Yeah... what IS faith anyway?

Our church has what we call BSFs, that is "Bible Study Fellowships" where we meet in small groups in someones home once a week to study the Bible together. We're currently following the Discipleship Explored course in Philippians by Barry Cooper which is BRILLIANT. And I LOVE philippians!

My point anyway is that this evening we were studying 3v1-9... the bit about having confidence in the flesh and counting everything as loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Jesus... and talking about how we can't do anything to earn our salvation, only have FAITH in what Jesus has done. And I just was thinking about how "faith" is quite an abstract idea and all the connotations we have around it kind of make us forget what it actually is. If we actually did understand it then we wouldn't try to put our trust in our own efforts. We are putting our faith in the fact that what Jesus did on the cross will be enough to have erased our sins and given us his righteousness when it comes to judgement. We can't really know for sure, so we have to have faith... which is this amazing gift from God that he allows us to have the faith to believe. Thinking of it like that... for me at least... makes it seem stupid to put our faith in our own good works, or quiet times, or church attendance... because we know that there is no way that those things could ever make us right with God.

It would be like someone else offering to buy us an ice cream from the shop, us agreeing, but then hoping that somehow by our efforts we will be able to get that same ice cream by our own efforts. That's a lame illustration but the point is that we have to have FAITH and BELIEVE and TRUST that the other person will do it for us, that they have enough money, they know which shop to go to and which ice cream to buy. They don't need us to do anything but accept the gift.

Our righteousness is in Christ
:)