More from Thinking About God . . . .

   The faith that transforms and changes is a total faith.  It emboldens us to push ourselves a little farther, maybe a little faster each day, always pushing us into the different and unknown.  It has to.  A transforming faith is a faith that marches forth bravely, goes forth almost recklessly, aggressively unfolding the unseen, boldly uncovering the deeper currents, fearlessly poking behind and beneath the skein of our lives and perceptions, regardless of what is out there.  It’s a faith that takes us well beyond where we ever expected to go.
     A faith that transforms will also make us willing to give up anything to experience what it shows us, to relinquish all that we thought we wanted or knew to embrace something far more meaningful.  We will find a faith that transforms the most compelling thing we have known, something that we will want more and more of each day.  Although life will laugh at us, we will laugh right back.  We know that we can see between the lines, and we know that we are part of a hope that transcends the visible future, that overwhelms the presently seen.
     Because faith laughs on the door of what we know, and because it challenges what we do know, we do it fullest justice when we allow it to let us see what we did not think we could see, or know.  Faith is a door into the uncharted undulations of our experience, those parts of our world that we didn't know about or did not care to explore.  It penetrates the forgotten corners of our arrogance and misery, pries open our long locked cupboards of opacity and myopia.  Transforming faith overturns everything we know.
     Though faith is a way of seeing, unless it allows its user to see (or at least have evidence for) all that is out there, it becomes a faith that is not fully consistent with what is real and true.  It becomes a faith that refuses to believe or does not comprehend what it sees, a faith that sees only what it wants to believe or see.
     For this reason, faith must be open to all possibilities if it is to be honest with its reality.  If faith is a way of seeing and the life changes that come from that seeing, then it must be shaped in a way that it can see all that there is to see.  Faith is shortchanged when we let our biases and partialities limit its scope.  Its effectualness is a function of the openness which those who experience it grant it.  Genuinely transformative faith is only possible when it is grounded in a proper sense of what is real.  Real faith is faith in what is most real.
     That in which we place our faith must explain the world.  It must explain why the world is the way it is, why we are here, and where we are going.  It must therefore be transcendent, that is, it must have a vantage point on the world that we who are living in the world might not necessarily have.  The world cannot explain itself.  Our faith must be able to look beyond us.  We cannot exercise faith in a meaningful way unless we acknowledge that it points to a presence or somethingness rooted in something greater, bigger, and more insightful and morally powerful than we. 
     And faith must be connected to a real reality.  It must trust in something that is genuinely real and true.  Otherwise, it means nothing.
     True faith must be faith in God.  Why?  Anything else is simply faith in the next best thing.  Outside of God, nothing is really real, and only faith that directs itself, in humility and trust, toward God, is real.  We all exercise faith in various people and things:  parents, friends, employers, real estate, sun and snow; but we all know that these are fleeting phenomena that, although wonderful in themselves, do not last.  They are not things in which we can safely place our deepest beliefs.  But God is.  God is transcendent, God is holy, God is undying love, and God is eternal.  And God has made himself known, in space and time, in Jesus, and promises redemption and freedom to all who call on him.  Faith in God is faith that is rooted in history, anchored in eternity, set into and committed to a sure promise and a comprehensive picture of reality.
    

(Thinking About God, 2007, William E. Marsh)