September 21, 2014 Ten Words Every Christian Should Know: FAITH

10 Words Every Christian Should Know: Faith 

James 2:14-24

We are getting to the end of our current series entitled 10 Words every Christian should know — today we are we are going to take some time and talk about “faith” even though we spent a lot of time dealing with that word last week in our discussion of Justification.  Last week if you remember we said that Justification is being declared righteous by God and the grounds for this declaration is faith or believing.  The verse we looked at for most of our time is Paul’s quotation of Genesis 15:6 in Romans 4; “And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness” and we looked at the first part of that verse for some time — and he believed — or and he had faith — really it is the same word in Greek.  But let’s take just a few minutes here at the beginning at talk about the nature of the faith that we are talking about.  Really the idea of faith or believing is a little bit difficult for us because of how the words are used — we say things like “well you just gotta have faith” or “just believe” as if the universe around is us is fundamentally friendly at the core so things might get better — when we say these things what we are really saying — whether we realize it or not is that — we believe faith is merely hope held onto tenaciously even in the face of difficulty.  “I know that you are going through a difficult time — you just have to keep your head up.”  This is faith without any corresponding object of trust — and this is not faith as far as the bible is concerned — do you see what I mean though?— when we say, “just believe and things well get better” or “You just gotta have faith” there is no object of trust clearly defined — faith is what?  Faith in faith perhaps — and that is just nonsense.....