Faith?

trust

belief

confidence

conviction

credence

reliance

dependence

optimism

hopefulness

hope

What does it mean to have faith?

Paul's letter to the Romans references the father of monotheism, faithful Abraham. Chapter four of that book includes robust reasoning on the contested subject of faith. Here are some passages, translated from the Greek by Eugene Petersen in The Message. 

One might want to slow down when reading Romans! It's not a breezy hello, how are you sort of letter: 

Trusting God

4 1-3 So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we’re given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. What we read in Scripture is, “Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own.”

4-5 If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.

17-18 (part) When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. 

Here's an excerpt from Thomas Leishman's essay on Romans in The Christian Science Journal dated August 1976--

...the Greek noun "faith" has such meanings as faithfulness, trust, confidence, or belief. Sometimes translators render "faith" as "a conviction of the truth" (of something). The reader himself must decide how he is to translate "justified by faith"; but one rendering might be: "we are made righteous by conviction of the truth."

To illustrate righteousness of faith, Romans 4 turns to Abraham. Quoting the Greek version of Gen.15:6, Paul cites Abraham's faith in God, which was counted (that is "credited") to him as righteousness. Thus for Paul, only through divine grace received through faith, not through merit of personal deeds, is salvation found.

These were surely big lessons for the Christians in Rome to digest. They continue to hold our attention today.

Julie Swannell