Category: Foundations

Faith is one of those words that almost everyone thinks they understand until they’re asked to rely on it.

I used to think faith meant believing hard enough. Or believing correctly. Or believing without questions. Sometimes it sounded like confidence. Other times it sounded like denial. And more than once, it sounded like something other people had but I didn’t.

If I’m honest, faith often felt fake to me. Or fragile. Or like a thin layer of optimism stretched over very real pain. I assumed that if faith were real, it would feel stronger than this. More certain. Less conflicted.

What I eventually learned—slowly, and not without resistance—is that most of those assumptions weren’t Biblical at all.

They were cultural.

What the Bible Means by Faith

The Bible’s most well-known definition of faith comes from Hebrews 11:1:

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

That sounds poetic, but it’s easy to misread. Faith is not described as certainty about outcomes. It’s not confidence that everything will turn out the way we want. And it certainly isn’t pretending reality doesn’t exist.

Biblical faith is trust. Specifically, it’s trusting in God’s character.

Faith does not say, “This will work out.” Faith says, “God is still God, even if it doesn’t.”

That distinction matters. Because one collapses the moment circumstances go sideways. The other can survive disappointment, confusion, and loss.

Scripture repeatedly calls people to trust God even when the path ahead is unclear.

“Lean not on your own understanding.”
(Proverbs 3:5)

“We walk by faith, not by sight.”
(2 Corinthians 5:7)

These aren’t commands to shut our eyes or stop thinking. They’re acknowledgments that our understanding is limited and that God’s faithfulness is not.

Faith, then, is not blind belief. It’s informed trust in Someone we’ve come to know.

The Hangups We Don’t Like to Admit

Most people don’t struggle with faith because they’re rebellious or hardened. They struggle because faith has been oversold as something it isn’t.

One of the most common hangups is doubt.

Many of us quietly assume that doubt disqualifies faith. If we were really faithful, we wouldn’t question. We wouldn’t waver. We wouldn’t feel torn. But Scripture tells a different story. David doubted. Job questioned. The disciples panicked. Thomas hesitated. These weren’t faithless people—they were honest ones. (Psalm 13; Job 3; Matthew 28:17)

Doubt doesn’t cancel faith. Silence does.

Another hangup is suffering. Faith feels especially fragile when life hurts. When prayers go unanswered. When healing doesn’t come. When the weight doesn’t lift.

Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the idea that faith should make life smoother. Easier. More manageable. But the Bible never promises that. In fact, it often warns us of the opposite.

Faith does not remove pain. It reorients us within it. (John 11:35; Psalm 22:1)

And then there’s the hardest question of all: If faith works, why hasn’t God fixed this?

That question doesn’t come from arrogance. It comes from exhaustion. From disappointment. From waiting longer than we thought we could.

The uncomfortable truth is that faith is not a mechanism for control. God is not a lever we pull. Faith doesn’t obligate Him to operate on our timeline. It calls us to trust Him even when the timeline doesn’t make sense.

Faith in Practical Terms

If faith isn’t optimism or certainty, what does it actually look like in real life?

Often, it looks unimpressive.

Faith looks like continuing to pray when prayer feels hollow. Like telling the truth when lying would protect you. Like taking the next right step without knowing where the road leads. Like showing up again when quitting would be easier.

Faith acts because obedience still matters, not because the outcome is guaranteed.

This is where faith is often misunderstood as passivity. As waiting. As standing still until clarity arrives. But Biblical faith moves. Abraham went without knowing where. Peter stepped out of the boat before the water held him. Faith does not wait for certainty. It responds to trust. (Genesis 12:1–4; Matthew 14:28–31)

Not recklessly. Not blindly. But faithfully.

How Faith Actually Grows

This is the part few of us want to hear.

Faith does not usually grow in comfort.

Scripture is blunt about this. Tribulation produces perseverance. Perseverance produces character. Character produces hope. Time and again, the pattern is the same: pressure precedes growth. (Romans 5:3–5; James 1:2–4)

That doesn’t mean God delights in suffering. It doesn’t mean every hardship is sent by Him. But it does mean He uses what we endure to refine what we trust.

Tribulation has a way of stripping away illusions. It exposes the things we leaned on without realizing it: control, approval, certainty, self-reliance. And when those supports fail, faith is no longer theoretical. It becomes necessary.

Looking back, I can see that some of the deepest growth in my faith happened when I felt the least faithful. When prayers were more honest than hopeful. When trust was chosen daily, not felt instinctively.

Faith, it turns out, grows the same way muscles do: through resistance.

What Faith Is Not Asking of You

Faith is not asking you to have everything figured out.

It’s not asking you to silence questions or suppress grief. It’s not asking you to pretend you’re okay when you’re not. It’s not asking you to feel strong all the time.

Faith is asking for honesty.

Honesty with God. Honesty with yourself. Honesty about what hurts, what confuses you, and what you don’t understand yet.

One of the most sincere prayers in Scripture is also one of the shortest:

“I believe; help my unbelief.”
Mark 9:24

That prayer isn’t polished. It isn’t confident. But it’s real. That’s how God receives it.

A Place to Begin

Faith does not start where we think it does.

It doesn’t start with confidence. Or certainty. Or answers.

Often, it starts with willingness.

Willingness to stay. Willingness to trust incrementally. Willingness to keep walking, even when the path is dimly lit. Willingness to believe that God is still present, still faithful, and still at work even when we can’t yet see how.

If faith feels small right now, that doesn’t mean it’s absent. It means it’s alive.

Faith does not require you to be unshaken. It asks you not to walk away.

And more often than not, that’s enough to begin.

There are few things more discouraging to a believer than prayer that seems to go nowhere.

Many of us have prayed earnestly for things that matter deeply: relief from illness, freedom from addiction, reconciliation in a broken relationship, or simply a sense that God is near. We pray because we are told prayer is powerful. We pray because Scripture encourages it. And yet, more often than we care to admit, prayer can feel unanswered.

This can leave us wondering whether prayer works at all.

The discomfort often comes from an assumption we rarely examine—that prayer is meant to produce outcomes. That if we ask sincerely enough, often enough, or with enough faith, the thing we are asking for should come to pass. When it does not, disappointment sets in. Doubt follows close behind.

But prayer was never meant to function as a mechanism for getting what we want.

Scripture consistently affirms that God is sovereign—that His purposes are not shaped by our preferences, and His timing is not accelerated by our urgency. We often acknowledge this in theory. “God will give us what we need, not what we want,” we say. Yet when we pray, we sometimes act as though our desires should take precedence over His will.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 speaks directly into this tension.

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven

A few verses later, we are reminded:

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

These verses do not suggest indifference on God’s part. They point instead to perspective. We see what is immediately before us; God sees the whole. There are forces at work beyond our awareness, purposes unfolding beyond our understanding. What feels like delay or denial may be part of a larger story we are not equipped to see.

This is where the phrase “turn it over to God” often enters our vocabulary. At its core, it refers to surrender—to releasing control over outcomes we cannot manage and trusting God where our understanding fails. If prayer becomes an effort to force a particular result, it is worth asking whether we are truly trusting God, or simply trying to influence Him.

Jesus Himself gives us the clearest picture of what prayer looks like when desire and surrender coexist.

In the garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:39), facing suffering and death, Jesus prays:

My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.

He expresses His desire honestly. He does not deny His humanity. But He submits that desire to the Father’s will.

Scripture encourages us to ask, but it never promises that asking is a way to control outcomes.

This moment reveals something essential about prayer. It is not the suppression of desire, nor is it an attempt to override God’s plan. It is the act of placing our desires before Him while remaining willing to trust His wisdom when the answer is not what we hoped for.

This helps us understand what prayer is actually for.

Prayer exists primarily to nurture relationship. Like any relationship, it requires communication—not because God lacks information, but because intimacy is built through presence and honesty. God already knows what we are facing, just as a parent often knows when their child is struggling. Still, there is something meaningful about being invited to speak, to share, to be known.

In prayer, we are not only speaking to God; we are also learning about ourselves. What we bring before Him—our fears, frustrations, longings, and hopes—reveals where our trust is placed and where it is still forming.

Prayer also rightly turns us outward. When we pray for others, we give time and attention to someone else’s burden, often in moments when no one else is watching. Scripture tells us that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). To intercede for another person is to participate in that love and allows it to shape us. In doing so, we become more aware of God’s presence within us—not because He was absent before, but because our attention has shifted.

Seen this way, prayer becomes less about results and more about relationship.

It becomes a space where we speak honestly to God about where we are, what we fear, and what we do not understand. We ask for wisdom rather than control. We ask for strength rather than escape. We acknowledge the weight of temptation, suffering, and uncertainty without pretending we can manage them on our own.

Prayer is also a discipline of listening. God’s response does not always come in the form of a voice. More often, it comes through Scripture, through circumstances, or through the slow reshaping of our understanding. Discernment matters here. Any thought, impression, or direction we believe comes from God must be tested against what He has already revealed in His Word.

This is why Scripture repeatedly urges believers to be grounded in truth. Paul describes this as putting on the armor of God—truth, righteousness, faith, salvation, and the Word of God itself (Ephesians 6:10–18). Without that foundation, we have no reliable way to discern what aligns with God’s will and what does not.

When prayer is treated as a list of requests to be fulfilled, disappointment is almost inevitable. Expectations go unmet, and doubt begins to take root. But the failure is not prayer itself, nor is it God. The problem lies in misunderstanding what prayer is meant to be.

Prayer is not a transaction. It is a relationship.

It is a posture of trust, an act of surrender, and a way of remaining present with God even when answers are unclear and outcomes remain unresolved.

It’s just something to think about.

What is, or isn’t, sin might seem straightforward, but I’m not so sure. We often hear how this is sinful, how that is sinful, and how other things “lead us to sin.” It can start to sound like sin is a specific object, or perhaps a place we’re dragged into, like a horse being pulled by the reins.

I think that way of speaking misses the point.

Ironically, the Greek word translated as sin literally means “missing the mark.” And that’s exactly what sin is. It isn’t a thing or a person. It’s a failure to live up to the standard God has set.

Sin is missing the mark.

If you think you’re living up to that standard perfectly, I have news for you.

The Apostle Paul reminds us:

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
(Romans 3:23)

Every one of us. No exceptions.

We’re sinners not because we are irredeemable, but because we are human—and humans are flawed. Sin is not who we are; it is what happens when we fall short of the standard God has set. Left to ourselves, we never quite reach it.

That’s why Scripture warns us to be careful when we point fingers.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says:

“Judge not, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
(Matthew 7:1–2)

He follows this with the piercing question:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”

Jesus isn’t telling us to ignore sin. He’s telling us to start with our own.

What gives any of us the insight to measure another person’s soul anyway? God doesn’t weigh people by outward appearances or isolated actions. He weighs the heart, the motivations, and the whole of a person’s life. Most of us struggle to understand ourselves. How could we presume to fully judge someone else?

So if sin is missing the mark, how do we know where the mark is?

For that, we turn to Scripture.

The Bible gives us a clear foundation for understanding God’s standard through what is commonly called the Law—most clearly summarized in the Ten Commandments. I can almost feel the collective cringe:

“Oh great. The list of things we can’t do…”

I understand that reaction. Many of the commandments confront desires we struggle with or habits we justify. But the Law was never meant to crush us. It was meant to reveal the standard and to show us how far we fall short of it.

That’s why there’s no point beating ourselves up endlessly when we sin. Acknowledging sin isn’t about self-loathing; it’s about honesty. But that honesty also comes with a sober truth:

Sin has a cost.

Paul states it plainly:

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
(Romans 6:23)

The Law was never intended to save us; it was meant only to lead us to Him.

The Commandments show us what the mark is, revealing God’s standard clearly. Jesus doesn’t lower the bar. He raises it, so that we finally understand the truth: none of us can follow that path perfectly. Jesus made this plain when He taught that sin is not merely about outward behavior, but about the heart and the motivation behind it.

You may not murder, but do you harbor hatred? You may not commit adultery, but do you nurture lust?

The Law can get us to the door, but only Jesus can bring us inside.

That’s why Christ matters so deeply. He didn’t come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. He paid the price for the sin we inevitably commit and offers grace where the Law can only diagnose the problem.

We will never be perfect. That’s why we need Jesus. But with God’s grace, the example of Christ, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we can grow, change, and walk closer to the mark than we ever could on our own.

At various points, we’ll spend time with the Ten Commandments—both as a whole and individually—looking at what they say, why they matter, and how they ultimately point us toward Christ rather than condemnation. They help clarify the mark God has set, reveal where we fall short, and remind us why grace is not optional, but essential.

Just remember this:

God is for you.

It doesn’t matter who you are.

It doesn’t matter what you’ve done—or haven’t done.

God loves you.