Singer/songwriter John Hyatt said once that if he had a nickel for every time someone played his song, "Have a Little Faith in Me" at a wedding, he'd stop working. Even though he doesn't get a $.05 royalty for wedding performance, I'll still bet he's doing OK.
We can have faith in all kinds of people and things. We have faith in loved ones, team mates, people at work and/or their performance and in the 21st century we are encouraged to even have faith in products and brand names. Faith seems to be crawling around everywhere.
A lot of what we call faith if held up to the light is really hope. We hope our iWhatever does what it's supposed to, looks really cool and is universally loved and revered, perhaps in the hope that we will participate in the love and reverence a bit ourselves.
Hope is good. However, hope is not the same thing as faith.
There's a place in the bible that describes faith as "the substance of things hoped for." Many many books, chapters and sermons have been written about this passage. Putting all that aside for the moment, one thing that is incontrovertible from this construct is that "faith" is considered to be somewhat more substantial than hope. As an example, we might hope for Christmas presents but we have faith that Christ is the reason we celebrate Christmas.
Faith and hope can get real confused. We usually hope for good outcomes in situations we face, particularly challenging situations. That's natural and fine. Sometimes people tell us to have "faith" that everything will come out OK. That's fine too but it does raise the question as to what "OK" means, or maybe what it actually is. The potential confusion here is pretty easy to see if you imagine a child being told that the way to get good things is to "have faith" that he'll receive them. Back when I was a kid, that would likely result in me having faith that I'd get my 2nd hot fudge sundae. Apparently my mom had more sense than I had faith because I never got sundae number two.
We Christians use the word faith about every which way it can be used and then throw in a few just to make sure everything is covered. That's generally fine but it can result in some disappointment or confusion when events don't unfold in a way that's consistent with our hope. And that's usually because we have confused faith with hope.
Sometimes faith gets confused with expectation. Faith and expectation are pretty easy to differentiate as well. We have the expectation that the sun will come up tomorrow. We don't exercise faith for that.
There's a good example of faith at work in the concept of marriage. When we marry, we assume that our spouses will be faithful. In effect, we have faith in their faithfulness. That points to another word though that is more closely aligned with faith than the alternatives we've looked at so far. That word is confidence.
Confidence in the good of people (i.e. the faithfulness of a spouse) is akin to faith. Having confidence that someone will "do the right thing" is parallel to having faith in them. Confidence and faith both represent investments of heart.
When we talk about having faith in God, it's not so much that we have "faith" that he'll do this or that. Maybe we expect him to do a particular thing but maybe he has something else in mind. Maybe we'd like him to do something now but later seems better to him.
That's actually when we have to have faith. The title here is ironic because in all the universe there's really only one kind of faith, at least as it applies to God. Faith is this: Knowing, expecting, hoping, committing and living life in a way that's consistent with the idea that God is who he says he is. In addition, there is exactly one commentary on this doctrine that's appropriate. Namely, God is good. (The idea that God is good is really contained in the idea that God is who he says he is but sometimes it helps to throw in that second bit.)
Most of our pain that's of the self-inflicted kind, most of our railing at situations or other people derive from the idea that God isn't really and completely who he says he is. I talked briefly to a woman the other night who thought that bankers were evil and should be punished. I saw kind of problem with this, not because it's impossible that bankers could ever do anything wrong, but rather because this woman apparently felt a lot of angst about the "unfairness" of the things "they" had done. What was hidden just below the surface of her anger was, "How can this be? This will not stand! This is not fair AND everyone should think so." That's fine but God says that redressing such wrongs is his job.
Laws are there to prevent systematic victimization and certainly they must be followed and upheld but self-righteous vengeance is a poor substitute for justice. When we indulge in that kind of thinking (as I too often do), we de facto deny the idea that God is who he says he is and all the cascading truths like, he'll take care of the spiritual injustice of it. In the moment we take up the cudgel, we deny that God really is our champion.
I'm gradually getting better with the idea that God is who he says he is. It takes a long time and we have to learn to except a fact about ourselves someplace in this process. Namely, we are who he spoke us to be. The truth of that is a story that each of us shares with God...because he is who he says he is.
