Thoughts On Faith

Faith is one of those things that's so simple, yet so hard for the human mind to fully understand. Or maybe that's just me.

I'm reading a book right now called Untamed By Alan Hirsch. He's a pastor at a church with his wife and they wrote this book to bring about the idea of Untamed Discipleship. A lot of the talk throughout the book discusses how Jesus lead a life that was extremely unorthodox and, in ways, crazy. For us to be true disciples (which translates to a student or apprentice), we need to work toward following a life after our Teacher. This is key, because when you're listening to a teacher, you're supposed to do what they say because they know what's right. Even when you have no idea what's going on.

One year in school I took a Logic class. One of our assignments over Winter Break was to memorize all of these logical processes. At the time, I had no idea what i was memorizing. It was a bunch of p's and q's and signs that I didn't even recognize. But since it was an assignment, I memorized them. Later on in the year, I started applying the logical processes to my work and it helped so much that I had taken the time to memorize the logical processes earlier in the year.

I'll take this back now to the idea of faith. I guess the best way to describe faith is following something when you don't understand. In school, you may follow a teacher, even if you don't understand, because you have faith that the teacher is educated. The question is, why is it so easy to have faith in your teacher? Usually we believe everything they say. Unless, of course, they're dealing with scientific or political content. But to answer the question, I'd say it's usually because having faith in a teacher usually doesn't cost us much, or sometimes anything. Teacher's have to go to school to teach, so we know they're educated. And we've all grown up believing that listening to a teacher in school is just what you do until you're 18. Because of this we rarely question the way that it is run. But when we read the Bible and listen to Jesus say things like, "Love your enemy" (Matthew 5:44) or to go to the ends of the earth to tell people of Jesus (Matthew 28:19) we get scared because of the price we'd have to pay to actually live that out. In Hebrews 11 we read that faith was clearly what pulled Abraham, Enoch, Noah, Moses, Jacob, Esau, and Rahab all were blessed. It was because they had faith and followed what God commanded them to do.

All of this makes me think about what would happen if we just did things more often. Even stuff that isn't plainly commanded in the Bible. What if instead of denying someone to hang out because you just didn't want to, you accepted. We're lazy sometimes, and apathetic and because of that the world isn't the place it should be. If we really want to be disciples, we have to be untamed, we have to live outside of the box that the world has created for us. It seems like we almost have to convince ourselves that we have to be crazier than really needed in order to pull us out of the hole we're in. Overshoot to hit the target because it's so far away. Go crazy. Be crazy. And do what you preach.