WHAT IS FAITH FOR?

I left this as a comment over at a friends blog, and realized that what I had said was sort of an illumination for people about how my faith works within my life. The question was asked, "what does trust in God do, what is it for?" Well, this is my answer. Thanks, Eddie, for asking the question, even though you didn't ask it of me directly.





We don't trust ourselves enough, even those who believe in God, and we ought to be able to trust ourselves more than anyone else, considering what Christ said about believing. Whether you believe in God or not, there is one thing that is most definitely true of the human race: A large lack of trust in ourselves. I think faith in God helps to overcome some of that. For whatever reason, we tend to believe of ourselves that we are very limited creatures. We tend to believe that we can't see in the dark. Yet when a person remains calm, and gives his eyes time to adjust, he can see in many more dark places than he believed at first.


We tend to believe that we could not survive a thirty foot fall uninjured, yet I myself have survived such a fall completely uninjured. People would say that such a fall would most likely kill a man, and certainly would injure him seriously in most cases.


In short, there seem to be more things we believe we cannot do than things we believe we can do. For me, trusting God makes everything possible. The only doubts I have are about my abilities, and even then, there are things I can do today that I believed I couldn't do years ago.


I believe the message of Christ is not just life after death, but Life during life. I believe that within me, there is a power unlike anything else in this physical world, and that this power is always available to me. Like I said, I don't trust in my ability to make use of that power, but there have been times when that power was most certainly manifested beyond the belief I had of my limits. Because of trusting in God, I am more inclined to believe I can do something than I was before. It is confidence, certainty, and strength where many times, people who don't believe in God would stop or not even try.


I am just learning about the lack of faith I have in me, and the strength of the God who makes up for any lack I have. I am a beginner, a cub, a calf, whatever name you would put on it. But the more I learn about the lies of the human mind in believing we have so many limits, the more I realize and experience that I am doing things I never could do before. Most of those things manifest themselves through my work, making things that others just look at and say, "How in the world did you ever make that with the tools you have?" Or someone being able to see the difference between my work and someone else's on the same project, such a difference that experience alone cannot explain. I'm not bragging here, either, it's just explaining a fact.


My trust in God is for perfection, not because I have to be perfect, but because I can be. My trust in God is for me to do those things I have believed I couldn't do because of perceived human limitations.