Currently Watching The Big Kahuna see related

I stumbled across TheTheologiansCafe the other day (link in subscriptions at left) .  The interesting thing here is that each day he posts several questions, on politics and religion mostly, and invites you to post your answer.  The temptation to have one's opinion on 'important' matters out there for all the world is apparently overwhelming.  He gets over a hundred answers to each question.

The one that drew me in was "How do you know that your system of beliefs are the right ones?"  A big hit , over 200 responses.  The most popular responses are what you might expect--"Faith", "It feels right in my heart", and "You can't know."  Most Christians seem to opt for "faith," which is our topic for the day.

What is faith anyway?  I think the people who answered that way are seriously misguided as to what faith means in Christianity.  Which isn't too surprising, since a lot of churches seem just as confused.  Is faith convincing yourself something's true?  This is what many people seem to think.  But really, that is not a difficult trick.  It's fairly easy to believe in almost anything, especially if that belief is comforting.  People have faith in Jesus.  People also have faith in crystals, L.Ron Hubbard, and Amway.  They have faith they're going to win American Idol.  If faith is nothing more than belief, then faith is as common as dirt.

The real problem there is that that kind of faith doesn't cost you anything.  Believing is easy.  Whereas what I think Scripture means by faith is something more like faithfulness.   Faithfulness always occurs in the context of a relationship.  Belief is private.  Which one does it seem like God would be more concerned with?  As I understand it, we're in a relationship with God, and He wants us to be faithful.  And He's faithful to us.

What we believe--about God, morals, the world--is going to change as we grow and learn more about these things.  Otherwise we're stagnant, stuck in our little baby beliefs, afraid that if we grow up God won't love us anymore.  Faithfulness though, is a tough standard.  A standard none of us fully achieve.  But, unlike our beliefs which need to grow in different directions depending on where we've started from, there's really only one direction for faithfulness to grow.