This is going to be a short post. I have a sick baby and my brain is more engaged with that than the work of thinking.
While listening to the sermon at church today, I got to thinking about how trust is a crucial aspect of faith that has nothing to do with belief.
Trust does not need belief.
That's part of biblical faith that defies our ideas about belief and being right; you don't have to be right to trust. I know that sounds dangerous-and maybe it is-but trust does not depend on our construction of reality.
The world you inhabit by trust is not one that you built in your mind.
Trust requires action; requires obedience. Faith calls into action through trust what belief preserves us from. Where belief renders action a secondary priority, trust is the mechanism by which faith is empowered.
We trust in that which we do.
Hebrews 11 states that it was by faith that the "heroes" were able to do great things. But when we look at the way faith is described in the bible, it is always coupled with the motion of trust; "trust in the Lord with all you heart and lean not on your own understanding" (Prov. 3). In this way, belief may be understood as our own understanding; it is not that we give up the search for understanding (which is what we are asked to pursue), but rather we do not trust on a certain type of understanding-our own.
Trust as in marriage.
And so to continue the thought of faith as a type of marriage relationship, the way in which a marriage is faithful is if trust is engaged between the parties. To do faith according to the bible necessarily relies on the trust that keeps a marriage together. The trust that faith brings does not rely on belief, but rather on the faithfulness of the other.
In the sense of a God-Human relationship, faith trusts in the faithfulness of God.
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