Why does God require faith? It is the way we have relationship with Him. But what is faith? Faith is a living trust that you employ not only towards God but also in other relationships in your life. You trust that those around you truly love you even though you couldn't really know what they might think. The heart is beyond wicked and the mind is full of every nasty thing. There is no way to truly know the state of someone else's heart and there isn't a way to even know your own. It is a chameleon, changing with the times. The heart and mind both work together pulling one another into spirals of self. We start believing our heart and yet our mind knows what the heart is feeling. We have a refreshed mind but our heart is carrying us away leaving behind our good sense. What a ghastly trick this is. With our hearts and mind constantly ebbing and flowing, we can only have one thing and that is faith. Faith in our relationships keep hope alive that all is well. We certainly muster faith for our worldly relationships for we know that our hearts are deceitful but we know Christ's heart is all loving. Jesus doesn't want us to muster our own kind of faith for Him. We need His faith. This is a difficult concept to envision but allows a peaceful rest if we can begin to understand it. For every problem, He offers the solution. He gives us faith for Him.
We don't create faith. As all good gifts come from the Lord, He also provides us the faith that trusts Him and His goodness. Not ours. You see, God gives us everything we need in Christ. We need not pray for more of this or that. We already have it. I don't believe that God is a vending machine only giving us small portions here and there. I believe He's given it all in one complete work as we come to Him. Our problem is not realizing that we already HAVE IT. We don't believe this because we don't see our lives exhibiting these things. At least not consistently. This shouldn't lead us to believe that on the days we are patient or fully compassionate or slow to anger that we are in any different place than in Christ even on the days we aren't those things! Those things exist in us because of His gift to us. We have misplaced our trust when we are exhibiting these behaviors.
What shall we do then? We faithe. This is not even a word! But there is an active faith that we must employ. Yes, Christ has given us full capacity for faith. Perfect faith. Yet, we don't allow it to work every day. We live in this untrusting flesh. So we must faithe. We must remind ourselves of His righteousness in our life. We don't fall before Him humiliated that we blew it and ask Him to dole out another dose of something. We renew our minds and faithe, actively trusting Him that He has completed us. I've heard before - "God's not finished with me yet!" This usually means God is sculpting us into better Christians. I'm not so sure of this. I believe the Creator of the universe, the God man who dies for us and rises to give us life, HAS sculpted us into what He wants. We are just so much more interested in what He can do for us than what His Son already did. We are too fleshly to see it. We still see the unmolded clay, clumped around us instead of seeing the pot that is filled with Christ. But this must be what keeps our faith alive - our trust in hope. We would certainly fall prostrate to see the completeness of Christ's glory. We must rest in faith continually - faithing - so that we know our completeness is true even though we don't always see it.
