Acquiring Faith

Everyone has faith. This is a fact that is difficult to argue against. A person has faith that their father's word or the word of a friend will be fulfilled; another has faith that their labors and effort will be rewarded; still another has faith that, upon going to bed, they will wake up the following morning. For the word of our father we wait patiently and with hope for it, for our labors we work with diligence, for our life we sleep in peace.

This faith is common to every person who is alive and who has lived, and who will ever live. We cannot escape this part of our nature, this faith that guides us every day and motivates us.

Yet many say, when faced with the Christian concept of faith, that our faith is blind. It is difficult, some will say, to accept on faith alone the idea of the existence of God, or of the supremacy of Jesus Christ.

And this is understandable, for it is indeed easier to have faith in my father who is before me and who experience tells me will keep his word, than it is to have faith in a God I have not seen or experienced in any manner.

This gives rise to an idea we may ponder, which is no less than can we increase our faith so that we can believe? Is it possible to increase our faith since faith, however small in us, is part of our nature? Can we exercise our faith as we would a muscle or organ?

Both the Apostle James and the Apostle Peter speak of faith arising through tribulation, for the tribulations are called by them a "trying of faith," (James 1:2-3; I Peter 1:6-7). This indicates no less than that suffering is itself an exercise which strengthens our faith.

This can be shown through one of the first examples of natural use of faith given. The person who labors endures hardship, maybe even sorrow and pain, while maintaining faith in the end results of their labors. The more a person succeeds, the more their faith in their labors and in themselves increases. Yet the most success, or rather the most amount of faith in their actions arises from success when there are numerous obstacles. The more adversity a person faces when laboring, if they continue to labor, the more faith they will have in this once they achieve their desired goal.

Yet we know that many who labor, when faced with difficulty, give up. It is a lack of faith that often brings failure to us. Thus faith is a matter of will or free will, for some labor in adversity and succeed while others labor in the same adversity and give up.

The person who labors in adversity ceases to rely on the supports around them. If people oppose their labors or do not aid, the laborer will withdraw their hope and expectation from these people. If circumstances are unfavorable, the laborer will cease to hope and look for assistance from circumstances. The person who is unable to withdraw themselves from hoping and looking for support from the very same obstacles they want to have faith in will inevitably be disappointed. Faith becomes a matter of character, but even more so, dependent upon the attachments we have to the world around us.

If we can accept the above analogy, then we can see how the same tribulation and suffering in life is intended to bring us to a state of faith in God, whether or not we believe in God. For in the suffering we experience, we lose hope and faith in the created world. We may lose our health, we may lose our financial support, we may lose our friends or our very mind, and not just as a small bump in our road of life which we travel, but devastating chasms opening up before us.

We can say with confidence that the person who does not suffer does not have faith, for if everything is given easily and we have all manner of support in the world around us, we have not withdrawn from everything else other than the object of our faith, be it a labor, or a friend, or God.

For the Christian we must endure suffering in the same manner a laborer endures opposition to their work. But to increase our faith on our own, we must seek out suffering. This path of seeking out suffering is the one a person without faith in God must also follow. A person who does not believe in God must follow this path as a form of love of wisdom and truth, as one who seeks answers. This love of wisdom, of giving all for the sake of truth is the path by which the ancient sages and philosophers traveled. Some fled to forests, some lived in barrels, others lived in caves, and yet even more spent every waking hour question and contemplating the validity of reality around them.

Yet these ancients labored for the truth out of a discontentment with their perceived worlds and all that was held as sacrosanct by their societies. Thus it was a matter of faith that led these ancients to search for truth.

For the modern truth seeker who does not have the character necessary to utilize the smallest amount of faith inherent in us for finding truth, but instead waits for truth to show itself without any labor on our part, we can say they are faithless. It is just such faithlessness that brings about damnation.

The labors that we can undertake then to increase our faith - besides enduring tribulation - are exactly those labors which are difficult for us to bear. We must challenge our comfort, challenge our attachments, and challenge our character. Belief in God is something we hope for everyone, yet without the use of faith we cannot believe. Without detaching ourselves from the world around us, without challenging these attachments, we cannot exercise our faith and come to the point where we believe in anything at all, especially God.

The task for a person who wonders about faith is obvious. The task for the person who has faith in God yet seeks to draw others to it has less to do with convincing through argument and emotional appeals, but to point to those things which will withdraw the person from attachments to the ideas, emotions, people, and the created world so that their faith is increased, and thus they will come to believe.

We cannot say that everyone who confesses a belief in God has faith, for if the faith is not based on labor or effort then they acquired a mental belief and not true faith. It is possible for both Christian and atheist to never labor or to run from the labor of suffering, and lose faith. Worse than losing faith is having faith in our attachments while convincing ourselves we have fulfilled the dictates of salvation.

Let us then challenge our character, and withdraw from our comforts, seeking after true knowledge and truth itself. By exercising our faith we will come to know what it is we are destined to be in Christ.