faith-filled obedience of Christ Jesus, who was obedient even unto death on a cross. Only a man who knew God could have lived the way Jesus did. It had to be the human Son of God whose perfect faith would lead us into a New Covenant.
This Covenant we read about is not a religious concept — it is as relational as the relationships we strive to maintain with our spouses and family and close friends. The biblical history we read is steady with the rhythm of the heart of a God who aches to relate to His Bride.
The seemingly unfulfillable longings and loneliness we experience echo the Heart that calls to us, "Come into this Covenant I've paid for with My life!"
But this requires faith that cannot be easily shaken. In Luke 22, Jesus lays an invitation before his disciples while teaching them communion. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you." The door to knowing Christ more closely is taking His cup. It is a cup of suffering and of death. But when we walk into the depths of pain, and continue determinedly towards Jesus for that joy set before us, that is faith. It is in darkness and valleys that Jesus pulls us into friendship and oneness with Him. And there is nothing sweeter.
What would change if we searched beyond the systems of believing that we have built for ourselves, and looked instead at the heart of the God who asks faith of us in the first place? What would our lives look like if our faith was rooted in a thriving friendship? Let us look once again at the foundations of our faith, and allow God to pull us into the fullness of the New Covenant.