Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
– Hebrews 11:1
The idea of faith is pretty abstract when you think about it. Faith is defined as complete trust or confidence in someone or something. Complete, as in total, full, outright. However, within our human nature, doubt seems to always exist to some degree. Always lurking around, whispering, trying to get our attention and distracting us. As a result, there exists a tug of war between faith and doubt. And to make things even more confusing, every unique situation we find ourselves in seems to either strengthen our faith or reinforce our doubt. As a result, either our faith or our doubt gains ground in this tug of war.
This makes sense from a world’s perspective. Everyone places faith in certain areas, situations or people and conversely everyone has a measure of doubt in certain areas, situations or people. The main factor here is drawn from our experiences and other people’s advice, encouragement or pessimism.
So where does this faith/doubt complex leave the believer? We are deceiving ourselves if we say we never experience times of doubt in our walk. But remember the tug of war always going on within us? As long as our doubt never wins out over our faith, God can always work with that.
And when He does, our faith is exercised while trusting Him. Exercise or usage always produces strength. When our faith is stronger (when it is made strong through our adherence to Christ), it has a greater potential and ability to overpower our doubt.
Hebrews 11:1 testifies that we do not need to find faith in ourselves or in the things of this world. Because really, we can find doubt and fault in both these areas. But when we place our faith in God or should I say, when His faithfulness becomes the foundation of our faith, the very hope that is within us changes. Faith in God creates an unfair tug of war in that doubt is not an attribute of God.
Our source of true faith should only be found in the Lord. Might we still experience doubt? Sure. But in these situations we have an important opportunity to put our complete trust and confidence in God. As a result, we show our doubt where our faith comes from and in doing so we are strengthened.
Jason Metz, lead Pastor
