What’s in it for me?
I know I said I would talk about identifying the two ways, God’s and Satan’s, but the thing on my mind today is why you might decide to try to begin trusting God’s Word. Right off the bat I will have to combat the existing paradigm around trust and faith. So many churches are operated by life long Christians who have developed their trust and faith in God from birth. The process of how they came to faith has long been lost in childhood memories and, even if they could remember everyone’s journey would be different and quite unteachable. Church leaders are quite likely the least qualified of anyone to teach how to develop faith to non Christians; they simply don’t know how, it’s just something they have.
So if you have gone to church or seen religious programs about faith and don’t get it, I would like to comment on the subject from a different perspective. Church views on faith are that everyone has their own way to faith and that it is something we can choose. Although this may work well for Christians it certainly doesn’t for the rest of us. Christians seem to think that faith is unique to God but in reality we all have faith in everything we do, we just call it something else in the secular world like courage or bravery, capable, confident.
KU views faith and confidence equally, one a Christian expression, one a secular expression. Nothing in the Bible seems to suggest we we’re created with a separate or unique faith for God alone, so if it’s not unique to God then it is the same faith we have in everything else, regardless of what we call it.
It is an extremely important fact. The most important thing about their equality is this: we should teach faith/confidence in God’s Word the same way we teach faith/confidence in everything else we already have faith/confidence in?
After five years trying to get a church to consider this I had to give up. It just seemed too abstract to them who already had faith for as long as they could remember. How could anyone not have it or at least not choose to have it? I don’t think this is much more than a deep seated idea that never gets much thought, it’s just how it is. In church we have faith in God. Outside church we have confidence in ourselves.
Imagine though if we taught faith in God’s Word, with the same methods and philosophy as we do mathematics. If faith in God is the same as faith in anything else we might expect it’s as well known and used in life as mathematics. Wow!
This approach to knowing God starts with trust. It is the same trust we have in anything else. If we study the things we now trust we will find out when it started, how it grew into the faith we now have in it. We will find it is a repeating process of beginning to trust and strengthening that trust over and over again until we have complete faith in it.
This is the process we learn (gain faith/confidence) in everything, and is the same process I came to have faith in God’s Word after 66 years of searching for it. Faith = Confidence, Confidence = Faith
So to get back to the original thought, what’s in it for me? Why should I give it a try? It might be easier to ask yourself why you would not try, now that you know faith and confidence are the same thing. The fact is everything we have ever learned uses the same process of beginning to trust it by using it over and over again and continuing on to faith in it. Everyone learns everything the same way. Everyone can learn to trust the Word of God the same way. Nothing but the Word of God though offers anything close.
KU
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