This past week, I had the honour of speaking to the Valley View Leadership Development Program about, ‘what it means to live in faithfulness?’ Now, in the hour I was given to speak, I have no doubt that I did not do full justice to that question. What it means to live in faithfulness is a subject that entire libraries have been written about. But while I was putting together this talk, I came across an interesting question that I want to share with you now. A question that must be answered if talking about ‘what it means to live in faithfulness' is ever going to go anywhere: As a Christian, what does it mean to have faith?

Now to clarify, with this question I am not asking whom as Christians our faith is in, nor am I asking what we believe. Those are much simpler questions to address, as something close to the Sunday School answer will serve you just fine. Instead, what I am trying to ask is on a base level, what does it mean to have faith as a Christian, compared to anyone else? This is an important question to answer when you are wanting to talk about how we are to live in faithfulness, as faithfulness is simply the living of our faith out.

I would hazard a guess that the most popular understanding of what it means for a Christian to have faith is drawn from John 20:29, where Jesus tells his disciples that ‘blessed are those who have believed without seeing.’ If you take this verse and apply it to what it means to have faith, the understanding you come away with is that to a Christian having faith means you believe in God without seeing, that is without proof. An anecdote to emphasize just how popular this understanding of what it means to have faith as a Christian is, I asked the LDP class if they had an answer to my question having this guess already written down in my notes, to which this was the first and only response from the whole group that I got. The wording was identical. I am also willing to bet that for a number of you reading this post, this was your answer as well.

However, there are two small problems with this being the Christian understanding of what it means to have faith. The first issue to take with the understanding that faith is belief without proof is that it kind of flies in the face of what Christians believe constitutes proof of God in the first place. Far from having no proof of God, as Christians, we actually believe we have quite a lot; that is some 4000 years of it. Open your Bibles and from Genesis to Revelation and all the stories of God reaching out to humanity contained therein, covers some 2000 years of history. Church history in which we Christians believe we have seen God working through the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers covers another 2000 on top of that. Far from having no proof of God in the world, to be a Christian is to believe there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for God’s existence and his activity.

The second problem with this understanding of what it means to have faith, as belief without proof, can be found by looking closer at that verse from John itself. John 20:29 is spoken by Jesus to his disciples following his own resurrection. The disciples up until the encounter of Jesus in which these words are spoken are all quite positive that their Lord is very dead. After all, they had just seen him hung on a cross and ran through with a spear only two days prior. It is in this passage that the disciples finally come to believe Christ is risen because they see him in person, they touch the wound in his side, as well as in his hands and his feet. Jesus, however, had told the disciples before in the gospel that though he would in die, he would also rise again. And so when he now tells the disciples ‘blessed are those who believed without seeing,’ the issue is a lot less to do with how the disciples needed proof, and a lot more to do with how they didn’t trust Christ enough to take him at his word.

And it is in this where I believe you can find the best answer as to what it means to have faith as a Christian. For a Christian, Faith in God is not about whether or not he exists, as after all, we have 4000 years of proof saying that he does. For a Christian, faith in God is also not about just blindly following the Lord either, as after all, throughout Christ’s life as well as throughout his actions in the bible and throughout church history, God gives us every reason to believe him when he says something is the case.

No, what it means to have faith as a Christian, I am pretty sure, is something much more obvious. I believe that what it means to have faith as a Christian is simply that you are willing, in light of millennia of proof and countless examples of who God is and that he keeps his word, to actually choose to trust and rely on him.

The implications this has on what it means to live in faithfulness, are astounding. But that is a post for a different day.

But what do you think of my definition? What do you think it means to have faith and why?