Acting On Faith

Faith is sometimes considered a passive action.

Then he came again to Cana in Galilee where he had changed the water into wine. Now there was a royal official whose son lay ill in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Then Jesus said to him, "Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe." The official said to him, "Sir, come down before my little boy dies." Jesus said to him, "Go; your son will live." The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way. As he was going down, his slaves met him and told him that his child was alive. So he asked them the hour when he began to recover, and they said to him, "Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him." The father realized that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, "Your son will live." So he himself believed, along with his whole household. Now this was the second sign that Jesus did after coming from Judea to Galilee. - John 4:46-54

The royal official started out on his journey home in faith.

He was not yet a believer although he came to Jesus in the hope of having Jesus do something for his son, so there was something there at first.  Hope came before Faith, and Faith led him to Belief.

How many times do we look at our situation and say, "I hope this gets better"?

Do we know how it can improve?  Probably not.  But the Hope is there, even before the Faith can appear.

Faith is the bridge between Hope and Belief.  It is the cane we use to guide us in the fog, the reassurance that something will come about to make things better.

Like a child longing to reach his mother's outstretched hands, we take our first steps, not because we know how, of because we believe we can, but because we see the goal and have faith it is achievable.

Each step is an act of faith.  Each act of faith strengthens our belief.

In business, we are taught to minimize risks, to look for all the ways something can fail and try to avoid them as much as possible.  But that limits what we can achieve.

If as infants, we looked around and saw that everyone else was walking and we were struggling to crawl, we might come up with a thousand good reasons not to try to walk.

But without knowing we cannot do something, we try, and try again, until we succeed.  

Faith is the antidote to fear.  It helps us challenge ourselves beyond what we know to be true.

Without faith, we would do nothing.

More to come...