In a previous post I outlined my struggle with ‘faith-healing’ teachings and how Jesus commended certain people for having faith in the Bible.
I said that his commendation wasn’t so much a commendation to them as a rebuke to others – that, it may be, the thing is that faith is actually an easy thing to do. Putting our trust in God is something that isn’t difficult to actually do – anyone can do it – yet so many in Israel couldn’t do it. Perhaps one of the points of those stories in the Scriptures is to show how the ordinary people could trust in God yet many of the scribes, Pharisees, and all those who should have found it easy to trust in Him found it difficult.
Since then I’ve come to realise something more and that is that faith comes from the heart, not the head. But in all my life I guess I’ve kept trying to get the head to believe, when the head is only there to help the heart to believe.
And it’s the heart that God wants, isn’t it? That’s why faith can be hard – while it isn’t difficult to place our trust in Jesus it is difficult for the trust to remain when things go wrong. Yet faith means we continue to believe despite that. Faith means we continue to believe even when our heads tell us we shouldn’t.
That’s why faith is a relational thing; not an agreement to certain beliefs of statement, but a trust in a person called Jesus. A trust that says, ‘Yes, you are good,’ despite whatever is happening around us.
Beliefs of statement can help us to get our trust aligned correctly, but doctrine must drop from our heads into our hearts – if it stays in our heads it’s actually no good, really.
Doubt and unbelief in the Bible are an issue of the heart, not the head. Faith is a thing of the heart, not the head. The promise from God is that He will change our hearts (Ez 36:26).
Our part is to take the risk with him that He will — and that too is faith.
Life-Ecstatic 